LINUX Unplugged

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406: Mars Goes to Shell May 18, 2021

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Tim Canham, Mars Helicopter Operations Lead at NASA’s JPL joins us again to share technical details you've never heard about the Ingenuity Linux Copter on Mars. And the challenges they had to work around to achieve their five successful flights.

Special Guest: Tim Canham.

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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.
MailRoute: Try out MailRoute today and get 10% off the lifetime of your account and start with a 30-day free trial, no credit card required.
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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NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Succeeds in Historic First Flight — NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter became the first aircraft in history to make a powered, controlled flight on another planet.
NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Completes First One-Way Trip
NASA’s Mars helicopter Ingenuity lands at new airfield after 5th flight
NASA’s Perseverance Captures Video, Audio of Fourth Ingenuity Flight
Ingenuity Helicopter Operational History — Ingenuity's fifth flight succeeded on May 7, 2021, 19:26 UTC, lasting 108 seconds. Ingenuity went 5 meters (16 ft) high, just like the last three flights, and traveled to a landing site 131 meters (429 ft) to the south.
Seeing NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Fly in 3D
Ingenuity Spots Perseverance From the Air — NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover is visible in the upper left corner of this image the agency’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter took during its third flight, on April 25, 2021. The helicopter was flying at an altitude of 16 feet (5 meters) and roughly 279 feet (85 meters) from the rover at the time.
JB Telegram Group
Linux Flies on Mars Sticker
Some PeerTube Problems — For now, we plan to keep testing PeerTube behined the scenes, trying out the new releases, and searching for ways to automate deploying content to PeerTube.
Pick: Finamp — Finamp is a music player for Jellyfin. Its main feature is the ability to download songs for offline listening.
[GitHub] finamp: A Jellyfin music client for mobile
Plexamp - Love your music! — A beautiful Plex music player for audiophiles, curators, and hipsters.
Plexamp Release Notes
plexamp on AppImageHub
Welcoming Linux to the 1Password Family — The wait is over. 1Password for Linux is officially here.
Behind the scenes of 1Password for Linux by Dave Teare — What makes this release even more amazing is it was created from scratch and developed using new languages and techniques most of our team never used before.

405: Distro in the Rough May 11, 2021

Show notes

We’re taking a look at an underdog distro. We may have found a diamond in the rough with a few tricks up its filesystem.

Plus our review of the ODROID-Go Super an Ubuntu-powered handheld, and our tools for laptop battery health.

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Sensory’s custom voice assistant debuts on a Linux-based microwave — Sensory announced that its 100 percent locally processed TrulyHandsfree technology can be used to create custom voice assistants without sacrificing privacy, as demonstrated in a new Linux-based Farberware FM11VABK microwave.
Ask LUP Anything - AskLUP.COM
ODROID-GO Super
ODROID-GO Super Dim Gray
EmulationStation — A graphical and themeable emulator front-end that allows you to access all your favorite games in one place, even without a keyboard!
ODROID Image for ES
SegaCD missing BIOS (linked) - ODROID
JB Telegram
Jupiter Broadcasting Garage Sale
Open Letter: DistroWatch and Nitrux — For the better part of three years, we have remained silent about your ongoing efforts to affect people’s perception of our Linux distribution continuously. We have tried our best not to engage with your evident hostility and disregard to inform your viewers and visitors about correct facts of the Linux distributions you display on your website, especially ours. However, we have decided to take a stance. It is today, the 6th of May, that we gallantly demand you to stop.
Uri's Blog: Unpopular Opinion Penguin #3: The Empire Strikes Back — I’m here to take a look at the newest “review” that our lovely haters (let’s call them for what they are) at DistroWatch published on their website some weeks ago.
DistroWatch.com: Nitrux
Nitrux — Nitrux is a Linux desktop distribution directly based on Debian. It uses the Calamares installer and includes NX Desktop and NX Firewall on top of the KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment and MauiKit Applications.
Meet Nitrux: The Most Beautiful Linux Distribution Ever?
Nitrux on Twitter
MauiKit — A free and modular front-end framework for developing fast and compelling user experiences.
Kirigami UI Framework — Build beautiful, convergent apps that run on phones, TVs and everything in between.
Changelog: Nitrux 1.4.0
NX Desktop — NX Desktop is a customization layer for Plasma 5.
AppImageHub — Here are 1200 apps (and counting) that you can run on Linux without installation.
Installing other DEs in Nitrux — During last month’s release of Nitrux, we made available a minimal ISO to let users install Nitrux and also install a different desktop environment and a selection of applications than the ones we include by default.
NX Software Center — A GUI to install and manage AppImages.
Nitrux: pnx — pnx (lowercase; originally Pacman for Nitrux) allows users to install software from Linux distributions that use the Pacman package manager on other Linux distributions that don’t use it without interfering with the distributions default package manager.
What’s Nitrux? The future. - with Uri Herrera
Linux Spotlight - Uri Herrera of NitruxOS
Feedback: PrivateBin — A minimalist, open-source online pastebin where the server has zero knowledge of pasted data. Data is encrypted/decrypted in the browser using 256 bits AES.
PrivateBin Docker Setup
Feedback: PIE Bin — Pre-Internet Encryption for Text.
Feedback: CryptPad — CryptPad is the Zero-Knowledge real-time collaborative editor.
CryptPad Installation Guide — This guide is about installing a public CryptPad instance available on the internet.
Pick: TLP — Optimize Linux Laptop Battery Life.
Pick: TLPUI — A GTK user interface for TLP written in Python.
Fedora — TLP 1.3.1 documentation

404: You've Got Mail May 04, 2021

Show notes

It's episode III, Return of the Email. Everyone says never host your own email, so we're doin it.

We just have one last job to complete.

Special Guest: Danielle Foré.

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elementary OS 6 Beta Available Today — Developers and testers, it’s the day you’ve been waiting for: elementary OS 6 Beta is available now!
elementary Builds
Get Involved with elementary OS — Everything that we make is 100% open source and developed collaboratively by people from all over the world. Even if you're not a programmer, you can get involved and make a difference.
Audacity & MuseScore Announcement! — Audacity has just joined Muse Group, a collection of brands that includes another popular open source music app called MuseScore.
(Video) I’m now in charge of Audacity. Seriously.
Jupiter Broadcasting Garage Sale
RainLoop docker-compose YAML
roundcubemail-docker — Resources to build Docker images for Roundcube Webmail
Documentation / Configuration / RainLoop Webmail
(Video) PipeWire: The New Multimedia Service, Now Ready for Automotive
(Video) LUP 272 OG PipeWire Interview Oct 23, 2018 — The lead developer of PipeWire Wim Taymans joins us to discuss Linux’s multimedia past, and its exciting future.
Pick: Rentry.co — Rentry.co is a markdown pastebin service with preview, custom urls and editing. Fast, simple and free.
Pick: procs — A modern replacement for ps written in Rust

403: Hidden Features of Fedora 34 Apr 27, 2021

Show notes

The new release of Fedora has more under the hood than you might know. It's a technology-packed release, and nearly all of it is coming to a distro near you.

Plus the questions we think the University of Minnesota kernel ban raises, and more.

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Thoughts on The University of Minnesota Kernel Ban
Some 5.12 development statistics — By the time the 5.12 kernel was finally released, some 13,015 non-merge changesets had been pulled into the mainline repository for this development cycle. That makes 5.12 the slowest development cycle since 5.6, which was released at the end of March 2020. Still, there was plenty of work done for 5.12.
Linux 5.12 Release Announcement
As Linux 5.12 released, Linus Torvalds warns next version will probably be rather large — "'Despite the extra week, this was actually a fairly small release overall. Judging by Linux-next, 5.13 will be making up for it."
Flatpak 1.11.1 Brings Changes For Steam, Better Support For Command Line Programs — One of the changes with Flatpak 1.11.1 worth mentioning is allowing sub-sandboxes to have a different /usr and/or /app.
steam-runtime-tools: pressure-vessel — pressure-vessel is a bit like a simplified version of Flatpak for Steam games.
While we worry about WSLg Amazon is Positioned to Kill Server Linux
Humble Bundle is removing their pay sliders and replacing them with two preset pay splits.
Looking forward to Fedora 34 — In 2021, complaints about PulseAudio are scarce indeed; the quirks have long since been ironed out and, for most people, sound just works. Obviously, it must be time to rip out the audio infrastructure and start over. That is what Fedora has done in the 34 release; PulseAudio is gone, replaced by PipeWire.
How to Upgrade to Fedora 34 from Fedora 33 Workstation
Common Fedora 34 Bugs
Fedora Linux 34 is officially here!
Fedora 34 Changes
Gnome40
DefaultPipeWire
XwaylandStandalone
Some nice stuff not yet in stable that Fedora wanted
WaylandByDefaultForPlasma
AArch64 KDE Plasma Desktop image
Fedora Media Writer — Write Fedora Images to Portable Media
BtrfsTransparentCompression
btrfs Wiki: Compression
Fedora Workstation 34 feature focus: Btrfs transparent compression - Fedora Magazine — This article is going to go a little further under the hood and talk about data compression and transparent compression in btrfs. A term like that may sound scary at first, but less technical users need not be wary. This change is simple to grasp, and will help many Workstation users in several key areas.
EnableSystemdOomd
LINUX Unplugged 351: Lenovo Loves Linux
Remove Support For SELinux Runtime Disable
UnifyGrubConfig
Unplugged Core Contributors
Feedback: Running his own email for six years
Feedback: Uses a Neat Trick with his Self Hosted Email
Feedback PIck: Modoboa, Open Source email server
PIck: zellij — A Rust and WebAssembly powered terminal workspace with batteries included.
jupitergarage.com

402: Our Worst Idea Yet Apr 20, 2021

Show notes

You should never host your own email, so we’ve gone and done just that. What we learned trying to build an email server in 2021.

Plus our take on Ubuntu 21.04, become a master of your schedule with our pick, and a Garage Sale update.

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Hirsute Hippo Release Notes — These release notes for Ubuntu 21.04 (Hirsute Hippo) provide an overview of the release and document the known issues with Ubuntu and its flavours.
Ubuntu 21.04 Release Date & New Features - OMG! Ubuntu!
Announcing the Ubuntu Desktop Team Indaba (AMA) - April 23, 2021 @ 3PM UTC — This will be a live stream featuring members of the Ubuntu Desktop Team and members of the community. We will include special guests from the community as well as take questions from via live chat.
LINUX Unplugged 396: How Linux Got to Mars — Tim Canham, the Mars Helicopter Operations Lead, shares Linux’s origins at JPL and how it ended up running on multiple boxes on Mars.
Nasa successfully flies small helicopter on Mars — The drone, called Ingenuity, was airborne for less than a minute, but Nasa is celebrating what represents the first powered, controlled flight by an aircraft on another world.
NASA Helicopter Hovers Over Mars In 1st Powered Flight On Another Planet
Humans have just flown a rotorcraft on an alien planet for the first time in history.
Linux Action News 185 — The major shift in the Linux landscape this week that was hardly noticed, and our thoughts on COSMIC from System76.
Jupiter Broadcasting Garage Sale
Jupiter Broadcasting Telegram
All Jupiter Broadcasting Shows
docker-mailserver — A fullstack but simple mail server (SMTP, IMAP, LDAP, Antispam, Antivirus, etc.) using Docker.
Docker Mailserver Docs
DMARC Guide | Global Cyber Alliance | Email Authentication Made Easy
GitHub - calendso/calendso: The open-source Calendly alternative.
System76 Blog — COSMIC to Arrive in June Release of Pop!_OS 21.04 — What is COSMIC? It’s a refined solution that makes the desktop easier to use, yet more powerful and efficient for our users through customization.

401: Own Your Mailbox Apr 13, 2021

Show notes

Do as we say, not as we do. This week we're setting off to host our own email. We'll cover the basics, what's we're using, and why.

Plus an update on Jupiter Broadcasting going independent, community news, and more.

Special Guest: Martin Wimpress.

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Google Online Security Blog: Rust in the Android platform — We're excited to announce that the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) now supports the Rust programming language for developing the OS itself.
Mike Kelly on Twitter — I’ve been curious to try out @rustlang and wanted to celebrate @LinuxUnplugged episode 400… so I combined both in a silly fun little project. Check it out… a mini-website powered by Rust… @ChrisLAS and @wespayne would be proud!
Mars Helicopter Flight Delayed — During a high-speed spin test of the rotors on Friday, the command sequence controlling the test ended early due to a “watchdog” timer expiration.
Work Progresses Toward Ingenuity’s First Flight on Mars — Over the weekend, the team considered and tested multiple potential solutions to this issue, concluding that minor modification and reinstallation of Ingenuity’s flight control software is the most robust path forward.
All Jupiter Broadcasting Shows
Mailcow.email — The mailserver suite with the ‘moo’ – 🐮 + 🐋 = 💕.
Mailcow: dockerized documentation
SOGo — SOGo is a fully supported and trusted groupware server with a focus on scalability and open standards.
Zimbra: Open Source Secure Private Business Email & Collaboration
Mail-in-a-Box Setup Guide
Jupiter Garage
GNOME Designers Explore a ‘Bottom Bar’ Layout for GNOME Shell

400: The See Ya Next Tuesday Apr 06, 2021

Show notes

Old friends and new join us on a quest to celebrate four hundred episodes.

Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar, Corry Clinton, Drew DeVore, and Graham Morrison.

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Too Much Choice | LINUX Unplugged — Does the Linux community lean on the age old excuse of choice, to brush of the real limitations of desktop Linux environments? We debate that, and then discuss the growing reasons to roll your own email server.
Still Minty Fresh | LINUX Unplugged 100 — We reflect on 100 episodes of LINUX Unplugged, the themes from episodes past & then review Linux Mint 17.2 Cinnamon edition.
Gallaghers’ Where U Brew — We are a family (and dog!) friendly tap room and brewery, working to make your DIY brewing experience a successful, positive, uplifting and rewarding pursuit of fabulously great beer, extraordinarily fine wine or cider, and even root beer!
Cloudron Solution for Self-Hosting Web Appplications — Cloudron is a turnkey solution for running apps like WordPress, Rocket.Chat, NextCloud, GitLab, OpenVPN & many more.
LINUX Unplugged Beer Stein
Name the LUP 400 Beer - Straw Poll

399: No PRs Please Mar 30, 2021

Show notes

Lutris developer Mathieu Comandon joins us to share his perspective on the uncomfortable issues facing Linux desktop developers.

Plus the tech behind Shells.com, community news, feedback, and more.

Special Guests: Mathieu Comandon and Zlatan Todorić.

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68k.news — Headlines From the Future
Linux Action News 182 — GNOME 40 is out and we chat with the project’s Executive Director about the technical and visual improvements in the new release. Plus the facts around RMS’s return to the FSF board, and our analysis of the situation.
Episode 118 — Stallman is back and ruffling feathers, PHP moves to GitHub, AMP might be on its way out, Audacity’s latest update gives us pause, Fairphone delivers an unlikely update, online events, and more.
AlmaLinux OS Stable Release is live! — We are very happy to announce that today we are releasing the first AlmaLinux OS stable version. That's right, you can go right ahead and download the stable version and use it everywhere you need a stable, reliable, Linux distribution.
Ubuntu 21.04 Testing Week — Ubuntu and its flavors will be participating in another ‘Ubuntu Testing Week’ from April 1st to April 7th.
Shells — Personal Workspaces Powered by Cloud Computers.
An Interview With Zlatan Todoric, Open-Source Developer & Former Purism CTO
Diversity, Flexibility, and Linux: Prioritizing Generous Transfer
JB Telegram Group
All Jupiter Broadcasting Shows
Lutris — Open Gaming Platform
[Mathieu's Blog] Not on the same page — The disconnect I feel between what I want to deliver in what I build and what the users asks for is now too big to ignore. In some way, I already knew it would be the case before I even started Lutris. I knew that what I was trying to achieve wasn’t in line with how Linux users usually behave…
Feedback: Cockpit
Feedback: Covid Appointment Script

398: Back in the Freedom Dimension Mar 23, 2021

Show notes

We share our favorite networking trick of all time, and then chat with the blokes behind a new WireGuard-powered service.

Plus our reaction to RMS's return to the FSF, some big project updates, picks, and more!

Special Guests: Dalton Durst and Danielle Foré.

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Microsoft Said to Discuss Discord Bid for Over $10 Billion — “Microsoft possibly acquiring Discord makes a lot of sense as it continues to reshape its gaming business more toward software and services”.
[Video] Richard Stallman is Back
edw · elementary Developer Weekend — This conference is our way of reaching out to app developers, sharing the knowledge we’ve all collected over the years, and providing a space to ask questions and provide feedback.
Ubuntu Touch OTA-16 Release — Today we are happy to announce the release of Ubuntu Touch OTA-16, our sixteenth stable update to the system!
Linux Action News 181
Forthcoming OpenSSL release — OpenSSL 1.1.1k is a security-fix release. The highest severity issue fixed in this release is HIGH.
Initial Support For The Rust Language Lands In Linux-Next — While no fully-baked Rust kernel driver is ready yet, the initial merge to Linux-Next does include an example kernel module written in Rust.
Linus Torvalds on where Rust will fit into Linux — Torvalds thinks "Rust's primary first target seems to be drivers, simply because that's where you find just a lot of different possible targets, and you have these individual parts of the kernel that are fairly small and independent. That may not be a very interesting target to some people, but it's the obvious one."
Supporting Linux kernel development in Rust [LWN.net]
Diversity, Flexibility, and Linux: Prioritizing Generous Transfer | Linode
JB Telegram
All Jupiter Broadcasting Shows
Hoppy — Hoppy provides a unique public IPv4 and IPv6 address to each of your devices, allowing connectivity without limitations. If you are behind a restrictive ISP, constantly on the move, or self-hosting services, Hoppy is for you. All major platforms are supported.
ngrok — Secure introspectable tunnels to localhost.
Gist: Assign public ipv6 to wireguard clients
WireGuard Routing and Port Forwarding
Gist: Forward all traffic to server over WireGuard VPN
Expose server behind NAT with WireGuard and a VPS
How To Forward Ports through a Linux Gateway with Iptables
FORWARD and NAT Rules
Pick: dsnet — Simple command to manage a centralised wireguard VPN. Think wg-quick but quicker: key generation + address allocation.
How to set up a wireguard VPN in minutes with dsnet
Feedback: Raspberry Pi POCKIT
Project POCKIT — PocKit is a computer made for the real, physical world. On top of its powerful, versatile Core, you can attach BLOCKS - any number of any kind - to suit your application.
Video: A small, plug-and-play Linux computer — Project POCKIT
GNOME 40’s Best New Features
FreeBSD kernel-mode WireGuard moves forward out-of-tree

397: Linux Desktop Levels Up Mar 16, 2021

Show notes

We break down the next-level features coming to a Linux near you in just a few weeks.

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Virtual x86 — v86 emulates an x86-compatible CPU and hardware. Machine code is translated to WebAssembly modules at runtime in order to achieve decent performance.
The Linux desktop is boring again — Where I was once a constant "fiddler" with my desktop, I now want the interface to work how I want it to work, but still look the way I want it to look. I'm more of a minimalist now, so GNOME suits my needs on both levels quite well. However, I find myself rather bored with the Linux desktop.
What to look for in Fedora Workstation 34 — Christian F.K. Schaller — The big ticket item we have wanted to close off on was Wayland, because while Wayland has been production ready for most of us for a while, there was still some cases it didn’t cover as well as X.org.
Christian Schaller on Twitter — 2020 was a year where we focused a lot on polishing what we had and getting things past the finish line and Fedora Workstation 34 is going to be the culmination of that effort in many ways.
GNOME 40 Introducing Headless Native Backend, Virtual Monitors — As part of this headless native back-end is also the ability to create virtual monitors via command-line options for debugging and other purposes. This also allows creating virtual monitor PipeWire streams.
What’s New in Libhandy 1.2
Reinventing tabs — In GNOME 40, Epiphany will feature a new tab bar. This isn’t just a restyling of the old one, but a ground-up rewrite.
My geek stuff blog: Maps and GNOME 40
GNOME 40 & your extension – GNOME Shell & Mutter
OBS Studio on Wayland
Diversity, Flexibility, and Linux: Prioritizing Generous Transfer
JB Telegram Group
All Jupiter Broadcasting Shows
Pick: kmon — Linux Kernel Manager and Activity Monitor 🐧💻
Pick: ebpfsnitch — eBPFSnitch is a Linux Application Level Firewall based on eBPF and NFQUEUE. It is inspired by OpenSnitch and Douane but utilizing modern kernel abstractions - without a kernel module.
Feedback: Docker Socket Security
Feedback: How to exit big picture mode
Telegram App Is Booming but Needs Advertisers, and $700 Million Soon

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