Untitled Linux Show 257 Transcript
Please be advised that this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word-for-word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-free version of the show.
Rob Campbell [00:00:00]:
This week we're talking about Ubuntu Workshop, Cash, Eos delivering better speeds over other distros, aeronos, kernel scripts, flutterfs and fast USB 4 data transfers. You don't want to miss it. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twit. This is the Untitled Linux Show. Episode 250 57, recorded Saturday, May 30. Better with butter. Hey folks, it's Saturday and you know what that means.
Rob Campbell [00:00:41]:
It's time for the Untitled Lenox Show. Jonathan was planning on being here today and maybe he will still show up, but he's had some delays at the airport. But the rest of us are still here, so we're still going to put on a show for you to listen to. So it's me, Ken and Jeff. How's it going this week?
Jeff Massie [00:01:03]:
Good. You had to think about it a
Rob Campbell [00:01:06]:
while since I. I feel like it's been a while since we missed a lot of shows together.
Jeff Massie [00:01:12]:
Yeah, well, other than last week, but yes, no, things have been going good. Lots of. Lots of Linux. Goodness.
Rob Campbell [00:01:21]:
Yeah. And Ken was on mute when he tried to say something. But.
Ken McDonald [00:01:29]:
Yeah, I was just trying to say you were here last week.
Rob Campbell [00:01:34]:
Yep.
Ken McDonald [00:01:35]:
Yeah, it does seem like nearly a month ago. Doesn't
Jeff Massie [00:01:41]:
does. See.
Ken McDonald [00:01:43]:
And yes, we are going to survive the weekend.
Rob Campbell [00:01:47]:
Last week was the only. Was the first time in a long time that we've all been here. So yeah, we'll see if Jonathan could show up or not. But if not, the only. We got under control.
Jeff Massie [00:01:58]:
Yes. The only thing I had this week is I'm gonna have to reinstall cache on my laptop because I had to get into Windows for something else and it did a bunch of updates and it screwed things up so Grub lost its boot partition. You know, it can't figure out where it's at. And it's like. And I never realized how. I always forget how painful Windows updates are until you do them. My wife.
Rob Campbell [00:02:26]:
You should be able just to do the arch rescue, do a CH root over and. And reinstall grubbing, I would think.
Jeff Massie [00:02:37]:
Yeah, I was trying that and it didn't seem to really take. It wasn't happening. It's. It's so quick to reinstall. It's like, all right, whatever.
Jonathan Bennett [00:02:44]:
Just.
Rob Campbell [00:02:45]:
So you're running Linux. Are you running Windows today?
Jeff Massie [00:02:48]:
No, I'm on Linux. I'm on my main machine. My laptop.
Rob Campbell [00:02:52]:
Gotcha.
Jeff Massie [00:02:54]:
It needed to talk to a programmer box for programming motorcycles. And because it's down at the driver level, I'm like, all right. Let me get into Windows. I hadn't been into Windows for about a year, so it rebooted and you know, update, reboot, update, reboot. And it wound up putting Windows 11 2H25 on or whatever and then it
Ken McDonald [00:03:15]:
just not 2H26H1 no, but it was.
Jeff Massie [00:03:22]:
It was.
Rob Campbell [00:03:23]:
Yeah.
Jeff Massie [00:03:23]:
So Windows screwed it up.
Ken McDonald [00:03:25]:
And I find Windows Weekly is a good podcast to fall asleep too. I so I do like the end of the show where they start talking about games and brown drinks.
Rob Campbell [00:03:39]:
Yeah, I used to like the beer segment better, but I'm more of a beer drinker than whiskey. But anyway, let's talk about Linux. Yes. Yes.
Jeff Massie [00:03:47]:
That's what I was going to say was kick us off to and I'm
Rob Campbell [00:03:51]:
first on the list, so I will just keep right on rolling here. And this week in Ubuntu News, Canonical is trying to make one of their more annoying parts of development a whole lot less painful. They have launched a new command line tool called Workshop. And the basic idea is that instead of spending half of your afternoon setting up a development environment, installing the right version of Python, pulling in some random dependencies, configuring Cuda, breaking something else, fixing that, and then forgetting what you did months later, Workshop wants to make that a one command job. The way it works is that you define your development environment in a simple YAML file, and that file says what your project needs. Maybe it needs Nvidia cuda, maybe it needs AMD rocm, maybe it needs Ollama for local AI or a specific language runtime or some other SDK that Workshop spins up that environment inside a sandboxed container ready to go, without dumping all of those dependencies directly into your main system, which can also be a pain when working with different languages and environments. You know, with with this, your project, each of them get a nice clean room to be built in. Everything that your project needs lives inside the Workshop environment.
Rob Campbell [00:05:20]:
And when you're done, your main Ubuntu install is still clean, just. Just pristine the way it was before. Your other projects are still clean. And you are. You're not stuck with one project needing one version of a tool or another need another. The classic problem of it works on my machine and one person on the team has a project working perfectly, and then someone else clones the repo and immediately runs into errors because their setup is just slightly different from yours. Workshop is trying to make that environment reproducible. The same YAML file can be shared with your team, checked into version control, and used again later on on another machine or even in a CI pipeline.
Rob Campbell [00:06:05]:
And one detail that makes this more interesting than just another container Wrapper is the SDK system. Workshop environments are built from SDK, and Canonical is launching with SDKs for tools like Ollama, OpenCode, Nvidia, Coda, AMD, RockM. Most of these come from an SDK store with versioned channels, kind of like the Snap store. So instead of every developer hand built in the same environment and hoping they pick the same versions, the project can be defined because exactly what is needed. The environments run in unprivileged LXD containers isolated from the host at the process file system and network level while still sharing the host kernel. And if that environment needs access to something outside of the sandbox, like the gpu, the desktop, the SSH agent, or another host resource has to request that through a permission system, also inspired by Snaps. So the pitch is not just convenience, it's also repeatability and containment. It's still early, so we'll have to see how well it catches on, how good the SDK ecosystem is, and whether developments actually adopt it.
Rob Campbell [00:07:18]:
But if everything works as advertised, this. This would be enough for me to adopt Ubuntu again as a. As my main development distro of choice. Though I wonder. I kind of wonder how easy this might be to install this on other distros once it's out there in the open. What do you guys think? I know you guys, you have. Well, Jeff, you're not using Ubuntu anymore, but.
Jeff Massie [00:07:44]:
No, I am. It's on my server.
Rob Campbell [00:07:46]:
Oh, right.
Jeff Massie [00:07:47]:
So I'm still on both sides of the fence.
Ken McDonald [00:07:52]:
I'm bouncing between Ubuntu 25.10. While I finish setting up Ubuntu 26.04, I've still got on the Ubuntu Pro support. Ubuntu 20.04 running.
Rob Campbell [00:08:13]:
Okay, update that. I'm guessing you don't really need that anymore.
Ken McDonald [00:08:18]:
Well, I've been trying to get everything set up so I can move my Plex server from that to another one, but it's still getting updates, security updates. Because of Ubuntu Pro.
Rob Campbell [00:08:30]:
Yeah, with Pro you got. Yeah, you got time. You got 10 years, you got another. Got another four years to go on that.
Jeff Massie [00:08:37]:
Yeah, I thought maybe you might have such old hardware or something that. Well, I can't really update because I lost kernel support or something.
Ken McDonald [00:08:44]:
You know, when I tried updating from doing the upgrade from 20.04 to 22.04, it switched me from Xfce to Gnome, and I lost all my settings as well. So I ended up rolling back to the last backup I had.
Jeff Massie [00:09:04]:
Oh, okay.
Ken McDonald [00:09:06]:
But with the Ubuntu works, all this sound like it's going to be handy
Rob Campbell [00:09:11]:
for developers, and neither of you do a whole lot of that. I mean, neither do.
Ken McDonald [00:09:16]:
I have nothing that I really share with the world.
Rob Campbell [00:09:21]:
I hobby in it sometimes when I have the time, but that's.
Jeff Massie [00:09:25]:
Yeah, my stuff is all it. If I do a little development, it's at work and it's very, very light, and it's its own specialized setup.
Jonathan Bennett [00:09:37]:
So.
Jeff Massie [00:09:37]:
But I'm all for it because, I mean, how many times? Well, good example. I'll give you a perfect example. I tried just before the show today to get Firefox to recognize the OBS loopback camera. Mine still will not work. I have to go through Chromium to make it work. But Ken said his does, and I even tried some of the workarounds and some of that, and they said, oh, change these settings, restart it doesn't help.
Rob Campbell [00:10:03]:
I. I don't know that this would help, that being in a LXD environment, containerized. But I do know from my experience in the past when I've tried to learn various languages, I know whenever. Whenever you set up a system, it's like if you're reading a book or how to or something, it's like, well, set these environmental variables and make sure to install these things and all these different things you got set up. So.
Ken McDonald [00:10:26]:
Right.
Jeff Massie [00:10:26]:
Well. And that was more just like an analogy of how one person is like, yeah, this works perfect, and somebody else, oh, yeah, I cannot get this to work.
Ken McDonald [00:10:35]:
And Michael Leribel saying that cashier OS delivers over Ubuntu
Jeff Massie [00:10:43]:
well, with that segue.
Rob Campbell [00:10:45]:
It has for a while, but apparently there's something new or it still does, but I don't know. Take it away.
Jeff Massie [00:10:52]:
All right, so this week on Jeff's benchmark corner, we have distribution testing. So Michael Arable over at Phonics decided to run some tests on Arch Cashios, Popos and Ubuntu. I just listed those in alphabetical, so nobody got upset. The tests were run on a Theo Major, configured with an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 9980X. So that's a 64 core Zen 5 processor paired with 128 gigabytes DDR5 5600 memory across 32 gigabyte sticks, a 1 terabyte crucial NVMe PCIe Gen 5 SSD, and an AMD Radeon AI Pro R9700 graphics card. So not your typical computer, you know, workstation. And it's pretty beastly though for newer listeners or people a little new to the Linux world. You know Arch, it's a rolling distribution meaning it gets frequent updates and very up to date with the latest software.
Jeff Massie [00:11:56]:
Cache is also Arch based but focuses heavily on performance optimizations and it includes some custom kernel and tool chain optimizations so such as aggressive CPU timing flags and scheduler changes and other low level tweaks to just improve throughput and responsiveness. POP OS is based on Ubuntu, but it's on 2404. Most of the work with System 76 has been on the Cosmic desktop. So while a lot of people love popos it isn't the most up to date distribution. But they never claim to be cutting edge either. You know, they're focusing on user experience and quality now. Once things settle down a little bit I think they'll catch up more. But just know that this is on 2404.
Jeff Massie [00:12:42]:
So it's a little. Some of the base packages are a little older and not least but alphabetically Last is Ubuntu 26.04 LTS which is kind of really tried to be a friendly, easy to use all around distribution had the distinction for a while being it's. Well it still is based on Debian but it would run the non free software so graphics drivers, things like that were Debian wouldn't. But probably about a year ago or so Debian said well you know what, we're going to support this. So you know I could have taken a little wind out of Ubuntu sales because they're not quite as unique as they were on the on the Debian side. Now for the sake of clarity, ubuntu had the 7.0.0 kernel, pop OS had the 6.18.7. So that's part of the 2404 where it's an older kernel. Cashios had 7.0.10 and Arch had 7.0.9.
Jeff Massie [00:13:49]:
And these were just the latest greatest when Michael ran the benchmarks. Now the benchmark suite in the review covers a wide range of workloads. This includes CPU intensive tests like compiling large software projects, compression decompression tasks, scientific workloads, rendering various synthetic and real world benchmarks that stress different parts of the system. Now starting with GPU performance, both Arch and Cache delivered notable leads over Ubuntu and pop OS in AMD's Radeon graphics tests. But this was expected since Both Arch based distributions were running newer Mesa 26.1 drivers and a little newer 7.0 kernel compared to the older version shipped with Ubuntu 26.04 and Popos 2404. Now between Arch and Cache specifically there wasn't much of a difference in the GPU focused tests. They pretty much a wash for 3D rendering using Blender 5.1. The results were pretty much similar to the GPU focus benchmarks.
Jeff Massie [00:14:53]:
Now where cacheos really started to separate itself was in creator and image processing workloads. In gegl, the graphics library that kind of underpins GIMP and GNOME Photos and other applications, Cache delivered the best performance by a wide margin, significantly outpacing even upstream Arch Linux. Now this is probably attributable to cache COS's compiler optimization and its tuning for AMD version 4 architecture compilation workloads told an interesting story for Linux kernel compilation Cashios, POP os, Nubuntu all finished faster than upstream Arch Linux. Arch was also the slowest when compiling the Godot game engine, so despite Arch's advantage in having the newest packages, its default compiler configuration didn't translate into the fastest build times. Now Ubuntu and PopOS performed well with SIMD JSON in Python scripting benchmarks Ubuntu 2604 LTS picked up a fair number of wins over Cash OS and architecture, which was somewhat surprising, but if you know looking at the big picture, across more than 100 benchmarks, Cashios finished in first place, most often winning 37% of the tests. Arch and Ubuntu tied for second each taking the lead 29% of the time. Now on a geometric mean basis across all the benchmarks, Cashiox Casheos was approximately 5% faster than Arch and about 10% faster than Ubuntu 2604 and roughly 23% faster than the stock POP OS installation. Now again, the POP OS gap is largely explained by the fact that POP OS is still bundled with it's still based off Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.
Jeff Massie [00:16:57]:
So older kernels, older Python packages, older GCC versions. It's just running older software, but take a look at the article linked in the show notes for full details and the ability to look at every benchmark that was ran. So happy reading.
Rob Campbell [00:17:15]:
I would love to see a much broader list of distros in their benchmark. I I don't think it would change anything, but quite often when when these benchmarks come come around I do see this complaint like the their favorite desktop environment isn't in there. You know, they have Ubuntu. But what about Kubuntu? Would running KDE make a difference? Or Fedora Linux Mint? I like to see some of those others that are people's favorites.
Jeff Massie [00:17:46]:
I don't think Kubuntu really make that much of a difference because a lot of this was, you know, computational based and compiler based and maybe a little bit on the graphics. But I was surprised and I would have liked to have seen Fedora in there because that's another major distribution that,
Ken McDonald [00:18:03]:
you know, that way I could see how my Fedora on my laptop compares to the Ubuntu 2604 that I've got.
Rob Campbell [00:18:11]:
You know, as far as the Kubuntu and Ubuntu with Gnome, I don't think it would make a difference, but I would like to see that. In fact, I would like to see one that just takes Ubuntu and just does like the Gnome, the, the kde,
Ken McDonald [00:18:25]:
each of the different.
Rob Campbell [00:18:27]:
Yeah. All the spins they have and just, just show me that, you know, that it doesn't make a difference or that it does.
Ken McDonald [00:18:36]:
Michael, how, how hard would it be to do a comparison of the different flavors of Ubuntu?
Jeff Massie [00:18:44]:
You know, probably not too bad. Are you, are you a supporter of Pharonics?
Ken McDonald [00:18:50]:
I am that paid to support him for this year.
Jeff Massie [00:18:53]:
If you are a paid supporter, he will answer emails. Not, I mean, I won't say 100, but I mean, if you ask for something, he would probably at least reply. I've emailed him in the past on stuff and he's replied.
Rob Campbell [00:19:09]:
Have you ever ran the Pharonics benchmark suite?
Jeff Massie [00:19:13]:
Yeah, Jeff, several times. Yeah.
Ken McDonald [00:19:16]:
Rand one, I think it was on the Ubuntu 20.04 when I was trying to do it.
Rob Campbell [00:19:21]:
Is it a lot of work? Because like, it always seems like he always has a rather small list and maybe he just doesn't think it's necessary, I don't know.
Jeff Massie [00:19:30]:
But I mean, well, and he might, because he's done so much of this that he might already know. You know, it's like, oh, I've done this before, I already know the results. And the other thing too is he's always running benchmarks all the time. So I think sometimes he's not trying to be all inclusive, but, but to me, if you hit, you know, okay, straight Debian Ubuntu Fedora, Arch Cashy, and then maybe an open Sousa, you're covering a huge flag. Yeah. Without totally Bogging down.
Rob Campbell [00:20:06]:
And you know, I'd still be curious though. In fact, I have a lot going on the next few weeks. But maybe, maybe at some point. I say this all the time and I never do anything I tell you guys I'm going to do. But maybe I'll try some of this. It's not going to be on the latest hardware.
Jeff Massie [00:20:25]:
Well, and you know, that's. But see, that's something else too because he's running on a thread ripper. Well, how does it work on an eight core system or you know, something like that, more user system. And with the Phonics benchmarks, you can run those exact benchmarks. So it sets it up as a queue. So if you want to, you can load that in and just kick that Phonics benchmark off and it'll just generate everything. It will save it to the cloud and then you can reload your operating system, do it again and you can upload those results and then it'll actually on that openbenchmark.org I think is what it is. You can compare the results of what you've got.
Rob Campbell [00:21:09]:
Yeah, I think, I think we gotta do it sometime.
Jeff Massie [00:21:13]:
Oh yeah, it's. It's a lot of fun. I've done. I've done quite a bit benchmarking in the past. A lot of times I was benchmarking kernels, you know, I'd compile them with optimization and I wasn't getting a lot. But where cache you. You, for example, you're benchmarking. The entire build is optimized, so it'd be more.
Jeff Massie [00:21:32]:
Almost more like a easier gen 2 with all the optimizations you can throw in.
Jonathan Bennett [00:21:38]:
Yeah.
Rob Campbell [00:21:39]:
I'll admit some of my reasons are selfish. Like I. There's some desktops I like to just see that they're really way below like I think they are.
Jeff Massie [00:21:50]:
Yeah, there. There is some of that. We do have a question. What sacrifices are cache making in its effort to be the most performance? Does it sacrifice security? No, what you sacrifice is a little bit of probably stability.
Rob Campbell [00:22:05]:
Yeah.
Jeff Massie [00:22:05]:
Because you're running optimized things and you're putting the pedal to the metal. So it's not as tested software.
Rob Campbell [00:22:13]:
Like I think it's even experimental sometimes. Some of their tweaks.
Jeff Massie [00:22:17]:
Yeah. Yep. And. Well, for example, I'm running the new 610nvidia driver from cache and it just, it just came down. I didn't request it or install it, but it's officially beta right now, I believe. I don't think it's a pretty sure it's not released. So you just, you know, and it's pretty stable. I mean, I talk about, okay, I got to reload my laptop.
Jeff Massie [00:22:40]:
I got, I had to reload my main machine here a while back. It's stuff that I've done or Windows has done to the machine that it wasn't cache itself that crashed anything. But when you get an LTS like 2604, just for example, or you're a red hat or anything that they kind of call server grade. It's older software because it's been tested, it's been hammered on. It's. It's going to be a lot more stable now. It can't make up for unstable hardware and consumer hardware is not as stable as server hardware. But operating system wise, it also has, you know, the LTSS and things like that have more stability because they're just slower.
Jeff Massie [00:23:28]:
It's more well known versus let's see what happens.
Rob Campbell [00:23:33]:
Yeah.
Ken McDonald [00:23:34]:
Yep. And it's actually openbenchmarking.org oh, okay, thank you, Ken. And I posted that in the Discord chat. So with that, let's take a break and then I'll talk about another OS that maybe Rob would be interested in hopping to.
Rob Campbell [00:23:56]:
Well, let's find out after this.
Ken McDonald [00:23:59]:
Well, now that we're back from the break, I'm going to tell Rob about what Bobby Barsoff wrote. He wrote about the atomic updated base Linux distro. And I want to make sure I say this right. Aaron OS. Releasing its May update. Now, this update features major package refreshes, new desktop stack versions, graphics improvements, developer tooling changes and several new packages. Now, the recent security disclosures that we all experienced led to four kernel updates bringing Aaron OS from Linux kernel 7.0.7 to 7.0.10, all within two weeks. Now, you now have Linux 7.0.10 and Linux 6.18.33 LTS available for both stable and gaming kernels.
Ken McDonald [00:25:09]:
Now, the following desktop environments were also updated. Cosmic Desktop Environment is Now at version 1.0.13. KDE Plasma has been upgraded to 6.6.5. Additionally, QT 6.11.1 is was upgraded as well as the necessary KDE stack rebuilds, they were also included in the graphics arena. Aaron OS updates the Vulkan stack to version 1.4.350 and upgrades Mesa as well. On the gaming side, updates feature Heroic Game Launcher 2.2.2 and LuduSavi 0.31, a tool for backing up PC game saves. New packages added to Aaron OS include KDE, ISO Image Writer 2.6.0.04.1 and SUSHI 50.0. Other updates include Firefox 151, LLVM 22, PipeWire 1.6.5, Wine 11.9, Shadow 4.19.4, Linux Firmware 20.26.05.19 Discord version 1.0.139-foot-1 27.0 Mango that's M A N G O W M0 13.1 Signal Desktop 8.11 Docker 29.5.1 Fast Fetch 26 dot or excuse me, 2 dot 63.1 about to miss the dots there.
Ken McDonald [00:27:18]:
Syncthing 2.1 Tail Scale 198.3 1.98.3 Excuse me. Z 1.3.6 and Zillij 0.44.3 now since I have only touched on some of the Internet OS updates, I do recommend reading Bobby's article for the rest of the details. And yes, that was only some of them.
Rob Campbell [00:27:48]:
I'm glad you didn't list them all.
Jeff Massie [00:27:51]:
Well, I. I never heard of that before and I. I looked it up. It's a rolling distribution based out of Ireland, totally independent. So it's not like.
Rob Campbell [00:28:04]:
Not based on anything else.
Jeff Massie [00:28:05]:
Not based on anything else now looks like maybe the first distribution, it showed up in December of last year. So about six months ago it popped on the scene. Well, actually, but I'm looking at Distro Watch, so yeah, that's not completely true.
Rob Campbell [00:28:25]:
So the history of this. Do you know anything about a kid? I know I. I know about it. We've never talked about Aaron specifically.
Ken McDonald [00:28:34]:
Didn't you talk about it over a year ago?
Rob Campbell [00:28:36]:
I may have talked about it coming. They changed their name to Serpent OS back in February of 2025. Before that. Or they changed their name to Aaron Os. Before that it was Serpent Os. And this is brought.
Ken McDonald [00:28:50]:
And I'm trying to think, was it something before that or is that what it started out as?
Rob Campbell [00:28:54]:
That's what it started out as. So this is brought to us by like Ike Iky Doherty and Joshua Strobel. I don't think Strobel was involved at the beginning, if I remember, but these are the guys who created Soless, if you're familiar with that. Yeah, they were the ones who created Soless. Iky left Soless. I think it was like. I think if I remember right, I might be getting some of this wrong. But I think Joshua was maintaining that by himself for a while.
Rob Campbell [00:29:22]:
Ikey did some other things and then he's decided to. He wanted to make another one. So he made Serpent Os and, and they changed it to Aaron OS last year. But solas, I did, I did try that years ago and I don't know, I only tested for a while. It seemed nice. I. I don't know why I didn't stick with it, but.
Ken McDonald [00:29:43]:
Because you can't stay still.
Rob Campbell [00:29:45]:
Yeah, I was much more of a hopper back then really, than I am now. I had time, so I did. And that's probably the only reason I didn't. I liked it. It was nice. I know I'd be interested to see, see if he did just as good of a job with this too.
Ken McDonald [00:30:01]:
So.
Jeff Massie [00:30:02]:
Yeah, I tried it for a bit too, back in the day because it was a KDE distribution, so I jumped on it. But one of the things that at the time, kind of, I don't know, I didn't care for was being independent like that. Some of the packet, you know, third party support was a little more weak. You know, you were compile everything from scratch and load, you know, oh, I got to get these dependencies. I got it versus at the time on Kubuntu or even Fedora, it's like, oh, oh, here's our Debian package, here's our RPM package. Just load it in.
Ken McDonald [00:30:36]:
Yeah, and did I hear something, Rob, that you may be jumping to a hummingbird?
Rob Campbell [00:30:43]:
Well, maybe, maybe I will. But I was gonna say I was looking at the solas still and I was, I was thinking that because it was independently maintained, created by the same people who, who do a Serpent now or Aaron now. I thought maybe it wasn't, but I guess they, they released soulless 4.9 in April of this year, so they see a reason to still keep both of them.
Jeff Massie [00:31:14]:
Interesting.
Ken McDonald [00:31:16]:
What are you running right now, Rob?
Rob Campbell [00:31:19]:
I'm on Cashy also, just like Jeff. Okay, bald head, Cashios beer.
Ken McDonald [00:31:25]:
And you're gonna stay there
Rob Campbell [00:31:30]:
for. We'll see. We'll see what the future brings. But Hummingbird. Okay, for all you AI deniers out there, this one is not for you. But if you think Ubuntu's workshop story needs a little more AI in it, then Fedora Hummingbird, yes, Fedora Hummingbird might be for you. This week, Red Hat and Fedora announced Fedora Hummingbird. And this is not just another Fedora spin with different desktop environment.
Rob Campbell [00:32:02]:
This is Fedora being pushed into the world of container native image based operating systems, and more specifically into the world of AI agents and automated development workflows. Fedora Hummingbird treats the operating system more like a container image itself than a traditional Linux install. Instead of the normal model where you install Linux distro, a Linux distro, add packages, update packages, remove packages, and slowly mutate the system over time. Hummingbird is built around images, updates are atomic, the root file system is read only, and if something goes wrong, rollback is part of the design. So in a lot of ways this takes the ideas we have already seen in immutable desktops and bootable containers and pushes them even further. Red Hat is not pitching Fedora Hummingbird as the next desktop, as I said, for your for your grandma, or even necessarily as your next daily driver for the average Fedora user. This is being described as a platform for agent first builders. In plain English that means developers, automation systems, and AI agents that need to spin up Linux environments quickly, consistently and without a bunch of friction.
Rob Campbell [00:33:27]:
Fedora Hummingbird is not AI in the sense that it has a chatbot sitting on the desktop or some magic assistant built into the panel. This is AI at the infrastructure level. Now I think that's where things start to get interesting and and maybe dangerous. But being an image based system should minimize some of that danger, I think. Hope we'll see. The idea is that if AI agents are going to help build software, test software, deploy software, and maybe even maintain parts of the stack, then the operating system underneath them needs to be predictable, disposable, auditable and fast to recreate. Because an AI agent does not want to click through an installer, it does not want to troubleshoot five years of hand edited config files. It wants an environment it could start from, do the work and either keep rebuild or throw away.
Rob Campbell [00:34:24]:
Hummingbird gives developers and AI systems a clean operating system image that can be rebuilt automatically, scanned continuously and rolled forward quickly when fixes are available. Red Hat is even talking about this as a lights out software factory, meaning more of the build, scan, publish process can happen automatically instead of relying on the traditional human heavy packaging model. So Hummingbird is not really putting AI on your desktop. It is about being a Linux platform for the kind of automated agent driven development workflow that Red Hat clearly thinks is the future. Hummingbird is designed to be fast, repeatable and clean, a lot like Ubuntu's workshop, but with AI. It is also borrowing heavily from the Container Security project or world project. Hummingbird has been focused on distillers container images, meaning images that strip out everything that is not strictly needed. No extra package manager, fewer moving parts, smaller attack service.
Rob Campbell [00:35:36]:
Fedora Hummingbird takes that idea and applies it down to the host operating system with the goal to Stay as close to zero CVEs as vulnerabilities as possible by continuously scanning, rebuilding, testing and publishing fixed images when upstream patches are available. So we definitely have a few great contenders for distros for aspiring developers. I guess the question is if you want AI and there are not. But even though Ubuntu's workshop announcement didn't mention AI, I bet that it might become part of one of those SDK shop options. So maybe the key difference is if you want a different container for each development environment or do you want your entire system to be a throwaway workspace? I don't know. They seem like both good options that when they are ready for the public, I. I'll be interested, interested to try them out. So I'm on cash US OS now, Ken, but maybe not.
Rob Campbell [00:36:46]:
When one of these are ready, I have to try them out. We'll see.
Ken McDonald [00:36:50]:
Well, from the sound of it, it can actually be run more as a container on a system that you have for doing the development you might need to do, and then you just dump it and start all over from scratch next time you want to develop.
Rob Campbell [00:37:04]:
Yeah, possibly.
Jeff Massie [00:37:06]:
To me it sounded kind of like an immutable operating system on overdrive. So it makes the changes even easier and quicker and faster rather than just, oh, it's stable for the average user. It's, oh, we got development here. Redo, redo, redo.
Rob Campbell [00:37:22]:
You know, just maybe more immutable too. I'm not sure.
Jeff Massie [00:37:28]:
It kind of sounded like it. I mean, it to me it was just. It sounded like it was going to be a lot quicker to switch. So like, that's why I said, you know, to me it sounds immutable on
Rob Campbell [00:37:37]:
overdrive and, oh yeah, AI and running with AI. Not, not, not, not just an AI chatbot, but this whole thing is just running on AI. I don't know, it's interesting, maybe scary, maybe not. I don't know.
Jeff Massie [00:37:54]:
Yeah, you're just one format away from getting rid of the fear if you're really that scared of it. But, but like I said, it's not really for every everyday people. It's. It's kind of a very specific tool.
Ken McDonald [00:38:07]:
Well, it sounds like a VM for you to try out.
Rob Campbell [00:38:11]:
Oh, I'll definitely, at, at the very least try it out in a vm. I. I don't know. I don't know. That'll be my daily driver. Just because, I mean, they kind of say it's not really meant for that. But Ubuntu, with workspaces that, that could be. I I really like to.
Rob Campbell [00:38:30]:
I you know, my my bit at the end of the workspace story where I'm hoping I could bring that somewhere else. It'd be nice to be able to bring that to to Cashy. That feature sounds great, but I love it.
Jeff Massie [00:38:44]:
Now you're just adding fluff to Cash. You're going to slow it down.
Rob Campbell [00:38:51]:
Well, on that note
Ken McDonald [00:38:56]:
and heard word from Jonathan that after he eats something he may be joining us, but he did mention that there's a long line for the food.
Jeff Massie [00:39:11]:
Well, and maybe, maybe we'll see what happens after we take a break and we talk about more Linux goodness right after this. Well, welcome back from the break. So my next story we're going to talk about some better fs. So the upcoming Linux 7.2 kernel cycle is bringing a notable performance improvement for the BetterFS file system. Or butter or BTRFS, or I'll let you all fill in how, in your own mind, how you specifically like to say it, but specifically a significant boost to the direct IO write throughput. Now, this improvement is technically a regression fix, correcting a mistake that was introduced several years ago. Here's the Background Back in 2023, BetterFS was converted over to the Linux kernel's new Mount API. This new Mount API had been in mainline for a while, ext4, for example, switched to it at the end of 2021.
Jeff Massie [00:40:19]:
It replaced Linux's old single system call for creating and changing mounts with a new set of system calls, avoiding the overloading of a single call and giving more control over the mount process. Christian Bauer described this API in the 2020 presentation at the Open Source Summit in Europe, and the developers, including Brawmer and Joseph Balak Bak sorry worked on adapting Better FS. To use it, the Better F translation or transition was merged into the Linux 6.8 kernel, but during that transition, something was missed. Before the switch, BetterFS had been setting a flag called SBNOSEC N O S E C in its Mount Root function. This flag tells the virtual file system layer that the file system may have files without security extended attributes, which allows it to perform certain optimizations. So if it doesn't have extended security attributes, it can optimize. When BetterFS moved to the new Mount API, this flag was accidentally dropped. The consequence, a check called is underscore nosec would always return false for a BTRFS node, which caused the BTRFs direct write function to always acquire the inode lock exclusively.
Jeff Massie [00:41:53]:
That in turn meant that all direct I O writes to the same file were being serialized, essentially forced to go one at a time rather than running in parallel. So basically it would kind of to break it down, it would say hey, is there extra security on this, on this file? And because they dropped that check, they, they dropped the flag, it would come back as false and say oh there, there isn't false, no security. So basically two negatives make it true. So yes, it must have extra security on it so we can't take any optimization. That's what was happening. Kind of a long way to get there. But for the technical they'll love to hear that the the original Mark Hamstrone, an engineer at Meta, discovered this issue and he found that restoring this behavior with a one line change resulted in roughly a 59% improvement in direct I O throughput on his machine, going from 826 megabytes per second up to 1,311 megabytes per second. Intel's kernel test robot independently confirmed the improvement as well, reporting around a 12% gain in their own testing on their hardware.
Jeff Massie [00:43:15]:
The patch is now sitting in the next staging code and is expected to land in the mainline kernel when the Linux 7.2 merge window opens in June. Take a look at the article linked in the show notes as it has more information and linked to another article with more information on the MOUNT API and it kind of forks from there. So I mean it looks something like something really to look forward to in the next kernel for the better FS users out there.
Rob Campbell [00:43:45]:
I am a Butter FS user.
Jeff Massie [00:43:49]:
It's always better with butter.
Rob Campbell [00:43:51]:
Everything's better with butter show title there. But I yeah Butterfly I've always. I've always known as butter. So every time I hear you say better it's like chalkboard but at least like like mashed potato pointed out no one ever calls it bitter OS.
Ken McDonald [00:44:15]:
Well because it's not an OS for number one.
Rob Campbell [00:44:17]:
Sorry bitter FS.
Ken McDonald [00:44:24]:
Well it is going to be better FS now that you're seeing a 59 increase.
Jeff Massie [00:44:32]:
Well he did the intel testing saw 12 so I mean it either way that's a pretty good. That's. That's in the noticeable improvement speed.
Rob Campbell [00:44:42]:
Yeah as a Butter FS user and a fan of I like. I mean the features are great. The drawback, you know when people are choosing between batterfs or x xf ext4 ext4 my brain today ext4 it's really like features or speed and if they can bring them closer together that'd be great.
Jeff Massie [00:45:09]:
Yeah.
Ken McDonald [00:45:09]:
So which would be more important with doing us compiling scripts or kernels.
Rob Campbell [00:45:17]:
Well, speed for sure.exe 4.
Jeff Massie [00:45:21]:
Yeah. So what you're giving up is there's more. Think of it like maybe accounting. There's more checks and balances with BTRFs and then ext4. So it takes longer to check your work on that file system than ext4. That goes. Oh yeah, it looks good. Now, there's checks.
Jeff Massie [00:45:43]:
There's checks and things like that. I'm not saying that it's ext4 has got any problem with it. I've ran it for years without issues.
Ken McDonald [00:45:50]:
It's like the difference between us keeping your account in a simple checkbook register, doing double entry accounting.
Jeff Massie [00:45:59]:
Right.
Rob Campbell [00:45:59]:
One is faster, one's more feature.
Jeff Massie [00:46:02]:
Yeah.
Ken McDonald [00:46:03]:
One's more accurate.
Jeff Massie [00:46:05]:
Yeah. Well, could be. It's more likely to catch M. One's more likely to catch mistakes. I guess we'll say it.
Rob Campbell [00:46:13]:
But now back to. Back to better FS and not this accounting analogy. You know, BetterFS has things like RAID and snapshots.
Ken McDonald [00:46:26]:
What else you recommend butterfs over ext4 for setting up a RAID with.
Rob Campbell [00:46:38]:
Well, it has the RAID capability built into it, but yeah, so you don't
Jeff Massie [00:46:43]:
have to use mdadm. It supposedly is a little better because mda. Now somebody will correct me and by all means do, because I'm pulling this from cobwebs in the memory. But mdadm, it pulls or when you check checks like at the sector level or something like that, it checks in bigger chunks than the butterfs does. It can check at a lower level, more ingrained and it can tell you if there's something wrong in the file more accurately. Because like in a RAID one situation, MDADM says one of these is off. I don't know which one it is. You got one bit flipped on drive A, one bit flipped on drive B and it can't tell.
Jeff Massie [00:47:35]:
It needs a third one where supposedly better FS is able to do lower level checksums and tell you which one is off and correct it.
Rob Campbell [00:47:44]:
Yeah. Another nice feature of butterfs is the data scrubbing. So if you have a lot of long term storage, it can protect against bit rot or basically something sitting there untouched for a long period. It can lose its, I don't know, lose its integrity and a bit can flip. Whereas like data scrubbing in BTRFS can catch that and fix that before it's too late and too many bits are flipped and it's not recoverable. So things like that. Those are some other features. I know there's a lot more.
Rob Campbell [00:48:21]:
Those are just Some of the key ones that have been important to me.
Jeff Massie [00:48:26]:
Yeah, I personally have not used the full extent of better fs, but I have corrected a drive because I did the normal procedure and nothing worked. And then so I did the don't do this because you might destroy your drive. And I'm like eh, all right, you know, I'm worse. Comes to worse, I format and go. And I did it and it found some issues and it went, there you go, all better.
Rob Campbell [00:48:52]:
And some of those features, you're not actively using them, but you're benefiting from them because it just does it. You know, it's protecting your data from Bit Rod and things like that.
Jeff Massie [00:49:04]:
Naturally it. It's kind of like ZFS in that there's a lot of different layers in there and you can really use a lot of it or you know, it's
Rob Campbell [00:49:15]:
a lot of the same features I I think of Butterfs is kind of trying to be the more Linux friendly license wise at least ZFS or zfs, it's really trying to do a lot of the same things. It's not quite as far along as mature as ZFS is, but.
Jonathan Bennett [00:49:37]:
Right.
Jeff Massie [00:49:38]:
Well, yeah, Zed started out in the Sunday, so it's had decades of hammering on it.
Ken McDonald [00:49:44]:
Was there a file system that used to use the Berkeley packet filter or was that. I'm gonna think of networking with that.
Rob Campbell [00:49:52]:
I mean that's more Networking.
Jeff Massie [00:49:53]:
Networking.
Ken McDonald [00:49:54]:
Okay.
Jeff Massie [00:49:56]:
Not saying there couldn't be, but I don't know of anything. I only know of networking.
Rob Campbell [00:50:00]:
But if you're doing kernel scripting, that might be a great way to just use a reason to use ext for now.
Ken McDonald [00:50:13]:
Did you want me to talk about a way to do kernel scripting?
Rob Campbell [00:50:17]:
Why don't you do that? Go for it.
Ken McDonald [00:50:23]:
Well, Rob, according to Bobby Barzolf and Michael Laravel, this week saw the first public release of KernelScript 0.1, an open source programming language for EBPF focused Linux kernel development published under the Apache 2.0 license. Now, according to its README file, KernelScript is a modern type safe domain specific programming language that unifies EPPF user space and kernel space development in a single code base. Now built with an EBPF centric approach, it provides a clean readable syntax while generating efficient C code for EBPF file programs, coordinated user space programs, and seamless kernel module or KFUNC integration. Kernel Script aims to become the programming language for Linux kernel customization and application specific optimization. By leveraging the KFUNK function and EBPF capabilities, it offers a modern alternative to traditional kernel module interfaces such as procfs and debugfs. Now the founder of Multi Kernel Technologies, Kong Wang, presented KernelScript at the Linux Foundation's Open Source Summit this past week. According to Michael, KernelScript positions itself as a better alternative to RAW C based and Rust EBPF programs. According to Bobby, this release is experimental.
Ken McDonald [00:52:12]:
As always, you can get more details at the Links to Bobby and Mark Michael's articles
Rob Campbell [00:52:22]:
well, I don't know much of what you're talking about there, so go ahead and add your comments. Jeff.
Jeff Massie [00:52:29]:
Yeah, you know, it's kind of outside of my wheelhouse.
Ken McDonald [00:52:35]:
Jonathan would probably have had a lot more to say about it and how it would affect working on the kernel.
Rob Campbell [00:52:45]:
I know Jeff, and I, and I believe you have too have compiled our own kernels, but I don't think configured and compile them. But I don't think that's what this is for. Or I could be wrong.
Jeff Massie [00:52:59]:
No, it sounds like more developers and maybe even automating some of the optimizations or something like maybe if you're building several different kernels, like you got your Regular V&V1, V2, you know, and then you go oh, I've got an ARM kernel and a, you know, different, different things like that maybe.
Ken McDonald [00:53:22]:
But yeah, it's basically for developers and it may or may not take off. Where it may take off is if you're having to do work with multiple kernels at once.
Rob Campbell [00:53:42]:
Well, I think I'll have to look into this more.
Ken McDonald [00:53:46]:
Yeah, I maybe look into it after the break.
Rob Campbell [00:53:51]:
Maybe I'll look into it after the show because we have plenty other things to
Ken McDonald [00:54:00]:
discuss when we come back from the break.
Rob Campbell [00:54:01]:
Yes, plenty more things to come up after this break when we Talk about fast USB 4 data transfers. All right, here is one of those Linux kernel stories that sounds boring at first until you realize it could actually be pretty useful. Intel engineers, you know, that kind of surprised me. I didn't think intel was working on anything for Linux anymore. I thought they gave up on that, but I guess, I guess they are. Anyway, intel engineers are working on a new protocol for Linux called USB for stream. And the idea is simple. Use a USB 4 or Thunderbolt bolt cable to move data directly between two computers without having to set up networking.
Rob Campbell [00:54:50]:
So that's no SSH server, no Samba share, no local networking, no hopping on Wi Fi, or no hoping Wi Fi is fast enough. Just two machines connected with a USB 4 or Thunderbolt cable, and Linux is exposing that connection as a device. The new driver is called Thunderbolt Stream and once everything is configured, each machine gets a device like Driver Dev, TBS or TB Stream 0. From there, applications can treat it almost like a regular file. If a program can read and write data, it could potentially use the stream without needing special support. So in practical terms, this could let you do things like pipe a backup from one machine to another, transferring a large archive, or move data between streams in a very direct way. We already have lots of ways to move between computers. You know all those ways.
Rob Campbell [00:55:53]:
I list this as HR sync, local send, external drives, cloud storage, but all those come with trade offs. WI fi can be slow or unreliable. Network shares can be a pain to configure. External drives mean copying the data twice, which takes some time. And cloud storage is not always practical when you are dealing with huge files or sensitive Data. With current USB 4 thunderbolt speeds up to 40 gigabytes per second. That is a 40 times faster than your typical 1 gigabit wired ethernet network. That's kind of common today.
Rob Campbell [00:56:33]:
Even more faster than most WI fi because usually you don't even get up to. You can't even get to a gig on WI fi generally these days. And even faster than some of the most expensive fiber connections out there. And with no new hardware, just your USB ports you already have. Now this is not quite the same thing as plugging in a USB flash drive. It does, it does need configuration through conversation, config, fs and both sides need their stream set up before data starts flowing. So you know, once, once there's some apps or that I'm imagining that'll be pretty seamless. So this is probably not going to be, I don't know, everyone's new favorite way to transfer files tomorrow, but for Linux power users, developers, admins, anyone moving large amounts of data between machines, this could be very handy.
Rob Campbell [00:57:34]:
And really I imagine there's going to be apps to make this easy for anybody to use. Why wouldn't there be if it's this great? Pharonix also points out that some more creative use cases like fast system backups or even sharing things between webcam data between machines over the cable because it avoids a traditional networking stack. It could be useful in recovery environments where networking is not configured yet, but you still need to get data off a machine. The driver is expected to target the Linux 7.2 kernel cycle, so this is something most users are going to have pretty soon. And like a lot of kernel features, the first version will probably be more exciting to developers and hardware folks than everyone else. And I could see this being an extremely useful feature in the future, you know, maybe a few years from now I might have USB cables running over my house as my, my new Network, my new 40 gigabit per second home network infrastructure. I don't know. But guys, what do you think?
Jeff Massie [00:58:53]:
I think it's pretty cool. I would like to say intel hasn't given up on Linux. Now we did have several people that have been there for a while leave but they also were getting people in, newer people in as well. But they do focus more on enterprise.
Rob Campbell [00:59:11]:
They didn't give up on Linux. They just scared us to try to make us think they were going to.
Jeff Massie [00:59:17]:
Yeah, I mean that's, that's pretty cool. I mean the only, the only thing is, you know, okay, we got this 40 gigabyte what drive. I mean unless you're running off RAM disks, you know you're going to overpower your, your drives. You know the normal consumer type drives.
Rob Campbell [00:59:33]:
I have a great use case here. External like VM storage. Like I have my Proxmox set up here and I then I have a, a synology NAS and I use the NAS to back up to. But I do not use it as I do not have my actual VM file systems on that NAS just because of data transfer speeds. If I just was able to use this and use the file systems on that NAS at native speed. Yeah it would be a game changer for my Proxmox setup.
Jeff Massie [01:00:12]:
That is true.
Ken McDonald [01:00:13]:
Could this become an alternative way for networking different computers?
Rob Campbell [01:00:20]:
You know that's, it's. I mean yes. I mean that's not directly what it is for but I think it could be. I mean it's definitely peer to peer. I mean right now it's probably more peer to peer networking. So to have like your whole office or home network all connected with USB is. It's.
Ken McDonald [01:00:42]:
I don't know, boot from a Ventory that has a. The kernel with this patch in it. So you could back up that.
Rob Campbell [01:00:51]:
Yeah.
Ken McDonald [01:00:52]:
That machine to your server.
Rob Campbell [01:00:55]:
Instead of an IP switch you have a USB hub and everybody's piped into that. I don't, I don't know if it'll work like that.
Ken McDonald [01:01:02]:
USB 4 hub of course.
Jeff Massie [01:01:05]:
Well, and, or Thunderbolt. Thunderbolt and USB 4 are basically the same things except USB 4. There's a lot of things optional and if you have a Thunderbolt 4 cable or setup it's mandatory. USB lets you get away with a
Ken McDonald [01:01:22]:
lot of like with usbc.
Jeff Massie [01:01:26]:
Well it's not, it's the, it's the. Not The C is the physical connector, but the USB 4 says up to 40 gigabits. Thunderbolt says it will be USB. The, the USB 4 says, well, unless the cable's too long or something happens and we're only going 20 gigabits USB
Ken McDonald [01:01:45]:
C, you'll see a dedicated USB C port physical connection on a laptop that will only work for display port only. Then maybe another one for just power providing power to the laptop and then the other then a third one for all those devices you want to connect.
Jeff Massie [01:02:04]:
I mean Thunderbolts, a guarantee is what it is.
Ken McDonald [01:02:08]:
So we need a Thunderbolt connection on everything and Thunderbolt cables.
Rob Campbell [01:02:14]:
Yeah, I would say I, I think you're somewhat exaggerating on, even on the, the USB 4 USB C. But, but yeah, I do know what you mean. Where it's like, why is my video not working? Oh, that USB port is not for. That USB port is not for video. But yeah, I've never seen a laptop where USB C port was only for power.
Jeff Massie [01:02:37]:
I haven't either. But, but I know, but we understand the spirit of your.
Ken McDonald [01:02:41]:
But I have seen phones for that.
Rob Campbell [01:02:46]:
I don't know. Let's move on. We're all confused or.
Ken McDonald [01:02:51]:
No, maybe it was just cables.
Jeff Massie [01:02:56]:
Cables, yes, because that is a security thing. So they cut out all the connectors in there except power. So if you are in an airport like Jonathan, you can plug into their USB cable and you will only allow power to go through. It can't. If someone has some malicious firmware chip somewhere back there, it cannot talk to your phone. It's kind of a sterilizer.
Rob Campbell [01:03:24]:
Exactly. Well Jeff, what do you have to tell us about Linux 7.1, RC5.
Jeff Massie [01:03:33]:
RC5. Well, you know, it's kind of interesting. We, we talked last week about how Linus Torvalds had an issue with security updates where people were flooding the kernel security maintainers with fixes. And a lot of times they were for items which had been reported multiple times before or they were for code that was getting deprecated or some other odd little corner of the kernel which it didn't really matter. It was very, very low priority. You know, it's not worth causing a big kerfuffle about. And, but this week Linus carries on a little bit more with that with the release of 7.1's RC5 kernel. And here's exactly what he had to say about it.
Jeff Massie [01:04:15]:
To the surprise of absolutely Nobody by now, RC5 is pretty big. Quite a bit bigger than RC5s have traditionally been. I'm not entirely happy about it. Most of this is totally trivial stuff to random drive drivers, which obviously makes all it all a little less scary. But at the same time I'm really not convinced that the churn is worth it at the RC5 time. These things are fixes, sure, but but at the same time a lot of them are simply so irrelevant that I think they'd be better off in the Linux next tree and get merged during the next window, the next merge window. So I think I will start being a little more hard nosed about this kind of unnecessary churn this late in the game we're supposed to look for regressions and regressions is emphasized, not critical fixes to long standing issues that are simply not appropriate for for this late in the release cycle. End result this is too big and this is the heads up that I'll be pushing back on pointless pull requests with fixes that just aren't that important.
Jeff Massie [01:05:19]:
And yes, several of these series were triggered by AI code review because fixes are not and trivial or not, these are the kind of large RC weeks. These kinds of large RC weeks are not conductive to long term stability. Trivial fixes may be trivial and have a pretty low chance of causing problems, but low chance is still not zero chance. So people start looking closer at your poll requests and ask yourself is this really a regression or serious enough that it shouldn't go until the next development poll? Now I think that Linus has a point here and you guys can pop in. I think he has a point here about people using AI and not really thinking about the output. The fat finger that turns your cursor red instead of yellow can probably wait. Or the spelling mistake that's been there for four years can wait past the RC window. And you know, again, please think about the output of the AI and logically think about where should it land in the actual real world priority.
Jeff Massie [01:06:29]:
Take a look at the article linked in the show notes for full details and the announcement on the mailing list. What do you have to say Gentlemen?
Ken McDonald [01:06:38]:
Hello Jonathan.
Jonathan Bennett [01:06:40]:
Hey, I'm here. Yeah, I'm here in the Boston airport, which my entire trip today has been sort of a nightmare. It started with a flight being delayed by two hours and then baggage on the wrong carousel and we stood there for about 30 minutes waiting for it. Anyway, I'm finally between flights, checked in and all that good stuff that I pop in and say hi, oh you
Rob Campbell [01:07:01]:
should have brought your ring light, but this will be.
Jonathan Bennett [01:07:03]:
Yeah, yeah, I was, I was trying to show off, you know, the fact that there's an airport behind me. I thought that would be just great. And then I did it. And I'm totally blown out in the back. Oh, well, I can't win them all. I know you guys were going to talk about the. The Ubuntu announcement. I think you guys have covered that already.
Rob Campbell [01:07:20]:
We have.
Jonathan Bennett [01:07:22]:
Did you talk about the Curl to bashometer?
Rob Campbell [01:07:27]:
We have not.
Jonathan Bennett [01:07:29]:
You need to go actually listen to the talks. My talk too, of course, because I was at the Ubuntu Summit where that announcement was made. But the talk where they announced the new Ubuntu thing, it started out talking about the problem of Curl, the Bash, and that's all of these different programs that the way you install them is by curling down a script, wiping it out, the Bash. And the idea there was that. That's a terrible idea. We agree. We've talked about that on the show a lot over the years. And Mark Shuttleworth, he was the one that gave that particular talk, and I actually really appreciate that he made that point, that he also followed on with a point that the fact that so many of these.
Jonathan Bennett [01:08:12]:
It's AI tooling, but it's a whole bunch of other things. In fact, hilariously, several of the things presented at the Summit, the install step, was curl the script and Pipe and Bash. Everybody was a little sheepish about it after this, but his point was that means that things out there are trying to move so fast, and things in Ubuntu particularly, that's what they were talking about, are moving slower than what the outside world would like. And he actually made a really good point that, you know, Snap is one of the solutions to that problem. And I've been on the fence a little bit about Snaps, but I will say this, it is a far superior solution than curling a script and running it in Bash, particularly if the instructions are do it with Sudo. Nope, I am not doing that to my computer. Do that in a virtual machine. But if there's a Snap that I can download instead, I'm all about that.
Jonathan Bennett [01:09:06]:
That was one of my takeaways from the Ubuntu Summit.
Ken McDonald [01:09:09]:
Would you prefer that to using Cargo to install it?
Jonathan Bennett [01:09:15]:
Cargo is kind of a whole different beast. Cargo is particularly if you're doing something with Rust, the whole, like the whole chain is rust. And with Cargo, you're sort of. You're doing the build right there on your machine. In some ways, Cargo is better. I'm not sure that I really want to mess with Cargo if I don't
Jeff Massie [01:09:29]:
have to say Flatpak and Appimage. Are the kind of the direct competitors to Snap or closest analogs.
Ken McDonald [01:09:38]:
It's just my command line tip for this week. I had two options. Snap or or cargo. And I made the mistake of doing it by snap first and I couldn't back remove it and then go back to cart and so on.
Jonathan Bennett [01:09:54]:
I mean you should be able to remove it. It's steps are supposed to be easily removable. That's kind of the point.
Ken McDonald [01:09:59]:
Yeah, I was able to remove it.
Jonathan Bennett [01:10:02]:
I was gonna say should be able
Ken McDonald [01:10:03]:
to but then when I installed it with Cargo it was still had the pointer from the for where the snap was.
Jonathan Bennett [01:10:10]:
I didn't fully clean up after itself. Yeah, it makes sense.
Rob Campbell [01:10:15]:
Yeah. So we were, we were just finishing up on Jeff's Linux 7.1 RC5 story and told him what was what.
Ken McDonald [01:10:28]:
So bloated from all the trivial AI corrections.
Jeff Massie [01:10:34]:
Yeah, he kind of went on a little rant talking about a lot of stuff should go into the next Linux next and just get pulled versus I'll
Ken McDonald [01:10:43]:
have to agree with Linus, he's right. If you're going to use AI, do it for that. At least the first revision.
Jonathan Bennett [01:10:51]:
Yeah. So something that we've done in one of the projects with Smashtastic, one of the projects I'm involved in is we started writing spec kits which are essentially instructions for the AIs and I wonder if that's something that they could write for the kernel and then include data about, you know, the different phases. It's like if this is not a critical fix, you know, don't do it during the bug fix window. During. Do it during the merge window.
Rob Campbell [01:11:14]:
Yeah, I think that would be something
Jonathan Bennett [01:11:16]:
that might be something that you could actually teach the AI to honor.
Rob Campbell [01:11:20]:
I think that would be a definite exception if it's a critical bug or, or a vulnerability.
Jonathan Bennett [01:11:27]:
That's what that time period is for.
Rob Campbell [01:11:29]:
Right?
Jonathan Bennett [01:11:29]:
It's for fixing the critical bugs. And what Torvalds is saying here is these are not critical bugs that you're sending me patches for.
Rob Campbell [01:11:36]:
Exactly.
Ken McDonald [01:11:36]:
Trivial typos.
Jonathan Bennett [01:11:39]:
Yeah, those are.
Jeff Massie [01:11:40]:
And little bugs that are inconsequential that have been there for a long time that yeah, they should be fixed, but it's not hurting anything. And like he said, it's trying to focus on, hey, we just added a bunch of code from the, from the pull from the merge window. We need to be looking at that for regressions, not worrying about these old
Ken McDonald [01:12:04]:
things that, you know what a programming language dedicated to kernel customization and APT optimizations help with cutting that down. Kernel script that I had covered earlier in the show.
Jeff Massie [01:12:25]:
I don't think it would because it's just people. I use AI and I found a spelling mistake. I found a goofy little. Like I said, oh, it turns my cursor red instead of yellow. Okay, there's no scripting. There has to be a way. And I think they're probably going to have to come up with a way to automate having machines actually process this stuff and kind of rate. Rate the criticality of it.
Jeff Massie [01:12:51]:
So it can go.
Rob Campbell [01:12:52]:
Yeah.
Jeff Massie [01:12:52]:
Oh, it's not really anything critical. It's. Yeah, it's as KDE likes to say, it's a paper cut, but it's not crashing your system. It's not a security vulnerability. It's just.
Rob Campbell [01:13:04]:
So since Jonathan is here, one instead of a two. Since Jonathan is here, do you want to jump one ahead and get yours done just in case anything happens at the airport?
Jonathan Bennett [01:13:18]:
Yeah, that's a really good idea. Let me go ahead and do that. So I've got a story here that really caught my eye and I wanted to bring it. It's because we've talked on the show before about the open source initiatives, open source AI definition. And I saw in Phoronix, this was earlier today that the G7 summit, which that's leaders from the seven biggest countries of the Western world, essentially, they got together and they put out a document about their definition for open source AI. And I thought it was really interesting to look at. So they've got open source AI with open data and that is where everything about it including the training data, is fully available and under an open source license. And then they also break that down following the OSI's guidance here, they break that down and talk about open source AI without open data.
Jonathan Bennett [01:14:16]:
And this one is controversial. I definitely understand where it comes from, why they do this. And essentially this is saying that the model weights, the deployment code and the training code and possibly the full training data is completely released and under an open source license. But it does have sort of an exception here for times when the training data cannot legally be shared. And so the idea is like if you have an AI that's trained on medical images, so you may be able to train the AI on say, X rays, chest X rays from over the last 30 years. Incredibly useful thing to train on. Incredibly problematic to try to release all that imagery to the public. And so this is why they've got this sort of line and sort of an exception in what is considered to be open source AI.
Jonathan Bennett [01:15:09]:
And then they went Ahead and broke this down yet further to an open weights AI where the weights and deployment code are the only thing that's available and it's under an open source license. And then there's one more, the weights available AI. And this is sort of the. This is the thing that says the least about the AI that you're talking about that is just that the AI is released free of charge and its weights and its deployment code is available. And so that's. That's kind of like your. Well, it's a source available license. It's a very limited source available license for AI.
Jonathan Bennett [01:15:43]:
So really it caught my interest to see that even, you know, you think the worst of the worst of the bureaucrats. And I don't mean that in like a moral sense, but just in a. The most bureaucratic. You would think that would be the people at G7. And they came around and they said, hey, this is a great sort of definition. We're going to adopt it. I thought it was pretty interesting and you know, good work from the folks at OSI to sort of put this together. I would not be at all surprised to learn that Simon Phipps was sort of behind this and was, you know, talking to people and trying to educate them because that's sort of what he does these days.
Jonathan Bennett [01:16:14]:
But very interesting to see.
Ken McDonald [01:16:18]:
Yeah, maybe it's time to get Simon Phipps on Floss Weekly to give us an update.
Jonathan Bennett [01:16:24]:
We have him as a co host every year once in a while. Last time I invited him, he's like, why don't you just wait until it's something that's really down my alley to invite me back? Okay, that's fine.
Jeff Massie [01:16:34]:
Never stopped me before.
Ken McDonald [01:16:36]:
Have him as a guest.
Jonathan Bennett [01:16:39]:
So. Yeah, yeah, we could definitely do that. Talk about this and some other things.
Jeff Massie [01:16:45]:
Yeah.
Jonathan Bennett [01:16:45]:
All right. Any comments on the open source AI thing?
Ken McDonald [01:16:49]:
It's nice to see some language coming about out about how to treat it.
Jonathan Bennett [01:16:56]:
Yeah, I think it'll be helpful.
Jeff Massie [01:16:59]:
Yeah, we'll see if it gains traction.
Ken McDonald [01:17:05]:
It's one thing if it becomes the dictionary.
Rob Campbell [01:17:08]:
Right.
Jonathan Bennett [01:17:09]:
If it becomes part of the legal structure, really, if it enters into use in parlance.
Ken McDonald [01:17:20]:
Yeah, go ahead.
Jeff Massie [01:17:20]:
Go ahead, Jonathan.
Jonathan Bennett [01:17:21]:
Well, I was going to transition to the next topic, so if you've got something to say here, go ahead.
Jeff Massie [01:17:25]:
No, go ahead.
Ken McDonald [01:17:26]:
Okay.
Jonathan Bennett [01:17:27]:
So speaking of legal things, one of the issues that we've been tracking is the age verification stuff, and Ken actually has the update on that today. What's going on out in California with age verification and open source source operating systems?
Ken McDonald [01:17:43]:
Ken well, it looks like we might be getting some new good news because this week we've got Christine Hall, Michael Larabelle, Sourav Rudra and Lennox Stans writing about an amendment to California's age verification law. Now the amendment, and this is where it starts getting boring, is that when I start rounding out the names of them it's AB Fair 1856 is currently undergoing committee reviews and could be voted owned by the California State legislature in June. According to Michael A.B. 1856 makes important adjustments to exempt most Linux distributions from California's age verification law. One of the importance of the amendment is that it amends the age verification law with Operating system provider does not mean a person or entity that distributes an operating system or application under license terms that permit a recipient to copy, redistribute excuse me, and modify the software. And on the application side, application does not include software components that are not themselves offered to consumers as a standalone executable application through a covered application store. According to Christine, Colorado's law already exempts open source operating systems thanks in part to efforts by the chief executive officer Carl Richel and his team at System 76, which of course manufactures servers, desktops and laptops pre installed with in house developed POP OS or Ubuntu or Linux distribution. According to Saurav, the Colorado bill also adds a requirement that exempts software that exempts software have no platform imposed technical or contractual restrictions on installing modified versions.
Ken McDonald [01:19:58]:
Basically this clause is aimed at tivoization, basically where manufacturers lock down hardware to block modified software from running even when the search code is freely available. According to Linux stans tech companies realized enforcing this on Linux would nuke 80% of server infrastructure overnight. No Linux means no cloud. No cloud means Silicon Valley becomes a very expensive ghost town. Now Christine, Michael Saurov and Lennox said a lot more in their articles that I don't have time to cover so definitely read them for the rest of the story.
Jonathan Bennett [01:20:44]:
It's interesting the rest of the story. I'm old enough to remember that.
Jeff Massie [01:20:49]:
Well, I was going to say little Paul Harvey there.
Jonathan Bennett [01:20:51]:
Yes,
Jeff Massie [01:20:54]:
you know it but like Steam I don't know if that's really going to be an issue.
Ken McDonald [01:20:58]:
It's not going to be covered because it it's a standalone applications store because
Jonathan Bennett [01:21:06]:
you know the you know download but
Jeff Massie [01:21:08]:
Steam OS they said could be that if they opened it.
Jonathan Bennett [01:21:12]:
Another interesting thing about this. You know the other interesting thing about this? Steam already has that. Steam already knows how old you are and it hides mature games. It already does this. They just didn't need a law to enforce it. Steam just looked at it. I think before even these laws even existed Steam looked at it and said hey this would be a good idea to not show erotic content to 13 year olds
Ken McDonald [01:21:34]:
or anybody that we haven't proved as an adult.
Jonathan Bennett [01:21:37]:
Yeah, well I'm pretty sure you have to give a birthday when you, when you sign up to Steam and having
Rob Campbell [01:21:43]:
somebody like Steam choose to do this, there's nothing wrong with that.
Jonathan Bennett [01:21:49]:
Yeah, I was going to say maybe it's kind of controversial. Take. What I would love to see here is for there not to be a law that says you have to do this but all the operating system manufacturers, including a bunch of the Linux distros say that's a really good idea. Let's put this in there so if you want to you can opt in and say hey I'm only 13 running this operating system, give me a somewhat filtered Internet or if you don't want to do that then don't. But I mean I think like there's a, on some technical level there's an argument to be made that this is a good idea to just have a button that you can click to say let the Internet know I'm only 12. Of course, you know, some of us, we just go about life letting the Internet know that we're 12 at heart.
Jeff Massie [01:22:29]:
I think the biggest thing is, you know, when you look at both, you know, Microsoft, Apple and Steam for example, you have kind of centralized choke points that they can easily do that but something like Debian, you know, it's all over the place and there's no centralized real location and you can modify and you can. I don't see Linux being able to really do this without putting up some kind of big infrastructure. I personally think eventually it's going to just turn into. You get a digital government ID that well you don't already have that.
Jonathan Bennett [01:23:11]:
Not a digital, it's not connected to your Internet.
Rob Campbell [01:23:14]:
And I don't think like what Jonathan is saying they should do or even what the laws at the time are saying they should do, it's not actual true verification, nobody's verifying the law but having the ability to say hey I'm under aged and you know I shouldn't be. I don't want to see this stuff. No, sure, maybe those underage people like yeah, I'm getting that out there, I want to see all of it.
Jeff Massie [01:23:38]:
But yeah, yeah, what 13 year old is not going to go, I'm 35, click, you know, prove it.
Ken McDonald [01:23:47]:
They what they need what Would be nice is if the federal government came up and said, okay, you're going to treat everybody as if they're a 13 year old unless they prove otherwise. And as a 13 year old you cannot get their any of their personal data.
Rob Campbell [01:24:07]:
You know Jeff, though, it would be
Jeff Massie [01:24:08]:
nice if the federal government didn't have to get involved.
Rob Campbell [01:24:14]:
The 13 year olds, you know that there's a gray area there. You know, some are going to. Most are probably just saying I'm 35, but 8 year olds and stuff. There are plenty 8 year olds who are innocent and actually don't want to see that stuff. So.
Jonathan Bennett [01:24:28]:
Well, you know, hopefully with an eight year old they don't even know the things that they hope to not see. Right.
Rob Campbell [01:24:34]:
Ideally.
Jonathan Bennett [01:24:34]:
But at some point you hope that there is some parental involvement with setting up a computer for an 8 year old.
Jeff Massie [01:24:41]:
When my kids were 8, I had the machines where I could see them and I had a lot of stuff locked out and I had them pretty well controlled on this would allow one
Rob Campbell [01:24:50]:
more facility for the parents to manage that though.
Ken McDonald [01:24:55]:
When my kids were 8, I don't think we had Internet in the house.
Jonathan Bennett [01:24:58]:
You got a Commodore 64 for them, right?
Ken McDonald [01:25:02]:
Nintendo.
Rob Campbell [01:25:03]:
Yeah. Yeah.
Jonathan Bennett [01:25:06]:
Sounds like that's how the original.
Ken McDonald [01:25:08]:
But it didn't use the Internet. Nintendo 64.
Jeff Massie [01:25:15]:
When I was in high school I had a Commodore 64 and I had a friend that I wound up getting a copy of strip poker game from.
Ken McDonald [01:25:22]:
So I. That wasn't via the Internet, was it?
Jeff Massie [01:25:26]:
No.
Rob Campbell [01:25:27]:
And the 64 did not have Internet either. No, no.
Jeff Massie [01:25:31]:
You could put a modem on them.
Jonathan Bennett [01:25:33]:
Yeah. There's like two games that supported it. Wasn't a whole lot. Wasn't a whole lot you could do with it. All right, should we move into some command line tips first?
Jeff Massie [01:25:42]:
I think we should take a break.
Jonathan Bennett [01:25:44]:
Oh, that's right. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with some command line tips. Be right back.
Rob Campbell [01:25:51]:
All right. My command line tip this week is my Spanish is getting rusty. Kian, I believe it is, which means who in Spanish. And basically this is a who is tui and more on a really. I don't know what word to use it Is it really pumped up one. So if I. Anyway, if I type this, the first thing is going to do is ask me to enter a domain or an IP address. So I'm just going to do Robert P.
Rob Campbell [01:26:23]:
Campbell.com hit enter and then I got different tabs here for those watching. I have a who is tab. It. It Says my registrar cloud cloud flare client transfer status is prohibited. So don't try to do that. You know all the things like created update expires, name servers, registrant stuff. But then I can go over and look at DNS which you know has EA records and. And all that stuff.
Rob Campbell [01:26:55]:
Move over, look at the mail records. I do not have email on this one so there's no mx, spf, DMARC or DKIM records. I can look over to see this the SSL TLS stuff. So it shows me the issuer which I have let's encrypt. So I. I guess their upstream must be Google trusted. Oh no, no, no, it's through. I actually I use the cloudflare proxy so that it must be through them.
Rob Campbell [01:27:29]:
I don't know what it is from anyway and then it'll show some HTTP stuff headers status is okay. The server SEO stuff it's going to tell you that could be handy if you're trying to make your site SEO friendly. That search engine optimization for those who don't know. So it says things like indexable robot set text is found, canonical not set up, sitemap not found, title description, various things like that for SEO related stuff and then the stack. So the infrastructure says the server's cloud flare CDN is Cloud Flare. That's just because it proxies to there. JavaScript says is jQuery external services like I guess I have Ajax, Google APIs on there and Cloudflare insights on there. They must inject the cloudflare thing.
Rob Campbell [01:28:28]:
I don't think I remember putting that there. Anyway, so It's a nice 2e based whois and more tool when you're looking into things on a domain or an ip. But obviously it's going to be a lot less detail on that. So keyn is that program and I
Ken McDonald [01:28:55]:
was noticing that it. I was noticing that it even has an option where you don't have to install it. You can just do a SSH QN sh.
Rob Campbell [01:29:11]:
Oh, I did not notice that but makes sense. You probably could just download that too maybe or something. But I did install it. I can't remember which method I use. There's a lot of different ways. Oh yeah, I did the arch because I'm on cache.
Ken McDonald [01:29:32]:
Okay. But I was noticing for Ubuntu it uses Curl. I think I'll use the brew option.
Jeff Massie [01:29:42]:
Yes.
Ken McDonald [01:29:44]:
And do we still have Jonathan with us?
Jeff Massie [01:29:51]:
Yes, we do. So my command line tip for this week is. It's kind of a two for one command line tip Shelly S H E L L Y Now, it can be started by just typing Shelley in the command line, or it can be used where it can be used in command line mode. Or if you want a ui, you type in Shelly UI and it will give you a graphical window. Great. So what does it actually do? It's a replacement for Pacman and Octopi, meaning it's a graphical package manager. It comes installed on Cashios and it's available for Arch and Arch flavors. Now, per the authors, Shelley offers a modern visual interface with a focus on user experience and ease of use.
Jeff Massie [01:30:41]:
It is not built as a Pac man wrapper or front end. So it's a complete reimagination of how the user interacts with their Arch Linux system, providing more streamlined, intuitive experience. Well, that's all well and good, you know, a little bit of, a little bit of marketing there, but you know, it. It's not a wrapper for Pacman is the, the biggest takeaway of that. Now, it can handle normal repositories, it can do the AUR repositories along with flatpaks and app images. It can update your system like package managers do. You can search for packages. It'll give you all the versions you can find.
Jeff Massie [01:31:22]:
So in the, in the link in the show notes, it goes to an actual YouTube video and for example, somebody looks up a program and it has the regular one, it shows different versions in the AUR repositories, it shows a flat pack version. So then you can pick which one you want and is there a specific version maybe you're after? Now there is an experimental feature that's kind of cool right now where if you select a package, you could also view the dependencies graphically. So it looks like a bunch of boxes with different colors based on if they're required or optional. And it's got lines connecting all the packages which the core program relies on. So all those boxes will connect to the central core program, but it also shows the dependencies required by each other. So you'll have other connections showing. Yeah, you've got library A which this main program relies on, but library B that the main program relies on is also a dependency for library A. So it's kind of cool that way.
Jeff Massie [01:32:30]:
But like I said, it's very experimental at this point. But it's something you can look at. The video links in the show notes goes even more into things like if you look at something like OBS Flatpak, you can, you know, normally do the install of the Flatpak for Obs but you can also manage the modules for that program. So then you can, you can keep track of what you've installed for that, for that package. If you, if you watch the video in the Show Notes, it's the Linux Next channel on YouTube and that's where I ran across this. So any, any that can't see the, the show notes, that's, that's what you look for and they go into a ton of features in there and there's a great amount of how to use the finer points of the program, different switches you can try goes into the settings of it. It's, it's pretty neat. And in the, in the description block of the YouTube video, there's a link to the GitHub page and they not only talk more about how to install it, how to use it and stuff, but they also have a list of features they're working on such as Package import, which I thought sounded cool, which allows for import of a previously existing package list to bring the system back up to a saved package state.
Jeff Massie [01:33:58]:
So maybe you load your machine up with a bunch of optional software and you save that list somewhere and then you have to do a reinstall or you want to install somebody else wants to set up kind of like yours. You can just feed that list in and it'll just automatically download all those packages. So I thought that was kind of cool. And the instructions on how to install it are simple. It's just the normal install like any other package. But take a look and happy installing.
Ken McDonald [01:34:32]:
Cool. And when I get on Catch os I'll have to try it or Arch.
Rob Campbell [01:34:43]:
I think it's time you set up Arch from scratch, Ken.
Ken McDonald [01:34:48]:
After I finish getting Ubuntu 26 set up for everything, I run it, you know.
Jeff Massie [01:34:55]:
And I will say, you know, just because it's the world I'm in right now I've got a lot more Arch based tips and whatnot. But I will say this about Cashy. It's not. Well now it's been a few years since I, I tried Arch, but it was pretty, it was, it was a little rough around the edges and it was a reading reason they call it the Bleeding edge. You know, I, I got cut a few times, but I haven't really had that with Kashi. I mean it's been a lot smoother. It's kind of the Ubuntu of the Arch world. In my, in my limited experience,
Rob Campbell [01:35:34]:
Yeah, I wouldn't say I had much of a issue with Arch itself compared to
Ken McDonald [01:35:40]:
Cashy, but Should I try Arch before Linux from scratch?
Rob Campbell [01:35:47]:
It's definitely easier.
Jeff Massie [01:35:51]:
I, I only went as far as Gen 2. I never went did the Linux from scratch.
Rob Campbell [01:35:57]:
Oh, Gen 2. Oh yeah, it's about the same thing.
Jeff Massie [01:36:01]:
Yeah, a lot of, lot of steps and Harold Finch says Arch has been fine lately, so. And that could be true. It's. It's been a few years since I tried Arch.
Rob Campbell [01:36:12]:
Me too. Well, what does Ken have for his command line? Tip.
Ken McDonald [01:36:17]:
Well, this week I'm going to be introducing the command HTML Q. Now, it is inspired by the application that Jonathan loves to use, jq, written in Rust. HTML Q is a lightweight, flexible and powerful command line HTML processor. You can use it to extract and filter data from HTML files using CSS selectors. And of course the first thing you want to do is find out what options you can use with it. The easiest way to do that is for those of y' all listening. I'm at my command line and I've got HTML Q space dash H and that gives me information about the version, the creator of the app utility. And it basically says run CSS selectors on HTML.
Ken McDonald [01:37:17]:
You've got flags or options that you can use and then the CSS selector that you want to try out. Let's say, for example, and Jonathan, you're going to hate the way I'm doing this because I am using Curl and this is one of the few times where you probably would be safe using curl. But I'm going to use curl to read the website, in this case rust-lang.org and I'm just going to pipe it straight through and that way you can see the HTML file in all its glory on your command line. Now that's a lot there to see. So let's cut that down by using the CSS selector id. Get hashtag git-help and you'll see it just cuts it down to where that's using the id, get help, which for those of y' all listening is in the line that's part of the division class, has the id, and then it start, goes from there until the end of that division and includes anything that's in that division. Now, another option that you can use is dash dash attribute
Rob Campbell [01:39:00]:
and
Ken McDonald [01:39:02]:
in this case I'm using the attribute href a. And if any of y' all have ever written any HTML code, you know that you use the A with the, the HTML reference to whatever you're wanting to do. And basically this comes up and gives you a breakdown of what the references in the HTML file that you're looking
Rob Campbell [01:39:32]:
at are basically all the links on the page.
Ken McDonald [01:39:37]:
Right. But you can also use it. Now I've got a link in the show notes to the GitHub page which gives you details both about how you can install it. You can. I installed it on Ubuntu 25.10 as a snap though. You can, if you've got Cargo installed, install it that way. I thought about switching to Cargo after installing Snap and the Snap didn't clean up everything. I still had the snap slash, bin/HTML or lq file was pointer was still
Jeff Massie [01:40:30]:
there, but is there a purge command on that? Because kind of sometimes when you remove packages there's a remove, but it keeps some of the config files. But you need to do a purge to just like wipe everything. There's like two levels itself.
Ken McDonald [01:40:48]:
Yeah, I don't remember off the top of my head and just right before the show. So I just went with the snap.
Rob Campbell [01:40:56]:
Seems odd being containerized that something else would be left behind but. Or somewhat containerized, I guess. Sandbox is more correct but interesting tool. Okay. I wasn't quite sure what the use cases would be until Briggs in the chat pointed out it's a link harvester.
Ken McDonald [01:41:19]:
That's one way it can also be used to harvest information from a page. You could save it to just remove the main topic and save it into a file.
Rob Campbell [01:41:31]:
Yeah, you could probably go on different attributes or different kind of queries there. So basically querying the HTML. Yep.
Jeff Massie [01:41:44]:
And the network is global. So it's an international link harvester. It's a global harvester.
Ken McDonald [01:41:54]:
Never mind global harvester.
Jeff Massie [01:41:57]:
My farm background is showing international.
Rob Campbell [01:42:01]:
The brand. International.
Jeff Massie [01:42:03]:
Yes, international.
Ken McDonald [01:42:04]:
But you could also tell it. It's got a option that allow you to say. To remove nodes that you don't want to have it bring up. Like say you've got an image node.
Jonathan Bennett [01:42:21]:
Can you guys hear me now?
Jeff Massie [01:42:24]:
Yes, we can.
Jonathan Bennett [01:42:25]:
Anything for me? Yes. All right, good deal. I apparently was muted there for a second. I do have one quick command line tip that I want to bring and it is DuckDB. This was something else from the Ubuntu summit. And I've got the link off to. Actually the talk that was given. The first third of that talk was about using DuckDB as a command line tool.
Jonathan Bennett [01:42:45]:
Something I really hadn't thought about before. But you can import things whether they be tab separated values, comma separated values. I asked him after the talk and he said, yeah, we could do like JQ can. We can take straight off a JSON probably you can do YAML, all kinds of stuff. You can pull those data straight into this sort of running in memory copy of DuckDB. You could do joins and selects, pivots, all kinds of fun stuff with that data and then spit it out. And he had one slide in particular that was really pretty impressive. It was like he had these two files that he was joining and then sorting and throwing on screen.
Jonathan Bennett [01:43:24]:
He's like, here's what the one liner would be. And it had in it an echo and a join and two tails and a sort and an awk and another sort. It was just a very long ugly string of the one liner. He showed us how to do it with DuckDB on the command line. It was quite nicely formatted and you could tell what it was doing. So I had never really thought about using a SQL engine as a command line tool, but he showed some pretty neat ideas of what you could do with it. That one is mine. Go check out the link.
Jonathan Bennett [01:43:54]:
What's the first third of that talk? And he'll give you all the details on it. It's pretty cool.
Ken McDonald [01:44:01]:
Probably handy for just using it to do a quick glance at my PLEX server database.
Jonathan Bennett [01:44:07]:
Yeah, you can do that with it too. Let's give each of the guys a quick chance to plug whatever they want to. Rob gets to go pre first and which.
Rob Campbell [01:44:18]:
All right, so I just have my normal plug of the week to. If you want more of me, which I know you do, you just got. Come find my website, Robert P. Campbell.com which I plugged into Kean earlier. Robert P. Campbell.com and on that page you can find links to my LinkedIn Twitter Blue Sky Mastodon. And if you really like what I've been doing, you can donate a coffee to be here on this little coffee cup or donate to the other other folks on the team here and just make sure to put in the comments who it is for and I will make sure to get to them.
Jeff Massie [01:45:03]:
All right, if you want to find me, you can find me probably on LinkedIn easiest ways find Rob and then you'll find me. But if you do, just try to friend me on LinkedIn. Make sure you mention something about the untitled Linux show because I get hammered with spammers and bots all the time. So if you do, if you don't mention that, I'll assume it's spam, so just mention it. The only other thing, and this seems very apropos today for Poetry Corner. Stay the patient. Course of little worth is your ire. The network is down Have a great week, everybody.
Ken McDonald [01:45:45]:
And I just wanted to let you know that in the show notes, I've got links to articles by Bobby Borisov and Michael Arabell about the wine 11.10 getting released and some of the improvements that they've. You'll see with it.
Jonathan Bennett [01:46:08]:
All right, very cool. Thank you guys for being here. Thank you for covering for the majority of the show when I was making my way through security and waiting on my bags and all of that good stuff. I very much appreciate it. Thank you all. If you want to find more of me, you can go check out the Ubuntu Summit that we just finished. I had the first talk on the second day about Meshtastic. And of course there's over at Hackaday, there's Floss Weekly, which we have taken over a month off unintentionally, and I'll be traveling this Tuesday.
Jonathan Bennett [01:46:34]:
So no show then. But next week the schedule is starting to fill back up. We've got folks from Embedded World. I got a bunch of business cards at the Ubuntu Summit and so we'll have a lot of them on as well. So watch for that. We sure appreciate it. Appreciate everybody that's here listening to us that joined us live five those that get us on the download. Whether you watch or listen, we sure appreciate you.
Jonathan Bennett [01:46:56]:
We'll be back on the Untitled Linux show next week. We'll see you then.
