LINUX Unplugged

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666: Berkeley Suffering Distribution May 10, 2026

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Who survived the install, who made it to the desktop, and who learned the hard way that one little mistake will blow up the entire BSD box.

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LinuxFest Northwest 2026 - Back to Root — April 24-26, 2026 - Bellingham, Washington
Texas Linux Festival 2026 - November 6-7, 2026 Austin, TX
Texas Linux Fest 2026 - Call for Papers deadline July 1, 2026
Dirty Frag, a new Copy.Fail like vulnerability — The Dirty Frag vulnerability class, first discovered and reported by Hyunwoo Kim, can obtain root privileges on major Linux distributions by chaining the xfrm-ESP Page-Cache Write (CVE-2026-43284) and the RxRPC Page-Cache Write (CVE-2026-43500) vulnerabilities.
How to mitigate the "Dirty Frag" CVE-2026-43284 in OpenShift 4 - Red Hat Customer Portal
Dirty Frag Linux kernel local privilege escalation vulnerability mitigations - Ubuntu
Dirty Frag Explained: Linux Root Exploit, Mitigation & Patching Guide
LINUX Unplugged 666 - The BSD Challenge Rules
Magnolia Mayhem's BSD Challenge Report — It’s still got that old cowboy feel to it.
Magnolia's Sinchflat - GitLab — Anyway, Pinchflat now has a FreeBSD-first competitor.
FreeBSD Foundation's Laptop Support and Usability Improvements Project — The FreeBSD Foundation's Laptop Support and Usability Improvements project aims to deliver a package of improved or new FreeBSD functionality that, together, will ensure that it runs well “out of the box” on a broad range of personal computing devices.
nixbsd: An unofficial NixOS fork with a FreeBSD kernel
Brent's nixbsd config
NomadBSD — Persistent live USB flash drives, based on FreeBSD. Together with automatic hardware detection and setup, it is configured to be used as a desktop system that works out of the box, but can also be used for data recovery, for educational purposes, or to test FreeBSD's hardware compatibility.
GhostBSD — A simple, elegant desktop BSD Operating System
gershwin-desktop — Desktop Environment based on GNUstep welcoming to switchers
gershwin-on-freebsd live iso
gershwin-on-debian live iso
gershwin-on-arch live iso
Maintaining the World’s Fastest Content Delivery Network at Netflix on FreeBSD - FreeBSD Foundation
Pick: kiji-proxy — An intelligent privacy layer for AI APIs. Kiji automatically detects and masks personally identifiable information (PII) in requests to AI services, ensuring your sensitive data never leaves your control.
Pick: Portbook — Local Rust web dashboard that auto-discovers and labels HTTP dev services running on localhost ports — with live SSE updates, project-root detection, and live/error/dead classification.
Pick: Sylve — Sylve is a lightweight, open-source management platform for FreeBSD. It combines Bhyve virtual machines, FreeBSD Jails, and ZFS storage into a modern web interface designed to deliver a streamlined, Proxmox-like experience tailored for FreeBSD environments.
AlchemillaHQ/Sylve — Lightweight GUI for managing Bhyve, Jails, ZFS, networking, and more on FreeBSD
FreshPorts: sysutils/sylve

665: Patch Me If You Can May 03, 2026

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We dig into the Copy Fail vulnerability and test a proof-of-concept against our own box. Plus, Jon Seager, VP of Engineering at Canonical joins us, and we kick off the BSD Challenge!

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Copy Fail — CVE-2026-31431 — "An unprivileged local user can write four controlled bytes into the page cache of any readable file on a Linux system, and use that to gain root." — Theori
Copy Fail: 732 Bytes to Root - Xint — "A single 732-byte Python script can edit a setuid binary and obtain root on essentially all Linux distributions shipped since 2017." — Xint
Linux Kernel Bug Explained - Jorijn — "CopyFail is more portable. One script, every distro, no offsets. Dirty Pipe needed kernel ≥ 5.8; Copy Fail covers 2017–2026." — Jorijn"Kubernetes Pod Security Standards (Restricted) and default seccomp do NOT block the syscall used." — Jorijn
Ars: Most Severe Linux Threat in Years — "The most severe Linux threat to surface in years catches the world flat-footed." — Ars Technica
Sysdig: CVE-2026-31431 Analysis — "The flaw was introduced in 2017 via commit 72548b093ee3, which switched AEAD operations to in-place processing." — Sysdig
CERT-EU Advisory
Ubuntu Security Tracker
The Register: Crypto Flaw
Kernel Patch (reverts 2017 optimization) — "This mostly reverts commit 72548b093ee3 except for the copying of the associated data." — Kernel Commit
Buggy Commit: 72548b093ee3 (2017)
DeepWiki: AF_ALG Internals
oss-security Disclosure
PSA + GRUB Mitigation - Jan Wildeboer
Ubuntu 26.04 LTS (Resolute Raccoon) Released — "Ubuntu 26.04 LTS sets the example for providing best-in-class resilience while simultaneously embracing innovation and the advancement of open source." — Jon Seager, VP Ubuntu Engineering
The Future of AI in Ubuntu - Jon Seager — "Throughout 2026 we'll be working on enabling access to frontier AI for Ubuntu users in a way that is deliberate, secure, and aligned with our open source values." — Jon Seager
Ubuntu 26.04 Release Notes
Ubuntu AI Features Throughout 2026 - Phoronix — "Canonical's approach to AI is refreshingly thoughtful — Microsoft should take note." — ZDNet
Canonical DDoS Attack Update — "Canonical's web infrastructure is under a sustained, cross-border attack and we are working to address it." — arcticp, Canonical
Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter #942
Canonical AI Approach - ZDNet
9to5Linux: Opt-In LLM Tools
uutils/coreutils: Cross-platform Rust rewrite of the GNU coreutils
LINUX Unplugged 636: Engineering the Future
LiveCD fails to start X session on QEMU · Issue #354 · ghostbsd/issues
Monty's “rescue” drive NixOS config
Magnolia Mayhem's BSD Challenge Report
Pick: NASty — NASty is a NAS operating system built on NixOS and bcachefs. It turns commodity hardware into a storage appliance serving NFS, SMB, iSCSI, and NVMe-oF — managed from a single web UI, updated atomically, and rolled back when things go sideways.
Pick: Defuse — Defuse is a GTK4 application for removing image backgrounds locally.
Defuse on Flathub

664: Back to Root Apr 26, 2026

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After 26 years, we return to our roots and reflect on why LinuxFest Northwest is still a special event.

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LINUX Unplugged 666 BSD Challenge - Rules and Regrets
LFNW2026 - Back to Root
LinuxFest Northwest 2026 Playlist - YouTube
LinuxFest Northwest - YouTube
The New Linux Kernel AI Bot Uncovering Bugs Is A Local LLM On Framework Desktop + AMD Ryzen AI Max
Bitwarden CLI Compromised in Ongoing Checkmarx Supply Chain
Bear454's Fundraiser: Support for James Mason's Family
Pick: Updo — Updo is a command-line tool for monitoring website uptime and performance. It provides real-time metrics on website status, response time, SSL certificate expiry, and more, with alert notifications.
Pick: Pake — 🤱🏻 Turn any webpage into a desktop app with one command.

663: The 99.8% Rescue Apr 19, 2026

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We all have data to rescue, you just don't realize it yet. This week we build our own custom live rescue distros, recover real data, and show you how to make your own.

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LinuxFest Northwest 2026 - Back to Root — April 24-26, 2026 - Bellingham, Washington
6 ultimate boot CDs (system rescue) for troubleshooting Windows PCs
SystemRescue — A Linux system rescue toolkit available as a bootable medium for administrating or repairing your system and data after a crash.
Finnix — Debian-based, CLI-focused with a comprehensive set of repair tools. Recent updates improved modern hardware support, boot speed, zram compression, and SSH remote access.
Changes/ModernizeLiveMedia - Fedora Project Wiki — Modernize the live media by switching to the "new" live environment setup scripts provided by livesys-scripts and leverage new functionality in dracut to enable support for automatically enabling persistent overlays when flashed to USB sticks.
Fedora 41: Modernize the live media Overlay Features?
aegis-boot — A signed UEFI Secure Boot rescue environment that lets operators pick any ISO from a USB stick's data partition and kexec into it — without leaving the chain of trust.
netboot.xyz — A network-based bootable operating system installer based on iPXE.
Greg's nixos-config
Self-Hosted 129: Forged Alliance — The battle for code forges is heating up. We chat about HexOS' big promises and get excited about Meshtastic.
pocket-id — A simple OIDC provider that allows users to authenticate with their passkeys to your services.
What Is Claude Mythos—And Why Anthropic Won’t Let Anyone Use It
v4call — v4call is a decentralised video, voice and text platform built on the Hive blockchain. Users set their own rates for receiving calls and messages.
Pick: Metadata Cleaner — View and clean metadata in files
Metadata Cleaner on FlatHub
Pick: mat2 — mat2 is a metadata removal tool, supporting a wide range of commonly used file formats, written in python3
Pick: Little Snitch for Linux — Every time an application on your computer opens a network connection, it does so quietly, without asking. Little Snitch for Linux makes that activity visible and gives you the option to do something about it.
littlesnitch-linux-flake — A Nix Flake for Little Snitch for Linux
Pick: PCAPdroid — No-root network monitor, firewall and PCAP dumper for Android

662: The GitHub Diet Apr 12, 2026

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Is it time to replace GitHub in our workflow? We git into it. Plus, our favorite features in the new Linux 7.0 release.

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LinuxFest Northwest 2026 — April 24-26, 2026 - Bellingham, Washington
LFNW2026 Schedule
Linux 7.0: Btrfs — A translation layer of logical block addresses that allows changes without moving or rewriting blocks for relocation
Linux 7.0: XFS — Autonomous self-healing; delivers live filesystem health events to userspace for automatic repairs
Linux 7.0: EXT4 — Improves write performance for concurrent direct I/O writes
Linux 7.0: IO-uring — Adds support for BPF filtering to IO_uring for high performance async I/O
Linux 7.0: Scheduler — Scheduler updates land with time slice extension, performance and scalability work for high core count systems
Linux 7.0: Rust — Formally concluding the 'Rust experiment'; Rust for the Linux kernel is here to stay
Linux 7.1: i486 — Begins phasing out Intel 486 CPU support; no known Linux distributions still ship with i486 support
Give Up GitHub — We realize this is not an easy task; GitHub is ubiquitous. Through their effective marketing, GitHub has convinced FOSS developers that GitHub is the best (and even the only) place for FOSS development.
opengist — Self-hosted pastebin powered by Git, open-source alternative to Github Gist.
Forgejo on Codeberg — Beyond coding. We forge.
Forgejo — Self-hosted alternative to GitHub; liberate your software from proprietary shackles with a familiar environment
NixOS Wiki: Forgejo — Lightweight software forge; completely free software and a fork of Gitea
Forgejo Actions — Reusable pieces of code for CI workflows; compatible with GitHub Actions
NixOS Forgejo Actions Runner — NixOS configuration for turnkey deployment of Forgejo Actions runners
Forgejo Federation (PR #10453) — Work-in-progress for federated repositories; enabling decentralized software development
Forgejo Snippets (Issue #1069) — Create a shareable piece of text, be it code or plain text, publicly or privately
Git Novice Guide — Free interactive tutorial; learn version control with Git from scratch
Pick: sshroute — Network-aware SSH router - routes connections to different IPs/ports/keys/jump hosts based on active VPN or network
Pick: rendercv — Resume builder for academics and engineers
Pick: ESPHome Starter Kit — DIY sensor kit for Home Assistant with ESPHome; build your own smart home devices

661: Sink Your Claws In Apr 05, 2026

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The expensive, challenging, and humbling journey with open source agents.

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LinuxFest Northwest 2026 - Back to Root — April 24-26, 2026 - Bellingham, Washington
Preferring Local OSS LLMs
Qwen3.5 27B vs Gemma4 31B
Open Models have crossed a threshold
Gemma 4 — Google DeepMind
Welcome Gemma 4: Frontier multimodal intelligence on device
Gemma-4-31B-JANG\_4M-CRACK · Hugging Face
mesh-llm — Mesh LLM lets you pool spare GPU capacity across machines and expose the result as one OpenAI-compatible API.
hermes-agent: The agent that grows with you — The self-improving AI agent built by Nous Research. It's the only agent with a built-in learning loop — it creates skills from experience, improves them during use, nudges itself to persist knowledge, searches its own past conversations, and builds a deepening model of who you are across sessions.
goose — An open source, extensible AI agent that goes beyond code suggestions; install, execute, edit, and test with any LLM.
Lobehub — The ultimate space for work and life. To find, build, and collaborate with agent teammates that grow with you. We are taking agent harness to the next level; enabling multi-agent collaboration, effortless agent team design, and introducing agents as the unit of work interaction.
LibreFang — LibreFang is an open-source agent operating system written in Rust.
OpenHarness — OpenHarness is an open-source Python implementation designed for researchers, builders, and the community.
Microsoft's Newest Open-Source Project: Runtime Security For AI Agents — Microsoft proclaims their new open-source project is the first toolkit that addresses all ten agentic AI risks identified last year by the OWASP
Top 10 Risks and Mitigations for Agentic AI Security - OWASP Gen AI Security Project
googleworkspace/cli: Google Workspace CLI — One command-line tool for Drive, Gmail, Calendar, Sheets, Docs, Chat, Admin, and more. Dynamically built from Google Discovery Service. Includes AI agent skills.
Tunarr API Reference
Euro-Office launches as Europe's open-source Office rival
Pick: single-file-cli — CLI tool for saving a faithful copy of a complete web page in a single HTML file (based on SingleFile)
Pick: html-to-markdown — Convert HTML to Markdown. Even works with entire websites and can be extended through rules.
Pick: skim — Turns any HTML page into clean markdown.

660: Boots and Breakups Mar 29, 2026

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Ubuntu wants a leaner, stricter GRUB, and your favorite setup may not survive the cut. We break down what’s really changing, and the practical ways to adapt. Plus, Chris moves on from one of his favorite open source apps.

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📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FM
LinuxFest Northwest 2026 - Back to Root — April 24-26, 2026 - Bellingham, Washington
This Week In Bitcoin 97 | Jupiter Broadcasting
Ubuntu 26.10 Looks To Strip Its GRUB Bootloader To The Bare Minimum For Better Security
Streamlining secure boot for 26.10 - Ubuntu Community Hub
Mitigating BootHole – CVE-2020-10713 and related vulnerabilities | Ubuntu
There's a Hole in the Boot - Eclypsium
Final Release · ErsatzTV — It is time for me to announce the final release of ErsatzTV in its current form. The existing repositories will be archived following this update.
ErsatzTV/next
Tunarr · GitHub — Create a classic TV experience using your own media — IPTV backed by Plex, Jellyfin, Emby, or NFO.
Threadfin
xTeVe
Filler - Tunarr — Filler lists are collections of content used by Flex to pad time between episodes. One reason to use filler is to simulate traditional television by playing advertisements between episode airings.
Dispatcharr — Dispatcharr (pronounced like "dispatcher") is an open-source powerhouse for managing IPTV streams, EPG data, and VOD content with elegance and control.
awesome-iptv — A curated list of resources related to IPTV
Tunarr API Reference
LINUX Unplugged 645 — We cut the streaming cord the Linux way with free, legal internet TV you can curate, DVR, and self-host via Jellyfin or Plex.
turnstonelabs/turnstone — Experimental multi-node AI orchestration platform. Deploy tool-using AI agents across a cluster of servers, driven by message queues or interactive interfaces.
Open-Source "GreenBoost" Driver Aims To Augment NVIDIA GPUs vRAM With System RAM & NVMe To Handle Larger LLMs
GeneBean's Cage Kiosk
GeneBean's Pi Arm Build Setup
Planify - Task Manager for GNU/Linux
alainm23/planify: Task manager with Todoist, Nextcloud & CalDAV support designed for GNOME
Pick: bore — bore is a simple CLI tool for making tunnels to localhost
nixos-bore-module — Self-hosted bore tunnel server for NixOS
Pick: kdeconnect-sms-tui — Terminal UI for sending and receiving SMS/MMS via KDE Connect.
Pick: Busybridge — Complex calendar free/busy syncing across organizations for consultants who work inside multiple orgs.

659: Truth Trapper Keepers Mar 22, 2026

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The self-hosted app that turned Chris into a family Time Lord, then we iterate on a long-desired hardware hack.

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📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FM
LinuxFest Northwest 2026 - Back to Root — April 24-26, 2026 - Bellingham, Washington
Keeper.sh — Keeper is a simple & open-source calendar syncing tool. It allows you to pull events from remotely hosted iCal or ICS links, and push them to one or many calendars so the time slots can align across them all.
Keeper.sh: Calendar Syncing, V2 Release
OneCal
PiBox Overview - KubeSail Docs
PiBox: A Modular Raspberry Pi Storage Server by Dan Pastusek — Kickstarter
RPi CM4 based local storage server launches on Kickstarter
KubeSail — So Long, and Thanks for All the Pods
ipetkov/nixos-pibox — NixOS modules for supporting the hardware present on the PiBox
raspberrypi/usbboot — Raspberry Pi USB device provisioning tool (RPIBOOT)
cage-kiosk/cage — A Wayland kiosk. A kiosk runs a single, maximized application.
systemd: BirthDate Field Added to JSON User Records — "Add birthDate field to JSON user records, allowing for standardized age-related logic within the userdb framework."
Azuay Province - Wikipedia
Pick: fq — fq is like jq but for binary formats, allowing you to tool, language, and decode complex binary data into human-readable structures.
Pick: file-fridge — move files that aren't accessed as often to cold storage
Pick: sigrok — Portable, cross-platform, Free/Libre/Open-Source signal analysis software suite: logic analyzers, scopes, multimeters, and more!
Pick: PulseView — a Qt-based LA/scope/MSO GUI for sigrok

658: Automated Love Crunch Mar 15, 2026

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We each spent the week on our own projects, breaking then fixing things. Now we're back to compare progress, and a few lessons learned.

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💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike
📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FM
LinuxFest Northwest 2026 - Back to Root — April 24-26, 2026 - Bellingham, Washington
PabloVitasso/esphome-chinbasto — A custom ESPHome component for controlling Chinese Webasto heaters using ESP32.
Hacking the Chinese Diesel Heater Communications Protocol.pdf - Ray Jones - GitLab
timmchugh11/Chinese-Diesel-Heater---ESPHome
OpenCode | The open source AI coding agent
anomalyco/opencode: The open source coding agent.
Hunter Alpha - API Pricing & Providers | OpenRouter
ESPHome - Smart Home Made Simple
Home Assistant
ESP32 Wi-Fi & Bluetooth SoC | Espressif Systems
nodemcu/nodemcu-firmware: Lua based interactive firmware for ESP8266, ESP8285 and ESP32
NodeMCU-32S Development Board Details, Pinout, Specs
Amazon.com: ESP-32S USB-C Development Board + ESP32 Terminal Board
agent-browser-protocol — Deterministic browser automation.
camofox-browser — Headless browser automation server for AI agents.
chrome-devtools-mcp — Chrome DevTools for coding agents
firefox-devtools-mcp — Model Context Protocol server for Firefox DevTools
LittleFOX-MCP — Model Context Protocol server for Firefox
Chrome DevTools MCP Debug — Let your Coding Agent debug your browser session
LFNW2026 - Back to Root
Brunch with Brent: Jason Spisak Part 1 | Jupiter EXTRAS 40
Brunch with Brent: Jason Spisak Part 2 | Jupiter EXTRAS 41
Pick: LosslessCut — Simple and ultra fast cross platform tool for lossless trimming/cutting of video and audio files.
LosslessCut on GitHub
LosslessCut on Flathub
Pick: CanIRun.ai — Can your machine run AI models?
Pick: llmfit — Hundreds of models & providers. One command to find what runs on your hardware.

657: Slop to Slap Mar 08, 2026

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After experiencing Planet Nix and SCaLE, we come back convinced the next phase of Linux is already taking shape.

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📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FM
PlanetNix 2026 — Where Nix Builders Come Together
SCaLE 23x — SCALE is North America's largest community-run open source conference.
Jupiter Broadcasting's SCaLE Matrix room
SCaLE 23x - YouTube — SCaLE 23x live streams, talks, and more.
LinuxFest Northwest 2026 - Back to Root — April 24-26, 2026 - Bellingham, Washington
Flox.dev
Flox: Developer environments you can take with you - GitHub — Flox is a virtual environment and package manager all in one. With Flox you create environments that layer and replace dependencies just where it matters, making them portable across the full software lifecycle.
Keynote: Privacy’s Defender - Fighting Digital Surveillance for over Thirty Years | SCALE
Cindy Cohn | SCALE
noblepayne/nix-anywhere-else-talk — A Slidev presentation about the "dark arts" of ELF surgery and Nix, built entirely with Nix. This talk explores how patchelf and a deep understanding of the Executable and Linkable Format can make binaries portable in both directions: bringing foreign tools into NixOS, and taking Nix-built artifacts out to the rest of the world.
DeepComputing — Advancing the adoption and implementation of RISC-V
Roxane Fischer - Anyshift.io
Determinate is the future of Nix today: Wasm, provenance, and flake schemas
EFF Privacy’s Defender - Fighting Digital Surveillance for over Thirty Years | SCALE
Cindy Cohn - SCaLE — Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which works to ensure that technology supports freedom, justice and innovation for all the people of the world.
Electronic Frontier Foundation - Defending your rights in the digital world
llama.cpp: LLM inference in C/C++
mangowm - Mango Wayland Compositor — Practical and powerful wayland compositor (dwm but wayland)
The Open Source AI Definition 1.0 - Open Source Initiative
Pick: sone — Native TIDAL desktop client for Linux. Modern UI, custom themes, and bit-perfect lossless audio up to 24-bit/192kHz via exclusive ALSA. License: GPL-3
Pick: qmd — mini cli search engine for your docs, knowledge bases, meeting notes, whatever. Tracking current sota approaches while being all local. License: MIT
Pick: mtr — Combines the functionality of 'traceroute' and 'ping' in a single network diagnostic tool. License: GPL-2
MTR - Welcome Home Brent

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