LINUX Unplugged

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466: The Night of a Thousand Errors Jul 10, 2022

Show notes

We were fixing servers all night, but at least we have a great story. A special guest joins us to help make a big show announcement.

Special Guest: Tim Canham.

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Systemd Creator Lands At Microsoft
Brunch with Brent: Quentin Stafford-Fraser
Brunch With Brent: Tim Canham — Brent sits down with Tim Canham, Senior Software Engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. We explore topics including the hardware and software powering NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter; JPL's switch from Solaris to Linux; the open source projects, tools, and philosophy at JPL, ...and more.
JPL Free Public Tours
West Coast Crew Matrix Room
Jupiter.party - The JB Network Membership
ptpython — A better Python REPL.
IPython — A powerful interactive shell.
bpython
Jupyter Notebooks
Nextjournal
Joe’s minimal implementation of Git ~300 LOC
Podcasting 2.0 Apps
Pick: dua-cli — View disk space usage and delete unwanted data, fast.
dust — A more intuitive version of du in rust.
parallel-disk-usage — Highly parallelized, blazing fast directory tree analyzer.
dirstat-rs — (fastest?) disk usage cli, similar to windirstat.
dutree — a tool to analyze file system usage written in Rust.
F’ — A Flight Software and Embedded Systems Framework.
quickemu
Play webtorrent’s with mpv

465: Too Nixy for My Shirt Jul 03, 2022

Show notes

The one shared secret behind some of the world's most powerful open-source projects.

Brent's Node : 03cf7e9b79a3230749db642ad690889065ec35b9ded184266d4fce424ab75470fc

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Git from the inside out — The essay focuses on the graph structure that underpins Git and the way the properties of this graph dictate Git’s behavior.
gitk — The Git repository browser
ungit — The easiest way to use git. On any platform. Anywhere.
Trustix — Distributed trust and reproducibility tracking for binary caches
Kexec and Kdump on Raspberry Pi
Install NixOS on Oracle Cloud
Kexec and Kdump on arm64
An update to Raspberry Pi OS Bullseye — So with this latest release, the default “pi” user is being removed, and instead you will create a user the first time you boot a newly-flashed Raspberry Pi OS image.
Build a Raspberry Pi Linux System the Hard Way — The instructions below will explain how to build a Linux environment for a Raspberry Pi 3B from scratch, focusing on extreme minimalism. I will build most components from source code and use BusyBox as the only user application on the target.
NixOS Wiki: NixOS on ARM/Raspberry Pi 4
Installing NixOS on a Raspberry Pi
NixOS on ARM/Raspberry Pi
nixos-pi — How to install NixOS on raspberry PI
Generating Raspberry Pi Images with NixOS
NixOS on a Raspberry Pi: creating a custom SD image with OpenSSH out of the box
nixos-docker-sd-image-builder — Build custom SD images of NixOS for your Raspberry Pi (or any other supported AArch64 device) in 5-20 minutes.
NixOS + Raspi4
Installing NixOS on the Raspberry Pi 4
How to Setup NixOS on a Raspberry Pi
NixOS on Raspberry Pi 4
Kernel Support for miscellaneous Binary Formats (binfmt_misc) — The Linux Kernel documentation
Cross-compiling the Raspberry Pi OS Linux kernel on macOS | Jeff Geerling
NixOS on ARM
Cross Compiling - NixOS Wiki
ARMing Yourself - Working with ARM on x86_64
Debian Wiki: qemu-user-static
ARM64/QEMU - Ubuntu Wiki
Emulating a Raspberry Pi with QEMU
Emulating ARM on Debian/Ubuntu
Raspberry Pi Documentation - Remote Access
Emulating ARM with QEMU on Debian/Ubuntu
Using QEMU to build arm64 experimental environment
How to set up an ARM64 playground on Ubuntu 18.04
Emulating ARM with QEMU on Debian/Ubuntu
NixOS — tmpfs as root
Erase your darlings — immutable infrastructure for mutable systems
Umbrel — A personal server OS for self-hosting
Umbrel Troubleshooting Guide
JB London Meetup — August 5th 6pm, Jubilee Park & Garden
Home Manager Manual — This manual will eventually describe how to install, use, and extend Home Manager.
Tutorial: Getting started with Home Manager for Nix
Merkle Tree
Git Book - Git Internals
Commits are snapshots, not diffs - The GitHub Blog — I believe that Git becomes understandable if we peel back the curtain and look at how Git stores your repository data. After we investigate this model, we’ll explore how this new perspective helps us understand commands like git cherry-pick and git rebase.
Fear Not The SHA! - Git Internals - YouTube
Git Internals by John Britton of GitHub - CS50 Tech Talk - YouTube
Merkle tree in Bitcoin - BitcoinWiki
Merkle Tree with real world examples - YouTube
What is the merkle tree in Bitcoin? - YouTube
OpenMPTCProuter — Internet connection bonding
Podverse — NEW: Embed a Podverse player on your website! 🥳
Nebula v1.6.0 — Experimental: nebula clients can be configured to act as relays for other nebula clients. Primarily useful when stubborn NATs make a direct tunnel impossible.

464: Git Happens Jun 26, 2022

Show notes

We're going back in time to witness the early days of a critical tool to build Linux, then jump forward 15 years and join our buddy Brent on his journey to learn that very tooling.

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WSL 2 distros are now supported on Windows Server
Ten SpaceX Starlink Updates
Dish calls out Elon Musk for tweets about Starlink and RVs, planes
Dish begs FCC to deactivate Starlink setups used in moving vehicles
SpaceX: Starlink Risks Becoming ‘Unusable’ If Dish Gets 12GHz Spectrum
JB London Meetup - Aug 5 “6pm London time”
London Colony Meetup - Matrix chat room
Linode Guides — Migrate a PostgreSQL Database to a Managed Database
Tech Talk: 2007 Linus Torvalds on git
Oh My Git! — An open source game about learning Git!
Getting started with Git: Terminology 101
Tech With Tim - Git And GitHub in ~30 Minutes
JB GitHub - Website Rebuild Ideas & Explorations · Discussion #8
Git Tutorial for Beginners - Git & GitHub Fundamentals In Depth
Cleanup by Brent · Pull Request #29
GitKraken
awesome-git — A curated list of amazingly awesome Git tools, resources and shiny things.
ungit — The easiest way to use git. On any platform. Anywhere.
Hugo: The world’s fastest framework for building websites
Celebrating 15 years of Git — An interview with Git maintainer Junio Hamano
Brunch with Brent: Quentin Stafford-Fraser — Brent sits down with Dr Quentin Stafford-Fraser, computer scientist, serial-entrepreneur, inventor (perhaps) of the webcam, Augmented Reality Ph.D. who ran the very first web server at the University of Cambridge, among much more.
Office Hours 6: Peer to Peer Future — Interview with Mitch Downey, co-founder of Podverse.
Fountain 0.4.0 — Listen to Earn, Promotions & Paid Likes
gpodder.net — gpodder.net is a libre web service that allows you to manage your podcast subscriptions and discover new content. If you use multiple devices, you can synchronize subscriptions and your listening progress.
Source for gpodder.net
GPodder Sync in the Nextcloud App Store
Podverse: Podcasting 2.0 certified player for Android, F-Droid, iOS, and the web.
[Album] The New Deal
TinyPilotKVM: Control any computer remotely.

463: Humble Beginnings Jun 19, 2022

Show notes

One of the pioneers of the web, VNC, Webcams, and more joins us; plus we'll update you on a few projects we love.

Special Guest: Quentin Stafford-Fraser.

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Brunch with Brent: Quentin Stafford-Fraser - Jupiter Extras — Brent sits down with Dr Quentin Stafford-Fraser, computer scientist, serial-entrepreneur, inventor (perhaps) of the webcam, Augmented Reality Ph.D. who ran the very first web server at the University of Cambridge, among much more. We explore topics including computer science as an art-form, the origins of the Raspberry Pi and T9 predictive text, philosophies around innovation and invention, challenging the patent system, and more.
JB London Meetup
DNS Toys — A DNS server that takes creative liberties with the DNS protocol to offer handy utilities and services that are easily accessible via the command line.
Mars helicopter needs patch to work around failed sensor — The patch inserts a small code snippet into the software running on Ingenuity's flight computer, intercepting incoming garbage packets from the inclinometer and injecting replacement packets constructed from IMU data.
Software upgrades help Mars helicopter keep flying
Umbrel 0.5 — Umbrel 0.5 brings the very first redesign of Umbrel’s UI since we launched. We went back to the drawing board to design a completely new homepage, a refreshed UI with beautifully crafted glass-like elements, a new dock-based layout, and the option to pick and choose from one of the 16 gorgeous, hand-curated wallpapers. And, of course, there’s a dark mode.
Dr Quentin Stafford-Fraser's Website — I’m a computer scientist, entrepreneur, part-time academic and full-time gadget enthusiast based in Cambridge, England.
Quentin Stafford-Fraser's Blog
Jellyfin 10.8.0 has been released!
Jellyfin Release v10.8.0 — After a rather long development cycle the Jellyfin team is proud to announce stable version 10.8! This release post will mostly cover the highlights with little prose, as there is so much to cover!
nix-bitcoin — A collection of Nix packages and NixOS modules for easily installing full-featured Bitcoin nodes with an emphasis on security.

462: One Cosmic Collaboration Jun 12, 2022

Show notes

From skeptic to buyer, why the HP Dev One is the best Linux laptop yet. This is the one review you don't want to miss.

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Starlink RV Mounting & Storage Options
HP Dev One — From preinstalled Linux Pop!_OS to a tuned Linux keyboard with a Super key, HP Dev One is designed with powerful features and tools to help you code your way.
AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U Processor
HP Dev One CPU Bench Benchmarks
Blender Test On HP DEV One Benchmarks
Podverse — Podcasting 2.0 certified player for Android, F-Droid, iOS, and the web. Share created clips, highlights, playlists, and chapters, sync your queue and more!
Office Hours 6 — Peer to Peer Future
Office Hours on Podverse
LINUX Unplugged on Podverse
Podverse on Twitter
Podverse on GitHub

461: Deep in the Tumbleweeds Jun 05, 2022

Show notes

Three tails of tech tribulations, and how Brent saved his openSUSE Tumbleweed box from the brink.

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Markuss Broks 🦆 on Twitter: "iPad Air 2 running Linux 5.18"
Konrad Dybcio on Twitter: "It’s spreading quickly 😎"
#46 Going Mobile · This Week in GNOME
JB’s London Meetup
Jupiter Tube
WWDC 2022 Live - JupiterTube
NixOS 22.05 released — NixOS is already known as the most up to date distribution and is the distribution with the most packages. This release saw 9345 new packages and 10666 updated packages. Removal of unmaintained packages is also important to keep the package set working and secure. This release removed 5874 packages that were available in 21.11.
Install and Configure NixOS on a Linode
NixOS On Linode.md — This tutorial is written for people who want to run NixOS on a Linode instance. The installation is pretty straightforward, but it involves some bootstrapping using Linode's tools.
Declarative Cloud Infrastructure with Terraform
LINUX Unplugged 432 - Three Tumbleweed Temptations
openSUSE Community Annual Survey Results
Premium Special To Celebrate Phoronix’s 18th Birthday — This Sunday, 5 June, marks the 18th birthday for Phoronix.com since I started this website to focus on Linux hardware reviews and performance testing. To mark the occasion, there will be a Phoronix Premium special if you wish to go ad-free on the site and enjoy multi-page articles on a single page while helping to hopefully ensure a successful 19th year for Phoronix.
Pick: stegosaurust — Steganography tool, written in rust.

460: CPU as a Service May 29, 2022

Show notes

A new Linux update allows Intel to control features in your CPU using hardware-level DRM.

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London Meetup — Sat, Aug 6, 2022, 2:00 PM GMT
Newest Version of Systemd Includes Experimental Feature for A/B-Style Updating — "Let's popularize image-based OSes," writes Lennart Poettering, "with modernized security properties built around immutability, SecureBoot, TPM2, adaptability, auto-updating, factory reset, uniformity — built from traditional distribution packages, but deployed via images."
Fitting Everything Together — In this blog story I hope to provide that from my personal perspective, i.e. explain how I personally would build an OS and where I personally think OS development with Linux should go.
systemd-sysupdate — This tool implements file, directory, or partition based update schemes, supporting multiple parallel installed versions of specific resources in an A/B (or even: A/B/C, A/B/C/D/, …) style. A/B updating means that when one version of a resource is currently being used, the next version can be downloaded, unpacked, and prepared in an entirely separate location, independently of the first, and — once complete — be activated, swapping the roles so that it becomes the used one and the previously used one becomes the one that is replaced by the next update, and so on.
Thoughts on software-defined silicon — The benefits to Intel are clear. The company can do price differentiation among its customers in an attempt to extract the maximum revenue from each while simultaneously reducing the number of different hardware products it must carry in its catalog. The revenue stream from a processor will not necessarily stop once the CPU is purchased, and might continue indefinitely. The benefit for customers is not quite so clear. In theory, customers with minimal needs can avoid paying for expensive features they don't use and can "upgrade" their hardware without downtime if their needs change.
platform/x86: Add Intel Software Defined Silicon driver — Intel Software Defined Silicon (SDSi) is a post manufacturing mechanism for activating additional silicon features. Features are enabled through a license activation process. The SDSi driver provides a per socket, sysfs attribute interface for applications to perform 3 main provisioning functions.
Boost without Switching Podcast Apps with Breez
New Podcast Apps
Pick: Mainline — A tool for installing the latest Linux kernels on Ubuntu-based distributions.

459: Better than Butter May 22, 2022

Show notes

We take a sneak peek at some future tech coming to Linux, and share details on HP's new laptop that runs POP!

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London Meetup — Alex from Self-Hosted will be in the UK in August and is proposing a meetup in London on August 6th at 2pm GMT (meetup.com is based off JBs Pacific Time).
HP Dev One — Get ready for a laptop that’s customized for the way you code. Featuring preinstalled Pop!_OS Linux and a tuned Linux keyboard with a Super key, HP Dev One was designed with developers in mind.
HP Preparing An AMD-Powered Linux Laptop Powered By Pop!_OS
HP teamed up with System76 for the HP Dev One laptop with Pop!_OS Linux
Bringing bcachefs to the mainline — Bcachefs is a longstanding out-of-tree filesystem that grew out of the bcache caching layer that has been in the kernel for nearly ten years. Based on a session led by Kent Overstreet at the 2022 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-management and BPF Summit (LSFMM), though, it would seem that bcachefs is likely to be heading upstream soon. He intends to start the process toward mainline inclusion over the next six months or so.
Bcachefs Principles of Operation
Tow-Boot — Tow-Boot a user-friendly, opinionated distribution of U-Boot, where there is as few differences in features possible between boards, and a "familiar" user interface for an early boot process tool.
OpenSats — Support contributors to Bitcoin and other free and open source projects.
Pick: Briar — Secure messaging, anywhere.

458: NVIDIA's New View May 15, 2022

Show notes

NVIDIA is open-sourcing their GPU drivers, but there are a few things you need to know. Plus, we get some exclusive insights into Tailscale from one of its co-founders.

Special Guests: Avery Pennarun and Christian F.K. Schaller.

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After losing contact with its helicopter, NASA put the entire Mars mission on hold — Mars is only going to get colder and darker for the next 10 weeks as winter deepens.
Why the open source driver release from NVIDIA is so important for Linux? — Today NVIDIA announced that they are releasing an open source kernel driver for their GPUs, so I want to share with you some background information and how I think this will impact Linux graphics and compute going forward.
NVIDIA Releases Open-Source GPU Kernel Modules — NVIDIA is now publishing Linux GPU kernel modules as open source with dual GPL/MIT license, starting with the R515 driver release.
Hector Martin on Twitter — So NVIDIA "released" their kernel driver as open source. By which they mean, they moved most of it to firmware and made the open source driver call into it. There are almost 900 functions implemented in the 34MB firmware, give or take, from what I can see. Broadcom vibes...
Longhorn on Twitter — Note that the 30MB+ firmware supports multiple GPU generations, and that’s an important factor. (If you see the elf sections, there’s ones for Turing, Ampere DC, Ampere customer and Gnext)
Linux Action News 240 — NVIDIA has announced its plans for an open-source GPU driver. Christian Schaller, the Director for Desktop, Graphics, Infotainment and more at Red Hat, gives us the inside scoop on this historic announcement.
Tailscale raises $100M… to fix the Internet — This is not our first rodeo. We don’t know where the economy or the market are going. We don’t want to be pressured into juicing growth numbers beyond where they belong. We don’t want to put revenue ahead of quality, because our stats say quality is where all our growth comes from.
sshuttle — where transparent proxy meets VPN meets ssh
Documentation · Tailscale — Welcome to the Tailscale documentation
Guides · Tailscale
Access a Pi-hole or Raspberry Pi from anywhere — One common use of a Raspberry Pi is to run a Pi-hole, a DNS-based ad blocking services. A typical setup is to have a Raspberry Pi in your house running Pi-hole, acting as the DNS server for your local Wi-Fi network.
Tailscale on NixOS: A New Minecraft Server in Ten Minutes — In this article I will show how to set up a brand new Minecraft server (exposed only over Tailscale) in ten minutes
Tailscale in LXC containers
Set up a dogcam with Tailscale, Raspberry Pi, and Motion
weron: Overlay networks based on WebRTC. — weron provides lean, fast & secure overlay networks based on WebRTC.
newpodcastapps.com
Podverse
Breez — Send a Boost without switching Podcast apps. All powered by Lightning Network.
Ansible Modules Bitwarden — Bitwarden integrations for Ansible

457: Automated Chaos May 08, 2022

Show notes

Each of us brings a secret topic to the show, and we discover a common theme about using the wrong tool for the right job.

Special Guest: Alex Kretzschmar.

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New NASA Black Hole Sonifications with a Remix — In some ways, this sonification is unlike any other done before because it revisits the actual sound waves discovered in data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. The popular misconception that there is no sound in space originates with the fact that most of space is essentially a vacuum, providing no medium for sound waves to propagate through. A galaxy cluster, on the other hand, has copious amounts of gas that envelop the hundreds or even thousands of galaxies within it, providing a medium for the sound waves to travel.
LXD vs Docker — System containers (as run by LXD) are similar to virtual or physical machines. They run a full operating system inside them, you can run any type of workload, and you manage them exactly as you would a virtual or a physical machine.
LXD 5.0 LTS is now available
LXD 5.1 has been released
pylxd — Python module for LXD
Manage LXD instances — Ansible Documentation
Try Infrastructure as Code eBook from Linode
Learning Ansible Basics - Red Hat — Ansible is an open source IT automation engine that automates provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, orchestration, and many other IT processes.
Installing Ansible on Ubuntu
Ansible 101 - Ansible for Beginners
Ansible 101 - Standards — This blog provides a list of the common standards or best practices to live by when writing Ansible code. This is an unofficial list of standards based on my personal experience with hundreds of customers and my own development practices I have used over the years.
Tips and tricks — Ansible Documentation
Jeff Gerrling - Ansible 101 Youtube Series — Ansible 101 is a live YouTube streaming video series that I started in March, 2020, to help people level-up their automation skills by learning Ansible during the global coronavirus pandemic. While everyone is isolated at home, this series brought people together to learn a valuable new skill.
Should we use NixOS as our Cloud and Local Server OS? | Poll Results
Pick: lyrebird — 🦜 Simple and powerful voice changer for Linux, written in GTK 3.
nix-autobahn — This simple shell script collection allows you to download ELF binaries and use them right away!
Mic92/nix-ld — Run unpatched dynamic binaries on NixOS.

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