LINUX Unplugged

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326: Dell, elementary, Fedora, oh my! Nov 05, 2019

Show notes

Dell expands their linux hardware lineup, why elementary OS's Flatpak support sets the bar, and we chat with Christian Schaller of Red Hat about Fedora 31 and what's around the corner.

Plus an update on Ubuntu on the Raspberry Pi 4 and a pick that's just for Wes.

Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar, Brent Gervais, Cassidy James Blaede, Christian F.K. Schaller, Danielle Foré, and Martin Wimpress.

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325: DNF or Die Oct 29, 2019

Show notes

Fedora 31 strikes the right balance, we get the latest on the Librem 5 situation, and an easy graphics boost for laptops.

Plus the best way to share your terminal yet, and more.

Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar, Brent Gervais, and Drew DeVore.

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324: RAMburglars Oct 22, 2019

Show notes

Is the ZFS tax too high? We pit ZFS on root against ext4 in our laptop pressure cooker and see how they perform when RAM gets tight.

Plus we take a look at Pop!_OS 19.10, complete our Ubuntu 19.10 review, cover community news, and lots more.

Special Guest: Alex Kretzschmar.

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323: It's Pronounced 19.10 Oct 15, 2019

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We risk it all and try ZFS on root with Ubuntu 19.10, and share our first impressions and what improvements we can't live without.

Plus, exciting news for both Plasma and GNOME, coreboot laptops from System76, and too many picks.

Special Guests: Brent Gervais, Drew DeVore, and Martin Wimpress.

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322: Just Enough VPN Oct 08, 2019

Show notes

We reveal our secrets for bridging networks with WireGuard and Linux-powered networking.

Plus the future of OpenPGP in Thunderbird, a disappointing update for the Atari VCS, and a shiny new Spotify client for your terminal.

Special Guest: Martin Wimpress.

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321: Fresh Install Feels Oct 01, 2019

Show notes

What makes a fresh install of Linux perfect? We ask our panel and share a few tools, tips, and habits that make our Linux installs perfect.

Plus the big little updates coming to Ubuntu MATE, some Pi pontification, and some significant changes for Wireguard.

Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar and Brent Gervais.

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320: RHELhide Sep 24, 2019

Show notes

CentOS goes rolling and announces version 8. Find out why we're excited to take a dip in this stream.

Plus we review what might just be your next Linux laptop, and explain why systemd is coming for your /home.

Special Guest: Neal Gompa.

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Ubuntu Touch on the Pinebook
CentOS 8.1905 — Hello and welcome to the first CentOS-8 release. The CentOS Linux distribution is a stable, predictable, manageable and reproducible platform derived from the sources of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).
CentOS Stream — CentOS Stream will be a rolling-release Linux distro that exists as a midstream between the upstream development in Fedora Linux and the downstream development for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). It is a cleared-path to contributing into future minor releases of RHEL while interacting with Red Hat and other open source developers. This pairs nicely with the existing contribution path in Fedora for future major releases of RHEL.
Transforming the development experience within CentOS — The CentOS Stream project sits between the Fedora Project and RHEL in the RHEL Development process, providing a "rolling preview" of future RHEL kernels and features. This enables developers to stay one or two steps ahead of what’s coming in RHEL, which was not previously possible with traditional CentOS releases
Reinventing Home Directories — The concept of home directories on Linux/UNIX has little changed in the last 39 years. It's time to have a closer look, and bring them up to today's standards, regarding encryption, storage, authentication, user records, and more.
Twitch Becomes Premiere Sponsor of the OBS Project | OBS — We are excited to announce that Twitch is now officially sponsoring my work on the OBS Project! Since 2012 we've maintained a great relationship with Twitch and their engineers. They've always been good to us, and we've always helped each other whenever needed. Twitch has always been one of the biggest supporters of our project, and now it's official.
Free Courses at Linux Academy — On September 17th Linux Torvald first released the Linux Operating System Kernel on September 17th, 1991 so we are celebrating by offering free training for you to increase your Linux Skills.
Texas Cyber Summit — October 10th to the 12th in San Antonio Texas.
Unofficial Hacker Family Dinner & Unbirthday Party | Meetup — Join Chris, Wes, Chz and Ell for a meet and greet with fellow Texas Cyber Summit attendees and a belated celebration of Ell and Allie's Birthdays! There will be good food, good friends, and we hope some good conversation.
System76 Adder Workstation — For content creators, researchers, and gamers.
Adder WS Quickstart Guide
Sys76addws-memspeed Benchmarks
Sys76AdderWS-fio Benchmarks
Sys76AdderWS-graphics-magick Benchmarks
Clevo PB50RC-G
Starship Is A Minimal And Fast Shell Prompt Written In Rust - Linux Uprising Blog
Starship — The cross-shell prompt for astronauts

319: Positive in the Freedom Dimension Sep 17, 2019

Show notes

Richard Stallman has resigned as president and director of the Free Software Foundation, and that's just one of the major shifts this week.

Also what makes Manjaro unique? We chat with one of the founders and find out why it's much more than a desktop environment.

Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar, Bernhard Landauer, Brent Gervais, and Neal Gompa.

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Richard Stallman Resigns — On September 16, 2019, Richard M. Stallman, founder and president of the Free Software Foundation, resigned as president and from its board of directors.
GNOME relationship with GNU and the FSF – Liberal Murmurs — In my capacity as the Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation, I have also written to the FSF. One of the most important parts of my role is to think of the well being of our community and the GNOME mission. One of the GNOME Foundation’s strategic goals is to be an exemplary community in terms of diversity and inclusion. I feel we can’t continue to have a formal association with the FSF or the GNU project when its main voice in the world is saying things that hurt this aim.
balena releases first fully functional 64-bit OS for the Raspberry Pi 4 — Today, we are excited to announce the release of 64-bit balenaOS for the Raspberry Pi 4, providing support for the full 4GB of memory and allowing the simultaneous, side-by-side running of 32-bit and 64-bit Docker containers - a first for the Raspberry Pi 4!
Nextcloud 17 scales up and improves data protection with Remote Wipe, collaborative text editor, 2FA updates, IBM Spectrum Scale support and Global Scale improvements – Nextcloud — Fresh from the Nextcloud conference stage, we are proud to announce a major release of Nextcloud, the easiest solution for secure, on-premises collaboration on documents, calendars and communication! Nextcloud 17 will introduce a series of secure collaboration features including a collaborative text editor, remote wipe, updated secure view, improved two-factor-authentication and easier access than ever with deeper integration of large-scale storage like S3 and IBM Spectrum Scale.
PowerShell on GitHub
PowerShellOnLinux - Home — Our Site is focused on everything PowerShell regardless of which OS you are running but we are specifically focused on Linux and Mac.
PowerShellOnLinux - FavoriteModules — Below you will find a list of PowerShell Modules that we've found useful.
PowerShellOnLinux on Twitter
DM on Twitter
Free Courses at Linux Academy — September 2019 — On September 17th Linux Torvald first released the Linux Operating System Kernel on September 17th, 1991 so we are celebrating by offering free training for you to increase your Linux Skills.
Texas Cyber Summit — October 10th to 12th in San Antonio, Texas.
Linux Headlines — Linux and open source headlines every weekday, in under 3 minutes.
Self-Hosted 1: The First One — You've been wanting to host a Nextcloud instance (or anything else) for your family for a while now. Where on Earth do you start? We share some hard learned lessons about self-hosting, discuss the most important things to consider when building a home server, and Chris gives Alex a hard time about Arch as a Server OS.
Unofficial Hacker Family Dinner & Unbirthday Party | Meetup — Join Chris, Wes, Chz and Ell for a meet and greet with fellow Texas Cyber Summit attendees and a belated celebration of Ell and Allie's Birthdays! There will be good food, good friends, and we hope some good conversation.
Manjaro - enjoy the simplicity — Manjaro is a professionally made Linux based operating system that is a suitable replacement for Windows or MacOS. Multiple Desktop Environments are available through our Official and Community editions. We also work with manufacturers to design dedicated hardware. Visit the shop for more information.
ClipGrab — A friendly downloader for YouTube and other sites
Linux 5.3 - Linux Kernel Newbies
Linux 5.4 Cycle To Begin With exFAT Driver, EPYC Improvements & New GPU Support — Finally there will be mainline exFAT support for that Microsoft file-system with it finally being blessed to be supported under Linux/open-source. The exFAT driver still has a lot of improvements to go (the current code quality has been called horrible) but is already making progress within staging.

318: Manjaro Levels Up Sep 10, 2019

Show notes

It’s official, Manjaro is a legitimate business; so what happens next? We chat with Phil from the project about the huge news.

Plus we share some big news of our own and the strange feels we get from Chrome OS.

Special Guests: Brent Gervais, Ell Marquez, and Philip Muller.

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Kate Planning — Whereas Kate already works well as a general purpose editor, the competition in the text editor space got more intense in the last years. For example Sublime, Atom and Visual Studio Code are things to keep an eye on feature & polishing wise.
Free software advocate Richard Stallman spoke at Microsoft Research this week | ZDNet — Stallman gave a "mostly standard talk," covering the importance of free software, GPL v3, GNU vs. Linux. He added that "he had a list of 'small requests': make Github push users to better software license hygiene, make hardware manufacturers to publish their hardware specs, make it easier to workaround Secure Boot."
Microsoft hosts first Windows Subsystem for Linux conference | ZDNet — Hayden Barnes, founder of Whitewater Foundry, a startup focusing on Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) announced WSLconf 1, the first community conference for WSL.
Manjaro is taking the next step - Announcements - Manjaro Linux Forum — On July 8th, Philip and Bernhard met together with the CEO of Blue Systems to officially found this business entity. As a result, Bernhard and Philip will now be able to commit full-time to Manjaro, while Blue Systems will take a role as an advisor.
Manjaro CommunityBridge
Self-Hosted — Discover new software and hardware to get the best out of your network, control smart devices, and secure your data on cloud services. Self-Hosted is a chat show between Chris and Alex two long-time "self-hosters" who share their lessons and take you on the journey of their new ones.
Linux Headlines — Linux and open source headlines every weekday, in under 3 minutes.
Free Courses at Linux Academy — September 2019 — On September 17th Linux Torvald first released the Linux Operating System Kernel on September 17th, 1991 so we are celebrating by offering free training for you to increase your Linux Skills.
Texas Cyber Summit — October 10th-12th 2019 in San Antonio Texas
Texas Cyber Summit Telegram Group
Unofficial Hacker Family Dinner & Unbirthday Party — Join Chris, Wes, Chz and Ell for a meet and greet with fellow Texas Cyber Summit attendees and a belated celebration of Ell and Allie's Birthdays! There will be good food, good friends, and we hope some good conversation.
LINUX Unplugged 296: Defining Desktop Linux — "[...] a desktop linux operating system where you are able to download the source code for the current version of the kernel, compile it, install it, reboot and boot off the kernel you just compiled and built. If you can't do that, it is not desktop linux." - Wimpy
Linux for Chromebooks could get an installation menu for different distros – About Chromebooks — A Crostini user recently submitted a feature request to provide more options, such as Ubuntu, Fedora or theoretically, any Linux distro that Google could possibly offer.
Google Launches Chrome OS, Says Windows is 'Torturing Users' | CIO — Google co-founder Sergey Brin said Windows and other traditional PC operating systems are "torturing users" at Google's Chrome OS launch event Wednesday, where the company claimed 75% of business users can be converted from Windows to Chrome OS right away.
Elgan: Why Chromebooks will fail | Computerworld
In the Clouds: Inventing Chromebook — While working for Google back in 2006, I had the good fortune to create a new operating system.
dnschneid/crouton: Chromium OS Universal Chroot Environment
Chromebooks can now run Linux in a Chrome OS window – Gigaom — This is cool: Chromebook users can now run their favorite Linux distribution within a window right on their Chrome OS desktop. Google’s own happiness evangelist François Beaufort revealed with a Google+ post Tuesday that Chromebook oners who have set their device in developer mode can download special Crouton Chrome extension to run Linux without being forced to switch back and forth between the two operating systems.
The Google Play store, coming to a Chromebook near you
A new generation of Chromebooks, designed to work with millions of apps
LINUX Unplugged Episode 248: Contain All The Things — Chrome OS is officially getting full-fledged Linux apps, and we ponder if this is truly a win for Linux.
You can now run Linux apps on Chrome OS | TechCrunch — For the longest time, developers have taken Chrome OS machines and run tools like Crouton to turn them into Linux-based developer machines. That was a bit of a hassle, but it worked. But things are getting easier. Soon, if you want to run Linux apps on your Chrome OS machine, all you’ll have to do is switch a toggle in the Settings menu. That’s because Google is going to start shipping Chrome OS with a custom virtual machine that runs Debian Stretch, the current stable version of the operating system.
Chrome OS Stable Channel Gets Linux Apps | Linux Journal
Neverware — Whether you’re a business, a school, or a home user, CloudReady OS is the fast, easy way to convert your hardware to the security and manageability of Google's Chrome ecosystem.
chromefy — Transforming Chromium to Chrome
Brunch with Brent: A Chat with Drew DeVore — Brent sits down with Drew DeVore, Jupiter Broadcasting's latest addition to the Audio Editing Engineer team and cohost of Choose Linux. We chat shoes, his love for linux, adventures in audio, and why JB feels like home.

317: Performance Picks for Kicks Sep 03, 2019

Show notes

We take a trip to visit Level1Tech's Wendell Wilson and come back with some of his performance tips for a smoother Linux desktop.

Plus the story behind exFAT coming to Linux, and the big desktop performance improvements landing next week.

Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar, Brent Gervais, Cassidy James Blaede, Drew DeVore, and Ell Marquez.

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XKCD Forum Hacked — The security breach occurred two months ago, according to security researcher Troy Hunt who alerted the company of the incident, with unknown hackers stealing around 562,000 usernames, email and IP addresses, as well as hashed passwords.
Examining exFAT — Linux kernel developers like to get support for new features — such as filesystem types — merged quickly. In the case of the exFAT filesystem, that didn't happen; exFAT was created by Microsoft in 2006 for use in larger flash-storage cards, but there has never been support in the kernel for this filesystem. Microsoft's recent announcement that it wanted to get exFAT support into the mainline kernel would appear to have removed the largest obstacle to Linux exFAT support. But, as is so often the case, it seems that some challenges remain.
Waypipe Is Successfully Working For This Network-Transparent Wayland Apps/Games Proxy — Waypipe development was successful this summer by student developer Manuel Stoeckl who was working on the effort as part of this year's Google Summer of Code (GSoC). Waypipe is successfully working now for running Wayland games/applications over the network using this proxy mechanism and supports features like compression, multi-threading optimizations, and hardware-accelerated VA-API for video encode/decode across the network.
GSOC 2019 - M. Stoeckl's website — Waypipe supports many quality of life features, including a user-friendly command line wrapper for ssh, hardware accelerated video encoding, transfer compression with either LZ4 or Zstd, and a method to reconnect applications when the ssh connection breaks. With more recent kernels and versions of Mesa that support DMABUFs (GPU-side buffers), it can proxy programs that render images using OpenGL.
What to Expect in GNOME 3.34, Out Next Week - OMG! Ubuntu! — GNOME 3.34 makes it MUCH easier to create app folders in the GNOME Shell ‘Application Overview’, i.e. the grid of app shortcuts you see when pressing the All Apps icon on the Ubuntu Dock.
GNOME 3.34's Mutter Lands A Last-Minute Performance Fix For NVIDIA — Canonical's Daniel van Vugt who is known for his many GNOME performance optimizations over the past two years has been toying with this NVIDIA fix/optimization the past few months and merged the code this morning to Mutter. This change that landed is the removal of GLX threaded swap wait handling for the NVIDIA binary driver.
Geometric Picking Finally Lands In GNOME/Mutter 3.34 For Lowering CPU Usage — This is about cursor movement and now avoiding OpenGL/GPU usage for the color picking operations. That logic is now being done on the CPU without OpenGL but turns out is more efficiently done this way and is able to cause a measurable drop in CPU usage when moving the mouse cursor and especially when moving around windows.
Geometric (OpenGL-less) picking · GNOME / mutter · GitLab) — By avoiding OpenGL and the graphics driver we also reduce CPU usage. Despite reimplementing the logic on the CPU, it still takes less CPU time than going through GL did.
GTK, Adwaita, and Vendor Styles - Platform - GNOME Discourse — After the BoF, we decided to continue the discussion and find actionable items to move things forward to improve Adwaita itself, the situation for app developers, and the experience for downstream vendors that wish to ship a distinct visual style. We decided that continuing here on Discourse is a good plan to keep the discussion persistent and centralized.
The Need for a FreeDesktop Dark Style Preference - GUADEC 2019 - Videos — Cassidy has been observing and researching dark styles in consumer software for several months, and conducted a user study with over 1,500 participants. In this talk he shares his research, observations, prior art, and requirements for a dark style preference on FreeDesktop platforms.
gamemode — GameMode is a daemon/lib combo for Linux that allows games to request a set of optimisations be temporarily applied to the host OS and/or a game process.
Free Courses at Linux Academy — September 2019 – Linux Academy — On September 17th Linux Torvald first released the Linux Operating System Kernel on September 17th, 1991 so we are celebrating by offering free training for you to increase your Linux Skills.
Texas Cyber Summit — October 10th-12th in San Antonio, Texas.
Unofficial Hacker Family Dinner & Unbirthday Party | Meetup — Join us for a meet and greet with fellow Texas Cyber Summit attendees and a belated celebration of Ell and Allie's Birthdays! There will be good food, good friends, and we hope some good conversation.
Level1Linux Channel
Chatting With Alex and Chris From The Self Hosted Podcast! - Level1Linux
cpufreq - GNOME Shell Extensions — This is a lightweight CPU frequency scaling monitor and powerful CPU management tool. The extension is using standard cpufreq kernel modules to collect information and manage governors. It needs root permission to able changing governors.
i7z — A better i7 (and now i3, i5) reporting tool for Linux.
CPUFREQ Extension
throttled — Workaround for Intel throttling issues in Linux.
Re: [X1C6/T480s] low cTDP and trip temperature in Linux - Page 9 - Lenovo Community — The good news: This problem is being very actively investigated and we (Lenovo) hope to have a solution soon.
Jupiter.Gallery — Our self-hosted photo gallery powered by Lychee. Send your photos to chz at jupiterbroadcasting.com.
Lychee — A great looking and easy-to-use photo-management-system you can run on your server, to manage and share photos.
Audio in Linux question — Is there something lacking in our ALSA/JACK/PuleAudio stack that I'm not aware of? We obviously can do pro audio production, given Ardour, REAPER and even Audacity. What's missing?
zFRAG by LostTrainDude — Defrag your mind by manually defragging a virtual Hard Disk, sector by sector, or enable the AUTODEFRAG to sit back and watch it do it on its own.
meshroom: 3D Reconstruction Software — Meshroom is a free, open-source 3D Reconstruction Software based on the AliceVision Photogrammetric Computer Vision framework.

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