LINUX Unplugged

Latest Episodes:

416: Server Meltdown Jul 27, 2021

Show notes

We try to pull off a show while recovering from an epic server crash. Then we build the ultimate remote Linux desktop—in the cloud!

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Linode Cloud Hosting: A special offer for all Linux Unplugged Podcast listeners and new Linode customers, visit linode.com/unplugged, and receive $100 towards your new account.
Entropy: 15% off your first project a mobile app, a web app, a Linux app, anything! Promo Code: LUP13
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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Live Starlink Satellite Map
Salt Lake City Meetup
Denver Meetup Meetup
Framework Laptop review: pick your ports — In other words, upgradability is the reason to buy the Framework laptop.
Latest Framework Laptop DIY Edition/Linux topics — Setup guides, advice, troubleshooting, and more, for those of us who use Linux-based Operating Systems on our Framework Laptops.
Which Linux distribution do you want to use on your Framework Laptop?
[Video] A COMPLETELY Upgradeable Laptop?
Framework: The Touchpad and Fingerprint Reader — If you’re a Linux user, we’ve got you covered too! Our firmware lead Kieran submitted a patch to libfprint, and support is making its way into various distributions to be able to work automatically.
FreeBSD Working On A New Installer, Updates To Their Linux Compatibility Layer — A variety of improvements to FreeBSD's Linux compatibility layer for running Linux binaries on FreeBSD.
Gaming sessions on Steam Deck are run via gamescope, a Wayland compositor — This also suggests that SteamOS 3.0 requires Vulkan, and specifically support for async compute.
Element raises $30M to boost Matrix — Element, the startup founded by the team who created Matrix, just raised $30M of Series B funding in order to further accelerate Matrix development and improve Element, the flagship Matrix app.
Webtop — Alpine and Ubuntu based containers containing full desktop environments in officially supported flavors accessible via any modern web browser.
LinuxServer.io: Meet Webtops A Linux Desktop Environment In Your Browser — A lot of different Docker GUI solutions exist today, but what we always found is they were just missing some common sense stuff.
Webtop - Running Linux Desktop inside a Container in the Browser
JingOS — Future Mobile OS based on Linux
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
PIck: docker-wine — Docker image that includes Wine and Winetricks for running Windows applications on Linux and macOS

415: Something Sinister Below Deck Jul 20, 2021

Show notes

Could the Steam Deck mean fewer native Linux games? We chat with prolific game developer Ethan Lee and get his perspective on the negative impacts of the Deck.

Plus, our thoughts on how Valve might successfully ship Arch to consumers, a batch of feedback, and more.

Special Guest: Ethan Lee.

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CBL-Mariner Stories
microsoft/CBL-Mariner — Linux OS for Azure 1P services and edge appliances
Linux Action News 186
Ethan Lee on Twitter — "If you have released a Linux version of your game on Steam and are directly approached by Valve about using Proton instead, please get in touch (DMs open). They’ve already done this a few times, but I would like to see how aggressive they’re planning to be going forward."
Ethan “flibitijibibo” Lee May Retire from Programming Due to Valve’s Proton
Destination Linux 235 — Valve’s Steam Deck & Right To Repair Goes Mainstream
Rocky and Gred Spin BS to avoid coming on LUP
I agree with Johnny Hughes - CentOS Project dev and Board Member - if Stream does not do the job - Alma seems like the way to go
Jupiter Broadcasting Meetup(s)
Salt Lake City Meetup
Denver Meetup
JB Telegram
Pick: Hotwire — Hotwire allows you to study network traffic of a few popular protocols in a simple way
Hotwire Screenshot
Pick: RustScan — 🤖 The Modern Port Scanner 🤖
RustScan Screenshot
“Head of Strategy” of Muse Group (Muse Score, Audacity, Ultimate Guitar) continues to threaten developer in public

414: Linux's Awkward News Phase Jul 13, 2021

Show notes

Have you noticed the Linux news has gotten a little weird? Michael Tunnell joins us to break down the changes we've observed over the last year.

Plus, we set up private and secure location tracking and tell you how and why.

Special Guest: Michael Tunnell.

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NASA is mapping out plans for bigger, more capable Mars helicopters — One concept is the Mars Science Helicopter, advocated as a way to greatly expand the exploration zone on Mars — including possible deep dives into Red Planet caves.
This Week in Linux - TuxDigital — This Week in Linux is a weekly news show that covers the latest news in the world of Linux. We cover a wide variety of topics from application / distro releases to Linux Gaming and even news about core system items like the Linux kernel itself.
Destination Linux Network — DLN is a media network powered by Linux & Open Source designed to bring passionate creators together to spread our love of open-source, technology, and Linux.
Salt Lake City Meetup
Denver Meetup Meetup
Colony Tracker . LIVE — Track the Colony and join us for Micro Meetups!
OwnTracks — OwnTracks allows you to keep track of your own location. You can build your private location diary or share it with your family and friends. OwnTracks is open-source and uses open protocols for communication so you can be sure your data stays secure and private.
What it does - OwnTracks Booklet
HTTP - OwnTracks Booklet
Example: OwnTracks recorder in a container on Fedora with Let’s Encrypt and nginx
Installing Owntracks recorder on FreeBSD – Dan Langille’s Other Diary
Rocky and Gred Spin BS to avoid coming on LUP
Current sitting CentOS Board Member Recomends People use AlmaLinux — Hey guys .. Igor and all .. I want to wish you all the very best. And for anyone out there who wants to move from CentOS Linux 8 to another downstream RHEL community build , this is the definitely the one I would recommend. I have known the Cloud Linux team for a while .. and I very much trust them.
IRC Transcript from LUP 413
Greg was too busy talking to the Reg to come on the show
Feedback: Michael Staggs on Twitter — @ChrisLAS You mentioned recommending Deepin to new users. I know in current political climate, China and security are hotbutton issues, but I don't feel we can give Deepin a pass on security. So bad that OpenSUSE audit team won't audit them anymore.
Portal:Deepin/Security Issues
Jupiter Broadcasting Meetup(s)
JB Telegram
JB Mumble

413: Community of Enterprise Linux Jul 06, 2021

Show notes

Linux server admins don't know where to turn next; how the cult of personality might be shaping Linux's most important market.

Special Guest: Jack Aboutboul.

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name cannot be blank on Twitter — "The Linux Foundation announced a game engine, the build instructions are only for Windows 🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️”
Linux Foundation to Form New Open 3D Foundation
IBM President and former Red Hat boss Jim Whitehurst quits — The CEO said Whitehurst had "played a pivotal role in the IBM and Red Hat integration" and was "instrumental in articulating IBM’s strategy" but alas "Jim has decided to step down".
(YouTube) What I learned from giving up everything I knew as a leader | Jim Whitehurst | TED Institute
Salt Lake City Meetup
Denver Meetup Meetup
Rocky Linux Community Update — After seven months of long, hard work, we are beyond excited to announce that Rocky Linux 8.4 has reached General Availability for x86_64 and aarch64!
SpecialInterestGroup/Hyperscale - CentOS Wiki — The Hyperscale SIG will focus on enabling CentOS Stream deployment on large-scale infrastructures and facilitating collaboration on packages and tooling.
Events/Dojo/May2021 - CentOS Wiki
dotnet/maui — .NET MAUI is the .NET Multi-platform App UI, a framework for building native device applications spanning mobile, tablet, and desktop.
Stack from Rocky Bows out of Responding

412: Going Deepin on Fuchsia Jun 29, 2021

Show notes

Is Fuchsia a risk to Linux? We try out a cutting-edge Fuchsia desktop and determine if it is a long-term threat to Linux.

Plus, have we all been missing the best new Linux distribution? We give this fresh distro a spin and report.

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Linux 5.13 Released With Apple M1 Bringup, Landlock, FreeSync HDMI + Much More — There are also new Linux 5.13 security features like the Landlock LSM, Clang CFI support, and optionally randomizing the kernel stack offset at each system call.
The 5.13 kernel has been released
PipeWire 0.3.31 Released — JACK has seen massive stability improvements. Locking and correctness wrt to callbacks and has been reworked. Also thread priorities have improved.
PipeWire Project on Twitter — Important change in PipeWire 0.3.31 is that we now have a database of weird Bluetooth hardware. This allows us to apply device specific tweaks to work around issues. This database is from Android and should let us support more devices seamlessly.
Real-time audio streaming with ROC
Deepin Linux 20.2.2 Introduces a Brand-New App Store, Secure Boot Support — With this release, fans of Deepin Linux can enjoy a brand-new App Store that supports installation of Android apps, offers a better app management with support for batch installation of applications, and has a fresh new design with simplified interaction.
deepin 20.2.2 – Deepin Technology Community
Deepin Screenshots Album
Salt Lake City Meetup
Denver Meetup Meetup
Jupiter Broadcasting Meetup(s)
JB Telegram
JB Mumble
dahliaOS — dahliaOS is a modern, secure, lightweight and responsive operating system, combining the best of GNU/Linux and Fuchsia OS.
dahliaOS Screenshots Album
Google is releasing Fuchsia OS, starting w/ 1st-gen Nest Hub
Here’s an easier way to try Fuchsia OS on your computer
Reddit: A Question About Zircon And Its Capabilities
A new version of Mixxx is out — Mixxx 2.3.0 comes with a new default skin: "LateNight" underwent a massive redesign and replaces "Deere" as default skin.
elementary EDW videos on YouTube

411: The Best of Both OSs Jun 22, 2021

Show notes

Is it possible to have Arch’s best feature on other Linux distros? We attempt it and report our findings. Plus our reaction to NVIDIA’s beta Wayland support–is this the milestone we’ve been waiting for?

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Support LINUX Unplugged

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Salt Lake City Meetup
Denver Meetup
Christian Schaller on Twitter — We been working closely with NVidia over the last year to prepare the ground for full NVidia driver Wayland support, including XWayland. Today NVidia released the first beta driver of that work.
Xwayland support in Fedora with the NVIDIA 470 series driver — Please help us test this support for hardware acceleration with the NVIDIA proprietary driver in Xwayland, and report issues for Xwayland in Fedora bugzilla.
NVIDIA DRIVERS Linux x64 (AMD64/EM64T) Display Driver BETA
Fedora Cloud Btrfs By Default - Fedora Project Wiki — For cloud installs of Fedora, we want to provide advanced file system features to users in a transparent fashion. Thus, we are changing the file system for the Cloud Edition to Btrfs so we can leverage its features and capabilities to improve the quality of experience for Cloud users.
Pagure Commit: Use Btrfs for Fedora Cloud Edition
Pacstall — The AUR for Ubuntu
pacstall on GitHub
pacstall-programs
Henryws on GitHub
makedeb — Create Debian archives from PKGBUILDs.
mpm — makedeb package manager
junest — The lightweight Arch Linux based distro that runs upon any Linux distros without root access.
x11docker — Run GUI applications and desktops in docker. Focus on security.
How to Run GUI Applications in a Docker Container
jessfraz/dockerfiles — Various Dockerfiles I use on the desktop and on servers.
Nix, the purely functional package manager
NixOS
pacapt — An ArchLinux’s pacman-like wrapper for many package managers.
Can I make use of other containers like debian or arch - Desktop / Silverblue - Fedora Discussion
Martin Pitt's Blog — Public lightweight sway developer desktop with OSTree and podman/toolbox.
Fedora 34 Toolbox Containerfile
Running Wine in Archlinux-based podman container

410: Ye Olde Linux Distro Jun 15, 2021

Show notes

We revisit the seminal distros that shaped Linux’s past. Find out if these classics still hold up.

Plus the outrageous bounty on a beloved Linux desktop app.

Special Guest: Gary Kramlich.

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Tim Berners-Lee, the World Wide Web’s inventor is selling its original code as an NFT — Comprising over 9.500 lines of code, the files contain the basis of the languages and protocols underpinning the internet as we know it: Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Universal Document Identified (URI).
Meetup: Salt Lake City — Saturday, August 7, 2021, 3:00 PM to 6:00 PM PDT.
Meetup: Denver — Friday, August 20, 2021, 5:00 PM to 8:00 PM PDT.
Jupiter Broadcasting Meetup Page
Pidgin: the universal chat client — Pidgin is a chat program which lets you log into accounts on multiple chat networks simultaneously. This means that you can be chatting with friends on XMPP and sitting in an IRC channel at the same time.
Pidgin contributors: grim — Long time contributor, author of Guifications, and a founding member of the plugin pack.
Zerodium on Twitter — We’re looking for #0day exploits affecting Pidgin on Windows and Linux. Bounty: $100,000.
ZERODIUM — Limited-Time Bug Bounties and Temporarily Increased Payouts
Linux 5.14 Mainline Should Work With The Raspberry Pi 400 — No kernel driver changes were needed since it's basically very close to the Raspberry Pi 4 but the updated DTS configuration is needed for the 1.8GHz clock rate, a different WiFi chip, and power off handling via GPIO.
XFS To Enjoy Big Scalability Boost With Linux 5.14 — The big numbers are seeing the transaction rate go up from around 700k to 1.7M commits per second and a reduction in flush operations by 2~x orders of magnitude less for metadata heavy workloads that don't enforce fsync.
Archive of old versions of Linux — Thanks to Mediactive Network for hosting this website.
Mandrake 10.1 Visual Tour
Xandros 3.0 Desktop Gallery
Red Hat 9’s Classic Look
Ubuntu 6.06 LTS — Ubuntu 6.06 LTS introduces functionality that simplifies common Linux server deployment processes. For system administrators setting up large numbers of web, mail and related servers, Ubuntu 6.06 LTS offers the fastest and most consistent path to deployment, combined with the availability of global commercial support where needed.
Damn Small Linux — Damn Small Linux is a very versatile 50MB mini desktop oriented Linux distribution.
BackTrack Linux — BackTrack was a Linux distribution that focused on security, based on the Knoppix Linux distribution aimed at digital forensics and penetration testing use.
TLP — Optimize Linux Laptop Battery Life
auto-cpufreq — Automatic CPU speed & power optimizer for Linux based on active monitoring of laptop's battery state, CPU usage, CPU temperature and system load. Ultimately allowing you to improve battery life without making any compromises.
Did you know that you can 100% legally get & run WordPerfect for free? — But there is a catch – of course: they're both very old and hard to run on a modern computer. I'm here to tell you how to get them and how to install and run them.

409: Launch Your Memories Into the Future Jun 08, 2021

Show notes

We discuss old and new ways to manage, organize, index, and search your photo collection. It's our favorite Google Photo's alternatives.

Plus Chris' hands-on review of System76's customizable Launch keyboard.

Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar and Brent Gervais.

Sponsored By:

Support LINUX Unplugged

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Google Photos is so 2020—welcome to the world of self-hosted photo management | Ars Technica — Alex's comprehensive write-up for Ars.
rclone Google Photos — The rclone backend for Google Photos is a specialized backend for transferring photos and videos to and from Google Photos.
Launch keyboard — The Launch Configurable Keyboard is engineered to be comfortable, fully customizable, and make your workflow more efficient.
Updated storage policy for Google Photos
Plans & Pricing - Google One
Install Google Photos Sync on Linux with a Snap
How To Backup Google Photos To Your Computer With gphotos-sync
Google Photos Sync — Google Photos Sync downloads your Google Photos to the local file system. It will backup all the photos the user uploaded to Google Photos, but also the album information and additional Google Photos 'Creations' (animations, panoramas, movies, effects and collages).
Sync Google Photos to your Linux Desktop
Photonix Photo Manager — Photonix is a photo management application that streamlines the process of storing, presenting and re-discovering photos.
Photonix Demo
LibrePhotos — A self-hosted open source photo management service.
PhotoStructure — Self-hosted, easy to install, and effortless to run. PhotoStructure is your cloud that runs on your computer. Your data stays yours.
Chevereto — Get your own turnkey image hosting system today. Start your own image sharing website with your own rules.
Lychee — Self-hosted photo-management done right.
PhotoPrism — PhotoPrism is a privately hosted app for browsing, organizing, and sharing your photo collection. It makes use of the latest technologies to tag and find pictures automatically without getting in your way.
Piwigo — Piwigo is open source photo gallery software for the web. Designed for organisations, teams and individuals.
FileRun File Manager — Self-Hosted File Sync and Sharing.
exiftool - bulk join json with jpg from Google Takeout
How To Correctly Export And Migrate Away From Google Photos
FakeSlice — Discharge USB-C Power Banks before internal battery on newer ThinkPads.
FOSS Talk Live — FOSS Talk Live 2021 is happening on 12th June at 7pm UK time!
JB Telegram
The Seasoned Tux Tee is on Sale

408: Linux Road Warrior Jun 01, 2021

Show notes

We’re joined by a special guest who’s built his very own Linux battle bus. We get the technical details on how Linux is at the core of this open road machine.

Special Guest: Aaron Bockelie.

Sponsored By:

Support LINUX Unplugged

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Aaron Bockelie on LinkedIn
Broccolibus6 on Instagram
Aaron Bockelie on GitHub
Home Assistant Conference – broccolibus.com — Today I will be presenting a short talk about our bus’s Home Assistant development.
[YouTube] High Tech School Bus Conversion - Nissan Leaf Powered Tiny House For Family Of 6 — Aaron and his family of 6 live in their 40ft. Bluebird bus, which serves as an amazing home and gives them the ability to see the country. Aaron works full-time from the bus as a way to fund their adventures and they homeschool their 4 children.
Pepwave MAX Transit DUO “PrimeCare Edition” Dual Modem LTE-A — The Peplink Pepwave Max Transit LTE-Advanced DUO PrimeCare Edition is a serious mobile router for the advanced user.
Venus GX - Victron Energy — The Venus GX is the communication-centre of your installation. Venus allows you to talk to all components in your system and ensure they are working in harmony.
An Open-Source USB to CAN Adapter - CANable — The CANable is a small low-cost open source USB to CAN adapter. The CANable shows up as a virtual serial port on your computer and acts as a serial-line to CAN bus interface
DeskPi Pro Set-top Box For Raspberry Pi 4