LINUX Unplugged

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Episode 276: Very Long Term Support Nov 20, 2018

Show notes

Android and Ubuntu are working exceptionally hard to create longer support cycles. We’ll highlight the work that makes this possible, and what’s motivating these two different projects to strive for Very Long Term Support.

Plus Chris reviews how his new Thunderbolt 3 GPU docking station works under Linux, and why he’ll never be undocking again.

Special Guests: Alan Pope, Brent Gervais, and Martin Wimpress.

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Pioneers — Pioneers, the wonderfully addicting game based on "The Settlers of Catan"
XPRA — multi-platform screen and application forwarding system or "screen for X11"
Valve discontinues the Steam Link — Farewell to the Steam Link, the best wireless HDMI gadget ever made
Bringing the Android kernel back to the mainline — Android devices are based on the Linux kernel but, since the beginning, those devices have not run mainline kernels.
Linux Deepin 15.8 Released with Various Neat Improvements
Ubuntu 18.04 LTS is getting 10-Year Support
Ubuntu Security Podcast
LINUX Unplugged Feedback: Docking Stations?
Lenovo G0A10170UL Thunderbolt 3 Graphics Dock
Lenovo Thunderbolt 3 Dock on Debian Linux | The Blog of Juho
Thunderbolt 3 device manager
prime-select: A fork of FedoraPrime enhanced for all linux distributions
Black Friday Sale | Linux Academy
Name the Automation System — Which two names work best for the Jupiter Broadcasting Automation system?
Feedback from Albert: Youtube on the Desktop?
Minitube, YouTube app for Mac, Windows and Linux
youtube-dl — youtube-dl is a command-line program to download videos from YouTube
webtty: Share a terminal session over WebRTC
unite-shell: Unite makes GNOME Shell look like Ubuntu Unity Shell.
WireGuard VPN Road Warrior Setup

Episode 275: Year of the Relevant Desktop Nov 13, 2018

Show notes

Christian F.K. Schaller from Red Hat joins us to discuss seamless Linux upgrades, replacing PulseAudio, some of the recent desktop Projects Red Hat’s been working on... And the value they get from them.

Plus a big batch of important community news, Wimpy’s Thunderbolt Dock experiments, and way to run pacman on any Linux distribution.

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

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Radio Garden
PlayStation Classic relies on open source emulator for its 20 games - SlashGear — Kotaku got some early hands-on time with the PlayStation Classic and discovered that it uses the PCSX ReARMed emulator.
snes9x — For those packaging the GTK+ port, note that building with GTK+ 3 is now highly recommended over GTK+ 2 and should have no regressions. Also note that Wayland compatibility is implemented, which, if enabled, also requires GTK+ to have been compiled with Wayland support.
Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth says he has no plans to sell anytime soon — “I value my independence,” he told me during a brief chat on the outskirts of the OpenStack Summit in Berlin today. In part, that’s because he simply doesn’t personally need the money but also because he’d like to see through to the end his vision for Canonical and Ubuntu
Open Invention Network Expands Linux Definition — The expansion includes 151 new packages, bringing the total number of protected packages to 2,873. “With this update to the Linux System definition, OIN continues with its well-established process of carefully maintaining a balance between stability and innovative core open source technology,” stated Mirko Boehm, OIN’s director for the Linux System definition. “While the majority of the new additions are widely used and found in most devices, the update includes a number of key open source innovations such as Kubernetes, Apache Cassandra and packages for Automotive Grade Linux.”
Bitwarden Completes Third-party Security Audit — We are pleased to announce that Bitwarden has completed a thorough security audit and cryptographic analysis from the security experts at Cure53.
Adding an optional install duration to LVFS firmware — We’ve just added an optional feature to fwupd and the LVFS that some people might find useful: The firmware update process can now tell the user how long in seconds the update is going to take.
Help wanted - SuperTuxKart networking testers
Supertuxkart
PipeWire Hackfest — The event kicked off with Wim Taymans presenting on current state of PipeWire and outlining the remaining issues and current thoughts on how to resolve them. Most of the first day was spent on a roadtable discussion about what are and should be the goals of PipeWire and what potential tradeoffs there would be going forward.
Thunderbolt 3 GPU Dock — Integrated NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 graphics card.
Automation System Name Poll — Vote on the Automation System name.
Junest — The lightweight Arch Linux based distro that runs upon any Linux distros without root access.
Wimpy’s xrandr Script

Episode 274: Open Source by Default Nov 06, 2018

Show notes

Have the revolutionaries won the war against proprietary software? That’s the argument being made. And we argue, what else did you expect?

Plus some performance improvements inbound to Linux, and the perfectly proportioned open source project we’ve recently discovered.

Special Guests: Alan Pope and Brent Gervais.

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Celebrate Fifteen Years of Fedora — On November 6, 2003, Red Hat announced Fedora Core 1
KDE Connect — Today we released version 1.10 of the KDE Connect Android app. Therefore it’s time again to share what we’ve been working on.
Apple's New Hardware With The T2 Security Chip Will Currently Block Linux From Booting — At least until further notice, these new Apple systems sporting the T2 chip will not be able to boot Linux operating systems
ProcDump-for-Linux: A Linux version of the ProcDump Sysinternals tool — A Linux version of the ProcDump Sysinternals tool
The Faster FUSE Has Been Fused Into Linux 4.20 — Performance work for FUSE in this next version of the Linux kernel includes symlink caching, a hash table optimization, and copy file range support.
The Open Source Revolution Is Over - the Revolutionaries Won — What happens when the revolutionaries win? After they've stormed the castle, tried on the king's clothes, slept in his bed and drunk the royal wine, then what?
Hybrid Cloud Architecture: What Is It and Why You Should Care
Huginn: Create agents that monitor and act on your behalf. — Create agents that monitor and act on your behalf. Your agents are standing by!
Automation System Naming Form
CPod: An Open Source, Cross-platform Podcast App — It is an Election app, which gives it the ability to run on the largest operating systems (Linux, Windows, Mac OS).

Episode 273: International Hat Machines Oct 30, 2018

Show notes

We speculate about a future where IBM owns Red Hat, and review the latest Fedora 29 release that promises a new game changing feature.

Plus Chris returns from MeetBSD with his review, and we get the inside scope on System76’s Thelio hardware.

Special Guests: Alan Pope and Martin Wimpress.

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LKML: Greg KH: Linux 4.19 — These past few months has been a tough one for our community, as it is our community that is fighting from within itself, with prodding from others outside of it. Don't fall into the cycle of arguing about those "others" in the "Judean People's Front" when we are the "We're the People's Front of Judea!" That is the trap that countless communities have fallen into over the centuries. We all share the same goal, let us never loose sight of that.
Samsung Open-Source Group Reportedly Shuts Down - Phoronix — Samsung has apparently shut down the Samsung Open-Source Group (Samsung OSG) as a blow to the wider free software ecosystem considering the group's prolific contributions over the years from low-level open-source projects to desktop/user-facing code-bases.
You Can Play Over 2,600 Windows Games on Linux Via Steam Play
ProtonDB
ThinkPad Thunderbolt 3 Workstation Dock — The ThinkPad Thunderbolt 3 WorkStation Dock is a pioneering docking solution powered by Intel Thunderbolt technology and is designed exclusively for ThinkPad Mobile Workstations, delivering up to 230W power to charge both notebook and a full range of productivity and connectivity peripherals.
System76 Shares With Us More Details On Thelio Open Hardware, Pricing Starts At $1,100 USD
System76 on US Manufacturing and Open Hardware — To further our open computer ambition, we’re working to remove functionality from the proprietary mainboard. To that end, we designed Thelio Io, a daughter board that manages thermal and chassis control while also providing a storage backplane for the drives in Thelio. It’s open hardware and open source firmware, and a big step in the right direction.
1 Billion pulls from Docker Hub.
IBM TO ACQUIRE RED HAT — IBM will acquire all of the issued and outstanding common shares of Red Hat for $190.00 per share in cash, representing a total enterprise value of approximately $34 billion.
Statement on the IBM acquisition of Red Hat — Nevertheless, the world has moved on. Replacing UNIX is no longer sufficient. The decline in RHEL growth contrasted with the acceleration in Linux more broadly is a strong market indicator of the next wave of open source. Public cloud workloads have largely avoided RHEL.
RHEL 7.6 Released — Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6 is designed to be the trusted bedrock for hybrid cloud deployments
Announcing the release of Fedora 29 — This release is particularly exciting because it’s the first to include the Fedora Modularity feature across all our different variants. Modularity lets us ship different versions of packages on the same Fedora base.
What is Modularity :: Fedora Docs Site — Different users have different needs. Developers want the latest versions possible, system administrators want stability for longer period of time. There are many Linux distributions out there, each targeting a different audience, for example Fedora vs. CentOS.
Working with modules in Fedora — This article puts one of those modules to practical use, covering installation and setup of Review Board 3.0 using modules.
Blog - Chris Goes to MeetBSD — MeetBSD 2018 took place at the sprawling Intel Santa Clara campus. The venue itself felt more like an olive branch than a simple friendly gesture by Intel. In truth it felt like a bit of an apology. You get the subtle sense they feel bad about how the BSD's were treated with the Meltdown and Specter flaws.
TAP ROOM For the Ask Noah Party
Dbxfs - Mount Dropbox Folder Locally As Virtual File System In Linux — The dbxfs officially supports Linux and Mac OS. However, it should work on any POSIX system that provides a FUSE-compatible library or has the ability to mount SMB shares.
PSA: Dropbox ext4 limitation workaround — Create a loopback!
TaskBook — Popey recommended!

Episode 272: Prepare for Pipewire Oct 23, 2018

Show notes

The lead developer of PipeWire Wim Taymans joins us to discuss Linux’s multimedia past, and its exciting future. They promise to greatly improve handling of audio and video under Linux.

Plus we review the professional grade Precision 5530, tour our new studio in a box, and release one of our first production tools as free software!

Special Guest: Wim Taymans.

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JACK Audio Connection Kit|Home
GetJacked · GitHub — Some simple scripts to build a "Studio in a Box" with JACK.
PipeWire — PipeWire is a project that aims to greatly improve handling of audio and video under Linux.
PipeWire Wiki
Launching Pipewire!
Precision 15 Inch 5530 Developer Edition — Dell’s thinnest, lightest and smallest 15" mobile workstation is more powerful than ever.
Precision 5530 Benchmarks — JB1 Reaper Custom Build vs Dell Precision 5300
TechSNAP Episode 385: 3 Things to Know About Kubernetes — Kubernetes expert Will Boyd joins us to explain the top 3 things to know about Kubernetes
TechSNAP Episode 386: What Makes Google Cloud Different — We bring on our Google Cloud expert and explore the fundamentals, demystify some of the magic, and ask what makes Google Cloud different.
TechSNAP Episode 387: Private Cloud Building Blocks — We bring in Amy Marrich to break down the building blocks of OpenStack.

Episode 271: Juno Jubilation Oct 16, 2018

Show notes

elementary OS’ latest and greatest released today, and we talk with Dan and Cassidy from the project about their biggest release yet.

Then community news, a preview of upcoming Ubuntu 18.10, and we announce our own free software project. Plus a chat with Dalton about the new Ubuntu Touch release and we find a real Photoshop replacement for Linux.

Special Guests: Alan Pope, Brent Gervais, Cassidy James Blaede, Dalton Durst, Danielle Foré, and Martin Wimpress.

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Tiny Palm smartphone baffles gadget fans - BBC News — A tiny Android smartphone designed to be a "companion phone".
KDE e.V. receives a sizeable donation from Handshake Foundation | KDE.news — We are excited to announce that the KDE e.V. received a donation of 300,000 USD from the Handshake Foundation.
elementary OS 5 Juno is Here — Refinement, Productivity, & an Improved Developer Platform.
Allen questions the Flatpak FUD - Pastebin.com
Flatpaks, sandboxes and security — What Flatpak brings to this is understanding of the specific desktop app problem space
Should GNOME Drop Support for GTK3 Themes? — It seems that our love of customisation is merely an illusion
Restyling apps at scale — tl;dr: If you want to change how an app looks, you need a designer in the loop.
DXVK 0.90 released : linux
Pumpkin Carving Contest #JackOLinux — Submission deadline is October 24, 2018, and the top 3 winners will be announced on October 31st!
Chrome OS Stable Channel Gets Linux Apps
Did Microsoft Really Just “Open Source All Its Patents”?? — This means the company can use or distribute ‘Linux System’ technologies without risk that another OIN participant may assert their patents against such ‘Linux System’ technologies.
Ubuntu 18.10 Release Date and New Features [Updated] | It's FOSS
GPD Pocket 2 Preview — The GPD Pocket 2 is a handheld computer that looks like a laptop, but which is small enough to fold up and slide into your pocket.
UBports — Ubuntu Touch is the touch-friendly mobile version of Ubuntu. This operating system is developed and maintained by UBports: An international community of passionate volunteers. This means Ubuntu Touch is 100% community driven and independent. Read more about the OS
Ubuntu Touch OTA-5 — While many have already joined the community on 16.04 with OTA-4, in addition to the long-term support of upstream Ubuntu development, OTA-5 will include a more stable experience, new tweaks, and new features to show off this next stage of Ubuntu Touch development.
Dalton Durst's GitHub
DaltonDurst - Ubuntu Wiki
Automation System Naming
Jupiter Broadcasting · GitHub
Photopea

Episode 270: Stratis Pulls it All Together Oct 09, 2018

Show notes

Red Hat developer Andy Grover joins us to discuss Stratis Storage, an alternative to ZFS on Linux and its recent milestone.

Also Google subtracts Plus, some KDE and GNOME news, and a bit of forgotten Linux history.

Special Guests: Alan Pope, Alex Kretzschmar, Andy Grover, and Martin Wimpress.

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IRL Glasses
Google Exposed User Data, Feared Repercussions of Disclosing to Public — Google exposed the private data of hundreds of thousands of users of the Google+ social network and then opted not to disclose the issue this past spring, in part because of fears that doing so would draw regulatory scrutiny and cause reputational damage, according to people briefed on the incident and documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
Project Strobe — The consumer version of Google+ currently has low usage and engagement: 90 percent of Google+ user sessions are less than five seconds.
Google Has 'No Plans' to Enable Chrome Hardware Acceleration on Linux
KDE Plasma 5.14 — A lot of work has gone into improving Discover, Plasma's software manager, and, among other things, we have added a Firmware Update feature and many subtle user interface improvements to give it a smoother feel.
Farewell, application menus! — These menus have been with us since the beginning of the GNOME 3.0 series, but we’re planning on retiring them for the next GNOME release (version 3.32).
Creative Selection (Audiobook) by Ken Kocienda
Eazel - Wikipedia — Eazel was founded by Andy Hertzfeld in August 1999 in Mountain View, California. It had 22 initial employees and raised $12 million from a number of venture capital investment companies
Eazel launches Nautilus software then lays off 40 workers — After releasing the first version of its new Nautilus open-source desktop software with much fanfare Monday, Eazel Inc. bit the bullet just a day later and laid off more than half of its 70-member staff
Jobs at Linux Academy
Andy Grover (@iamagrover) — Hacks on @StratisStorage at Red Hat, and has other creative dreams too. Bass. Rustlang. Mostly cat and political retweets these days.
Stratis Storage (@StratisStorage) — Easy to use local storage for Linux.
Stratis Storage Project Page
Stratis: Easy local storage management for Linux [LWN.net] — Stratis is a new local storage-management solution for Linux. It can be compared to ZFS, Btrfs, or LVM. Its focus is on simplicity of concepts and ease of use, while giving users access to advanced storage features. Internally, Stratis's implementation favors tight integration of existing components instead of the fully-integrated, in-kernel approach that ZFS and Btrfs use.
XFS vs EXT4 – Comparing MongoDB Performance on AWS EC2 — In performance terms, XFS is indeed a force multiplier when paired with high speed disks that it can take real advantage from. For low to mid-end systems, it doesn’t seem to be able to do much to improve your performance.
Todoist for Linux, an electron wrapper for the official Todoist web app. — Todoist for Linux, an electron wrapper for the official Todoist web app.

Episode 269: Alternate Desktop Universe Oct 02, 2018

Show notes

What if desktop computing went a very different direction in the late 90s? Deeply multithreaded from the start, fast, intuitive, and extremely stable. This is the world of Haiku, and we go for a visit.

Plus the latest community news, true flicker freedom comes to Fedora, and our favorite tools for easy virtual machines on our laptops.

Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar and Brent Gervais.

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System76 To Release A "New Open-Source Computer"
Fedora 29 Succeeds At Flicker-Free Boot Experience On Intel Hardware
Google gets into game streaming with Project Stream and Assassin’s Creed Odyssey in Chrome
Halloween Documents
BeOS R5
R1/beta1 – Release Notes | Haiku Project — It’s been just about a month less than six years since Haiku’s last release in November 2012
Ars spends too much time trying to work in Haiku, the BeOS successor — What starts as a joke Turned into a fool's errand "I'll work in Haiku."
The Be Book - The Application Kit
s-tui: Terminal based CPU stress and monitoring utility — Terminal based CPU stress and monitoring utility
Lenovo-throttling-fix — Workaround for Intel throttling issues in Linux.
fwupd - ArchWiki — fwupd is a simple daemon allowing to update some devices firmware, including UEFI BIOS for several machines.
Virtual Machine Manager Home — The virt-manager application is a desktop user interface for managing virtual machines through libvirt. It primarily targets KVM VMs, but also manages Xen and LXC (linux containers).
Kimchi — Kimchi is an HTML5 based management tool for KVM. It is designed to make it as easy as possible to get started with KVM and create your first guest.
python-imaging Ubuntu Package

Episode 268: Elementary, My Dear Plasma Sep 25, 2018

Show notes

We chat with Nate Graham who’s pushing to make Plasma the best desktop on the planet. We discuss his contributions to this effort, and others.

Plus we get the scope on a new Juno feature from the source, and the creator of WSLinux a distro built specifically for Windows 10’s Windows Subsystem for Linux joins us.

Also some community news, some old friends stop by, and more!

Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar, Brent Gervais, Cassidy James Blaede, Hayden Barnes, Martin Wimpress, and Nate Graham.

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ytdl-webserver: 📻 Webserver for downloading youtube videos. Ready for docker.
Google Secretly Logs Users Into Chrome Whenever They Log Into a Google Site — Starting with Chrome 69, whenever a Chrome user would access a Google-owned site, the browser would take that user's Google identity and log the user into the Chrome in-browser account system
Christoph Tavan on Twitter — "Clear all Cookies except Google Cookies", thanks Chrome."
PlayOnLinux 5.0 Alpha Released With Redesigned UI, Phoenicis — PlayOnLinux 5.0 Alpha has a completely redesigned user-interface and rolls out their new "Phoenicis" platform. This new platform is decentralized, Git-based, and improves POL's script engine. The current PlayOnLinux 5.0 Alpha release has support for about 135 different games.
AppCenter and Content Ratings — Starting with Juno, we’ll display a content warning when a user goes to download an app that meets or exceeds a certain level of OARS data—think nudity, violence, or language content.
Getting the team together to revolutionize Linux audio — With the video part of PipeWire already in production we decided the time has come to try to accelerate the development of the audio bits. So PipeWire creator Wim Taymans, PulseAudio developer Arun Raghavan and myself decided to try to host a PipeWire hackfest this fall to bring together many of the core Linux audio developers to try to hash out a plan and a roadmap.
Precision 15 Inch 5530 Mobile Workstation Laptop
Nate Graham is creating KDE Plasma | Patreon — I'm Nate Graham, and I'm on a mission to make KDE Plasma the best and most widely-used computer operating system interface on planet Earth.
KDE's Goals for 2018 and Beyond | KDE.news — Nate reasons that focusing on irksome details of the most common and commonly used of KDE's software, such as Plasma, Dolphin, Okular and Discover, would be the first step towards polishing the whole.
This week in Usability & Productivity, part 37 — Here’s your latest Usability & Productivity report–and we’ve got all kinds of goodies to share!
Recommended Watch: Konquering the World
'Netflix for Open Source' Wants Developers to Get Paid — A startup called Tidelift hopes to help these unsung programmers get paid with a business model the company compares to Netflix. The idea is that a company pays a subscription fee to Tidelift, which takes a cut and then distributes the remainder to open source projects that the subscriber uses, such as Babel. In exchange, the subscriber gets assurance that the software is properly maintained.
Tidelift
WLinux — A Linux distro optimized for WSL based on Debian.
WLinux: GitHub
John's +1 to Root on ZFS
zedenv — ZFS boot environment manager
Traefik - The Cloud Native Edge Router / Reverse Proxy / Load Balancer
KDE - KDE Community Code of Conduct

Episode 267: People Patches Sep 19, 2018

Show notes

Linus takes a break and the Linux kernel adopts a new Code of Conduct. We work through these major watershed moments, and discuss what it means for the community.

Plus our review of our brand new ThinkPad T480’s running Linux, the bug you need to know about, and why this might be one of the greatest Linux laptops of all time.

Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar, Brent Gervais, Danielle Foré, and Eric Hendricks.

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