LINUX Unplugged

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426: This Old Linux PC Oct 05, 2021

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It's the worst time ever to upgrade or buy a new PC, so we cover our favorite tips for getting the most out of your current hardware. Then we pit a 2014 desktop against a 2021 laptop and find out if our old clunker can beat the Thinkpad.

Special Guests: Alan Pope, Christian F.K. Schaller, Jack Aboutboul, and Martin Wimpress.

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A Cloud Guru: By the end of this course, you will feel comfortable working with a large variety of networking tools and configurations to manage complex Linux networking implementations.

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It Seems Pop OS Linux Will Soon be Available on Raspberry Pi and Other ARM Devices — System76’s Principal Engineer and maintainer of Pop!_OS, Jeremy Soller shared a teaser photo on Twitter recently.
PipeWire and fixing the Linux Video Capture stack — With PipeWire having stabilized a lot for audio now we feel the time has come to go back to the video side of PipeWire and work to improve the state-of-art for video capture handling under Linux.
PipeWire
Linux Action News 209 — Why Linus believes keeping Linux fun is critical, the massive investment Fedora is about to make in video, and why we suspect Cloudflare's R2 service will make Amazon squirm.
AlmaLinux OS Foundation Membership Opens to the Public — An individual can qualify for membership as anyone who uses AlmaLinux OS, contributes to AlmaLinux OS, provides services to the AlmaLinux OS community or otherwise supports the AlmaLinux OS. All past and present contributors or mirror maintainers would qualify as Contributor members.
What AlmaLinux Foundation Membership Means for You - AlmaLinux OS Blog — We all own AlmaLinux now and no one can change that. Forever. Not CloudLinux, not any other corporation or anyone else. Our fate and future are in the hands of every member and is ours alone to control. We're no longer bound by one person, group or entity. It can not be bought nor sold, nor transferred or fought about.
Unofficial user repositories/Repo-ck - ArchWiki
tubearchivist has a docker-compose.yml
Which “server” distro should we go with next? | StrawPoll.com
Pick: Helvum — Helvum is a GTK-based patchbay for pipewire, inspired by the JACK tool catia.
Pick: tubesync — Syncs YouTube channels and playlists to a locally hosted media server.

425: Sad Server Stories Sep 28, 2021

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Sometimes things go wrong; this week, we admit we've got a problem.

Plus new details about the Steam Deck everyone has missed, and an old friend stops by the show with an update.

Special Guest: Danielle Foré.

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Amazon’s Astro home robot is like having Alexa on wheels — Amazon claims the Astro can do a wide variety of things you might want from a home robot. It can map out your floor plan and obey commands to go to a specific room. It can recognize faces and deliver items to a specific person.
“Intel Software Defined Silicon” Coming To Linux For Activating Extra Licensed Hardware Features — The Intel Software Defined Silicon (SDSi) driver is for supporting the "post-manufacturing mechanism for activating additional silicon features."
One of the Steam Deck’s biggest hurdles just disappeared: EAC has come to Linux and BattlEye is inbound — While developers would still need to patch their games, this immediately means some of the most popular games on Steam are now theoretically within reach, including Apex Legends, Dead by Daylight, and War Thunder, which are all among the top 25 games on Steam.
Syscall User Dispatch — The Linux Kernel documentation — Compatibility layers like Wine need a way to efficiently emulate system calls of only a part of their process - the part that has the incompatible code - while being able to execute native syscalls without a high performance penalty on the native part of the process. Syscall User Dispatch brings the filtering of the syscall dispatcher address back to userspace.
Steam Deck :: FAQ
Poll: Which “server” distro should we go with next? — So it's time to replace our garage server... We've been running Arch, and so far it's worked mostly great. Should we keep pushing our luck, or try something new?
PowerEdge R820 Rack Server Details
PhoneTrack - Nextcloud Apps — PhoneTrack is a Nextcloud application to track and store mobile device's locations.
Pick: tubearchivist — Your self-hosted YouTube media server.

424: Space for Theming Sep 21, 2021

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A serious problem is brewing in Desktop Linux that hasn't impacted end users yet, but will soon. We break down why distribution makers are getting upset and explain what's next.

Plus, an update on Matrix and the recent upgrades we made to our server.

Special Guests: Brent Gervais and Joshua Strobl.

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Building an Alternative Ecosystem | Joshua Strobl — While we have been consistent in this vision, though certainly not without flaws in its execution, we have seen a significant shift from GNOME’s development efforts and vision being focused from their desktop experience, to a heavier focus on mobile-to-desktop application scalability and a more touch-oriented, almost iPadOS like user experience that does not (in our opinion) provide the most optimized experience for laptop and desktop users.
The Truth they are not telling you about “Themes” – Rust in Peace — There seems to be some confusion when it comes to libadwaita’s stylesheet and coloring APIs.
Red Hat’s Upstream Contributions Are Making For A Great Fedora Workstation 35 - Phoronix — Fedora Workstation 35 will hopefully be out at the end of October (currently the beta is running behind schedule) and when it does ship it's once again at the bleeding-edge of Linux features.
GNOME 41 has new multitasking settings!
SeaGL is coming up soon, and is virtual this year — November 5th & 6th, 2021
This Week in Matrix
Spaces: The next frontier — Using Spaces and Subspaces to build hierarchies effectively turns Matrix into a global decentralised filesystem for conversations and other real-time data!
toger5/TheBoard — A collaborative Whiteboard powered by the [matrix] protocol and infrastucture.
Matrix Live
Compressing Synapse database | Levans’ workshop — Anyone running a federating instance of the Matrix homeserver Synapse will likely have seen this: synapse is database-hungry. It tends to take a lot of space. In this post, I'm documenting how I shrunk my homeserver database from 100GB to a little under 8GB, during a long maintenance cleanup.
Pick: Wayfire — Wayfire is a wayland compositor based on wlroots. It aims to create a customizable, extendable and lightweight environment without sacrificing its appearance.
Garuda Wayfire Download

423: What Makes a Linux User? Sep 14, 2021

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Why it might be time to re-think who is and who is not a Linux user, plus we do a reality check on the state of Linux phones.

Special Guest: Brent Gervais.

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Email from Purism — As previously announced, we will be increasing prices for all new orders of the Librem 5 in stages (the phone will be priced at $1199 from all orders received on or after Nov 1st, 2021 and we expect this price to go upward to $1299 in March 2022) as component prices change and as we deliver greater quantities of product.
Linux Phones | Madaidan’s Insecurities — Linux phones lack any significant security model and the points from the Linux article apply to Linux phones fully. There is not yet a single Linux phone with a sane security model.
Linux kernel needs more phones and tablets, says developer — "Especially for guys even running upstream kernel on RPI CM4 like me, more ARM devices with upstream kernel support will just be more happiness. Not to mention this also means super long time support, way longer than the lifespan of those devices."
Steam Deck dev-kits are on the move Valve say, as some already have it — "All packaged up and ready for devs! This is one of the limited batches of Steam Deck dev-kits heading out today for partners to test their games."
POKE 756,224 on Twitter — @ChrisLAS I admire your quest to get Linux running on your Thinkpad with the same battery life and perf you get on Windows. I've gotta admit, I've given up and just run Windows on mine, and the ugly truth is that Windows 11 is, for my needs anyway, really nice!
Pick: Flatseal — Flatseal is a graphical utility to review and modify permissions from your Flatpak applications.

422: The Fun Distro Sep 07, 2021

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We try out what might be the most fun Linux distribution around. It started as a laugh, but now we’re in love.

Plus, the reunion road trip hits a bump, some community news, feedback, picks, and more.

Special Guest: Brent Gervais.

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The Light Phone — The Light Phone II is a premium, minimal phone. It will never have social media, clickbait news, email, an internet browser, or any other anxiety-inducing infinite feed.
Ingenuity Is So Good, NASA’s Mars Helicopter Mission Just Got an Exciting Update — Given its stunning and unexpected success, NASA has extended Ingenuity's mission indefinitely.
KDE’s Plasma Wayland Session Is “Finally Reaching Stability” Following Many Fixes — "Gazillions of bugfixes...Including many for the Plasma Wayland session! It’s finally reaching stability. I know it’s taken a while, but I think we’re very nearly there!"
This week in KDE: gazillions of bugfixes
Nftables reaches 1.0 — The release of nftables 1.0.0 can be seen as a signal that it is time for the laggards to get more serious about making the switch. While it is hard to imagine iptables support being removed anytime soon, it's rather easier to foresee that enthusiasm for maintaining it will continue to wane. It only took 13 years, but this transition finally appears to be heading into its final stage.
nftables wiki
Garuda Linux — Garuda Linux is a rolling release distro based on Arch Linux, which ensures always getting the latest software updates.
Garuda Whoogle
Garuda Startpage
Stickers | Jupiter Broadcasting Garage Sale
Pick: yt-dlp — A youtube-dl fork with additional features and fixes.
Pick: ytmdl — A simple app to get songs from YouTube in mp3 format with artist name, album name etc from sources like iTunes, Spotify, LastFM, Deezer, Gaana etc.

421: Server Savior Squad Aug 31, 2021

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A surprise server outage at the studio requires we jump into action with a few last-minute solutions and deploy one of our favorite open-source tools.

Plus some community news, handy picks, emails, and more. It's a special edition of the Unplugged show.

Special Guest: Brent Gervais.

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SCO v. IBM settlement deal is done — Documents filed in the Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware last week suggest a settlement payment of just $14.25 million will see the matter closed.
ChrisLAS on Twitter — "My spot to record in Arizona today."
Ventoy Adds a Web GUI — Ventoy now ships with a web-based graphical user interface since version 1.0.36.
Ventoy — Ventoy is an open source tool to create bootable USB drive for ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI files.
“Apps For GNOME” Launches To Highlight GNOME Apps — There hasn't been a comprehensive, modern, user-friendly web-site for outlining all of the GNOME apps and inviting participation until now with this Apps for GNOME.
Apps for GNOME — Discover the best Apps for GNOME.
nebula — A scalable overlay networking tool with a focus on performance, simplicity and security.
TheOrangeOne's Blog — Nebula mesh network - an introduction.
Jon the Nice Guy's Blog — Nebula Offline Certificate Management with a Raspberry Pi using Bash.
Nebula-Cert-Maker — A script that allows you to create new host certificates and keys.
Gardiner Bryant on YouTube — I wasn't prepared for how much growth System76 has experienced in the year and a half since my last visit.
Stickers | Jupiter Broadcasting Garage Sale
Pick: psst — Fast and multi-platform Spotify client with native GUI.

420: Real People Are Out There Aug 24, 2021

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We share some stories from our Denver meetup, the strange reason we found ourselves at a golf course, and some news you should know.

Special Guest: Brent Gervais.

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Brent Gervais on Twitter
Stickers | Jupiter Broadcasting Garage Sale
JB Telegram
Razer bug lets you become a Windows 10 admin by plugging in a mouse
jonhat on Twitter — Need local admin and have physical access? Plug a Razer mouse (or the dongle), windows Update will download and execute RazerInstaller as SYSTEM, then abuse elevated Explorer to open Powershell with Shift+Right click.
Join us for dinner 4:30 local time at TheViewHouse in Colorado Springs
Btrfs Set To Land Support For IDMAPPED Mounts In Linux 5.15 — Back when IDMAPPED mounts functionality was added to the Linux kernel, the initial implementation came for FAT and EXT4. XFS support has also been in the works while now for Linux 5.15 the Btrfs support appears ready.
IDMAPPED Mounts Aim For Linux 5.12 - Many New Use-Cases From Containers To Systemd-Homed — Idmapped mounts make it possible to easily share files between multiple users or multiple machines especially in complex scenarios. For example, idmapped mounts will be used in the implementation of portable home directories in systemd-homed.service(8) where they allow users to move their home directory to an external storage device and use it on multiple computers where they are assigned different uids and gids.
FOSDEM 2021 - Idmapped Mounts
brauner/mount-idmapped — Helper utility to use IDMAPPED mounts until upstream support exists.
Ubuntu 21.10 Systemd To Finally Ship With Cgroup v2 By Default — Ubuntu has been sticking to the legacy cgroup v1 hierarchy because their prized Snap support hasn't supported Cgroup v2. Upstream Snap still doesn't have the support yet but there are patches pending that are still expected to be merged this cycle.
Fedora 35 To Support Restarting User Services On Package Upgrades — What this ultimately means is that user services like PipeWire can seamlessly restart when upgrading them via Fedora RPM updates rather than needing to manually do so or restarting the system for the upgrade to take effect.

419: What's Cookin' at System76 Aug 17, 2021

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Live from Denver, we chat with old friends and new. We get the inside scope on what has been going on at System76, and what's coming up next.

Plus we catch up with a few members of our crew, and find out what Linux tech they're loving these days.

Special Guests: Aaron Honeycutt, Alex Kretzschmar, Brent Gervais, Carl Richell, Cassidy James Blaede, chzbacon, and Ian Santopietro.

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Gadgetbridge for android — Gadgetbridge is an Android (4.4+) application which will allow you to use your Pebble, Mi Band, Amazfit Bip and HPlus device (and more) without the vendor's closed source application and without the need to create an account and transmit any of your data to the vendor's servers.
tldr: Collaborative cheatsheets for console commands — The tldr-pages project is a collection of community-maintained help pages for command-line tools, that aims to be a simpler, more approachable complement to traditional man pages.
Energy Management in Home Assistant — Today’s release of Home Assistant Core 2021.8 contains a new energy dashboard. The goal is to make it super easy for users to get insight into their energy usage.
Death of man pages? — "I'm seeing a sad pattern lately. Software for Linux is being distributed for Linux as containers such as flatpaks, appimages, etc. or as straight binaries but the documentation that come with these formats in very limited or non-existent. I've also not seen any applications distributed this way contain man pages."
Jupiter Broadcasting Garage Sale Stickers

418: What's up with WireGuard Aug 10, 2021

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Big things are happening in the world of WireGuard, Jim Salter joins to catch us up.

Plus we chat with Daniel Foré and Cassidy James Blaede about the just released elementary OS 6.

Special Guests: Brent Gervais, Cassidy James Blaede, Danielle Foré, and Jim Salter.

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Denver Meetup
Jupiter Garage Stickers
JB Telegram Group
Principal Software Engineer in Redmond, Washington, United States
elementary OS 6 Odin Available Now — It’s been a long road to elementary OS 6 but it’s finally here. elementary OS 6 Odin is available to download now. And it’s the biggest update to the platform yet!
Valve working with AMD to support Windows 11 on Steam Deck — “There’s work looking at TPM just now. We’ve focused so much on Windows 10, so far, that we haven’t really gotten that far into it. Our expectation is that we can meet that.”
Valve dumped Debian Linux for Arch Linux with SteamOS 3 because surprise - faster updates — "We were making a bunch of updates and changes to specifically make sure that things work well for Steam deck, and Arch just ended up being a better choice for them."
Web UIs for WireGuard That Make Configuration Easier
wireguard-manager — wireguard-manager enables you to build your own vpn under a minute.
easy-wg-quick — Creates Wireguard configuration for hub and peers with ease.
wg-manage — An awesome command-line tool to manage Wireguard configurations.
dsnet — Simple command to manage a centralised wireguard VPN. Think wg-quick but quicker: key generation + address allocation.
dsnet-gui — A simple gui for dsnet.
subspace — A simple WireGuard VPN server GUI.
subspacecommunity/subspace — A fork of the simple WireGuard VPN server GUI community maintained.
wg-ui — WireGuard Web UI for self-serve client configurations, with optional auth.
wireguard-ui — Wireguard web interface.
wg-easy — The easiest way to run WireGuard VPN + Web-based Admin UI.
drago — Securely connect anything with WireGuard® and manage all your networks from a single place.
WireGuard Home Assistant Community Add-on — WireGuard is pretty simple, however, can be quite complex for user that isn't familiar with all terminology used. The add-on takes care of a lot of things for you (if you want).
autowire — Automatically configure Wireguard interfaces in distributed system. It supports Consul as backend.
wiresteward — Wireguard peer manager with OAuth2.
wireguard-p2p — A tool for setting up WireGuard connections from peer to peer.
wesher — Wireguard overlay mesh network manager.
netmaker — Netmaker is a platform for creating and managing fast, secure, and dynamic virtual overlay networks using WireGuard.
wiretrustee — Connect your devices into a single secure private WireGuard®-based mesh network.
headscale — An open source, self-hosted implementation of the Tailscale control server.
innernet — A private network system that uses WireGuard under the hood.
Pro Custodibus — Pro Custodibus is a SaaS with a web GUI that makes it easy to add users and devices to WireGuard VPNs, manage their configuration, and monitor their usage.
New WireGuardNT shatters throughput ceilings on Windows — The WireGuard VPN project announced a major milestone for its Windows users today—an all-new, kernel-mode implementation of the VPN protocol called WireGuardNT. The new implementation allows for massively improved throughput on 10Gbps LAN connections—and on many WI-Fi connections, as well.
2.5 Admins
JingPad A1 (DVT) review, part 1
PIck: ethr — Ethr is a Comprehensive Network Measurement Tool for TCP, UDP & ICMP.

417: Run Every Distro At Once Aug 03, 2021

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Yabba Dabba Distro! Run every major distribution on one native host. How we hijacked a Fedora install and turned it into the ultimate meta Linux box.

Plus Valve and AMD team up to improve Linux performance and the duct-tape solution holding our server together.

Special Guests: Brent Gervais and paradigm.

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Jupiter Broadcasting Garage Sale Stickers
Salt Lake City Meetup
Denver Meetup Meetup
AMD + Valve Working On New Linux CPU Performance Scaling Design — Along with other optimizations to benefit the Steam Deck, AMD and Valve have been jointly working on CPU frequency/power scaling improvements to enhance the Steam Play gaming experience on modern AMD platforms running Linux.
Linux has finally hit that almost mythical 1% user share on Steam again — If we take how many monthly active users Steam has which Valve reported at over 120 million at the start of this year, that would give us an estimated 1,204,000 monthly active Linux users on Steam.
Watch Ingenuity explore intriguing Raised Ridges in new video
Chris Hijacks Fedora 34 (Image Gallery)
Bedrock Linux — Bedrock Linux is a meta Linux distribution which allows users to mix-and-match components from other, typically incompatible distributions. Bedrock integrates these components into one largely cohesive system.
Bedrock Linux: Frequently Asked Questions
Linux Action Show 316 — Introducing Bedrock Linux
Bedrock Linux presentation at Ohio Linuxfest 2012
Chris Fisher on Twitter — I joined the @latenightlinux boys to cover my @syncthing setup that just hit the two-year mark, and we chat a little @teamsilverblue, the problem of OSS grifting, and more.
JB Telegram
JB Mumble
Pick: imgdupes — Find and delete near-duplicate images based on a perceptual hash.

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