Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.
00:00 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Hey, this week we talk about Linux on the X Elite, and then we give Cosmic a try, and then it's AMD's new Ryzen chips, more news about Canonical and the malicious compliance, maybe that the kernel is up to. We talk about Germany funding open source software and celebrate Libcurl's 24 years. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned. Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Twit. This is the Untitled Linux Show, episode 164, recorded August 10th. Not entirely headless. Hey folks, it is Saturday and you know what that means. It's time to get geeky, to geek out about Linux and all things open source. It is the Untitled Linux Show. It is of course not just me here today. We've got the regular crew. Welcome guys. Rob might be a little bit more suntanned after coming back from vacation, although we were thinking before the show. He may have just set his lights a little warmer to make himself look suntanned. We're not sure yeah we're not.
01:08
We're not sure yet, but uh, that aside, we've got some linux news. There's some stuff going on this week and we're going to talk about it and we're going to let rob go first and rob. What do you have to lead us off with?
01:21 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
yes, so this is a moment we have all been waiting for. The moment we've been waiting for is upon us. I have returned. But there's also the Snapdragon elite arm chipset and the laptops we've been waiting for since they were announced several months ago. So coming out.
01:41
You know, they came out initially with Windows installed by default, but we've all been imagining getting our Linux installed on an X-Lite and what that might be like. Much in the same way, linux first came out on the Apple M1s, if you kind of recall how that was, with a lot of critical things really not working at the first release at the beginning at least, yeah. But unlike Apple's M1 chips, the patching is coming from the chip manufacturer themselves rather than a third party like Asahi having to reverse engineer everything Apple did or somebody did. They posted Linux kernel patches for support to the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 devices powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 system on a chip or SoC. But with this and other Snapdragon X1 chips there are, as I said, critical things not working. The feature status it's mostly on par with the other excellent machines. Notably, it's lacking in usb a uh, probably usb over a surface connector. Also, uh, the sd card reader isn't working yet.
03:19
Touchscreen and touchpad support, keyboard support, um, audio support, but it seems like that. Well, it seems like the keyboard might be an easy one to fix, but, yeah, so not quite quite yet ready yet for us in any productive terms. I mean, if you don't have a keyboard or touchpad or touchscreen, that's a real functional laptop, isn't it? But these chips, you know they came out just this summer. So this quick jump to provide Linux support, it is promising, and you know why? Not a Linux Surface laptop, as my first powerful ARM laptop. You know, so far the Surface Pro has been kind of the best Linux device I could find tablet I could find to put Linux on. So you know, once we get these figured out, hopefully quickly, hopefully a little faster than the Apple Silicon took, hopefully with some help we'll be able to get this X-Lite analytics going. Otherwise, I know we have some stories about other people providing that chip. I think there's a future here coming, qualcomm's even helping it along, which is great. But we're not there yet.
04:46 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, so when you say you don't have keyboard support, you don't have mouse support. Like it is, these things have USB ports. The USB ports I hope work so you can plug in a keyboard and you can plug in a mouse, so it's not like they're completely unusable.
04:59 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yeah.
05:00 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
They're not entirely headless, but that does kind of kill part of the point of a laptop if you can't use the keyboard USB-A into a USB-A slot on it. Yeah, probably. I don't know. Some of these are probably USB-C only.
05:17 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yeah, but that's one of the things that it says it's lacking.
05:21 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, USB-A is one of the things that's lacking.
05:27 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So well, there's USB, there's usbc. I would. I would think maybe these are not very usable at all. I was, I was, I was gonna make this, I was gonna make fun of you for for talking about them not being usable when you plug it, maybe you can't plug a keyboard into them, yeah if there is a us-C, I suppose you could have a dock.
05:45 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
You could dual boot Windows and Linux and you could use Windows as a laptop and then, when you want to dock it in, you can boot up into Linux and use your keyboard and stuff. Does Bluetooth work with it?
06:04 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Well, you know, that wasn't on the list of things that didn't work. You know it would be quite hilarious if Bluetooth works on these before USB-A does. That would be something and you end up having to use a Bluetooth keyboard and Bluetooth mouse. What a world. What a world, All right. Well, let's move on to the old and reliable x86-64 chipset that we all know and love. And there's some AMD news, or is it benchmarking News? Benchmarking performance, all of the above.
06:35 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
All of the above and the keyboard's been working since the early 90s.
06:42
So big news this week we have some new CPUpus to look at. Our friend michael arable over at phronix was hard at work running more than 400 benchmarks on the new amd ryzen 5 9600x and the ryzen 7 9700x. They're not drastically different from the older generation of products, core wise and layout, other than the zen 5 improvements. Ryzen 5 9600x is a six core, 12 thread zen 5 processor with a 3.9 gigahertz base clock and 5.4 gigahertz boost clock, while having a 32 megabyte l3 cache and a 65 watt tdp rating. That's the kind of the power rating, but the TDP is runs through a special formula and don't take that as a literal amount. It's supposed to be a funky thermal rating. But bigger takes more power, lower takes less power, that's. That's about all you can get from it. This processor is launching tomorrow at $279, which I guess it's time of the article it's already launched. So $280 for that six-core. Ryzen 7 9700X is an eight-core, 16-thread Zen 5 desktop processor with a 3.8 gigahertz base frequency and a maximum boost clock of 5.5 gigahertz, 32 megabytes L3 cache again and a 65-watt TDP. The Ryzen 7 9700X is launching at a suggested price of $359, which I believe is cheaper than the previous generation Not a ton, but it's in the ballpark there For its launch price, not what you can get them at today.
08:28
Linux compatibility is good and there shouldn't be any issues with the existing AM5 motherboards. But know that you're going to have to make sure you have a recent BIOS. An update might be in order. One caveat is the power monitoring Michael talks about. There are a couple of patches needed if you're going to dive deep into power monitoring while benchmarking. The fixes are known and making their way into the normal channels. Early adopters just have to do a little work if you want the power monitor programs. But, as noted in the article, that isn't something that the normal person uses. That's just only benchmarking type power monitoring. The other minor hiccup is for compiler support. Gcc 14.1 has Zen 5 enabled, but it released in April. So there are a lot of programs out there which are not Zen 5 aware and the LLVM slash Clang compiler doesn't have support yet. This isn't the end of the world, it just means that the code which is generated isn't the most optimized With GCC 14.1 out only recently. That means that the release cycle with other programs lots of them are not going to have support yet but it'll be flowing out as more programs release, with the new compiled under 14.1.
09:41
Getting back to the benchmarking, michael performed a ton of AMD 5000 series, 7000 series and 8000 series CPUs alongside it Remember, the 8000 are mobile processors and he also included a bunch of Intel 13th and 14th Gen as well. There are a total of 29 CPUs included in this vast array of benchmarks. Included in this vast array of benchmarks, all the processors were tested on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS with the Linux 6.10 kernel and GCC 13.2 as the default compiler. All motherboards were their latest BIOS. Excuse me, two terabyte Corsair MP700 Pro NVMe SSDs and a Radeon RX 7900 GRE graphics were used throughout. All DDR5 capable processors were using two 16 gigabyte DDR5 6000 speed memory, while the Ryzen 5000 series was using two 16 gigabyte DDR4 3600 memory.
10:42
It should go without saying that I'm going to just talk about the geometric mean of the results, but with 400 benchmarks, you should take a look at the article in the show notes to get a lot better idea of what the benefit of the new CPUs would be to you, based on something close to your workload.
10:57
The 9600 improved over the 7600 by a factor of 1.25, and the 9700 came in at an improvement of 1.15. He did call out the new CPUs are very impressive in the single-threaded workloads, the AVX512 workloads and other heavy computational workloads. Notice, I didn't say gaming. Michael says it made great strides in gaming and while it is better, that's going to be a mixed bag. I want to call out that there were limited gaming benchmarks and most of the benchmarks focused on heavier workloads. You know the Blender, compile times database, things like that. If you look at the internet, I found the results at other sites like Jays2Sans, gamersnexus, levelonetex and so on. You know to say that while AI and more computational workloads are better and give the CPU a good review, gaming not so much.
11:49
I'll quote Steve at Gamers Nexus when he said for the gaming conclusion meh at least it isn't Intel which that's referencing the issues that have been that Intel has been having of late. So this is my personal opinion right now. But if I was gaming, I wouldn't get the new CPUs unless you're coming from at least 5000 series or older. And if I could, I would still get a 7800X 3D instead. I don't think I would upgrade, no matter you know what my workload was from a 7000 series unless there was a specific workload that you were doing which showed a huge improvement in the benchmarks. There are rumors of 9000 x3 cd cpus coming out in a month, but those are rumors and we'll have to wait for an official announcement of when we can see those. If you want a game, I would wait for the 9000 x3d series.
12:45
If you have a reason to upgrade. You know, if you're still running something recent, I don't think there's a real compelling reason to upgrade. It's not like it's a huge jump. Now a lot of people have been raving about the power efficiency, so it does take a lot less power. So if that's important to you, that could make this a lot more uh, a better, a better reason to to upgrade as well. But if you're happy with your CPU, I don't know, as I would uh jump. There's nothing wrong with them, they work great. It's just that you know sometimes you're you're better off skipping a few generations before you upgrade. Personally, right now I'm running a 7900. I'm not going to the 9000 unless series, unless there's something the x3d come out with something mind-blowing. But right now I'm just going to stay where I'm at. Uh, since this segment is getting rather long, I'll just stop it here. But are there any comments about the new hardware from my co-hosts? Are there any comments about the new hardware from my co-hosts so one thing, how many?
13:45 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
did you enter? Go ahead, john. One thing you mentioned. It's not worth upgrading. It might be worth pointing out. There are a handful of new instructions in there and some of the interesting ones are there are some AI-related instructions. So if you're doing the AI thing large language models or machine learning, all of that stuff it might be important.
14:06 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yes, and that was reference to the look at the benchmarks, because there are a few. It really jumps ahead. But average everyday kind of gaming surfing the web, playing videos probably not so much. But again, it depends where you're at. If you're on a 3000 or 2000, 1000 series, that's going to be a pretty monstrous upgrade.
14:28 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's right Ken.
14:30 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I'm just thinking. I went from an AMD Athlon 2 to a Ryzen 7 7700. When should I plan for my next upgrade based on that? When?
14:41 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
you retire?
14:43 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, at your current rate, another 10 years, yeah my ryzen, uh uh, 5000 series is working just fine.
14:52 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
So when I see the performance, uh double compared to what I currently have.
14:56 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
In other words, yeah, you did more than double though from the other, the other one yeah, you should have upgraded quite a while ago from what you were running.
15:09 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
All right, let's chat about funding open source software, and Germany is taking the lead here, ken, what's the scoop?
15:18 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Well, jonathan, first I want to warn everybody. This story took me down a rabbit hole of interesting information that I am still reading. This story is from FOSS Forces' Christine Hall, who writes about a new program to fund maintainers of open source projects. It is, as Jonathan said, germany's sovereign tech fund and is expected to be up and running by the end of this year. We all know open source software maintainers are the unsung heroes who keep important open source infrastructure software up to date and free from bugs and security vulnerabilities, while usually receiving no financial compensation receiving no financial compensation.
16:08
Now Mirko Swillis and I apologize if I'm mispronouncing that program manager at Sovereign Tech Fund wrote in a blog announcing the fund's new Fellowship for Maintainers program, and here I'm quoting open source infrastructure is the backbone of our digital world and the work of the people who maintain it is essential to ensuring the security and availability of this global resource.
16:33
They lead project development, review changes, manage community interactions and tackle security issues security issues. With this new fellowship program, we're directly investing in the people behind the code by paying maintainers of critical open source components for their work. According to Christine's article and Mirko's blog, the new program's details are still a work in progress. As of right now, it would have three components as cornerstones. These are impactful work, diverse engagement options and the last one is mentorship and growth. According to Merco, sovereign Tech Fund expects to begin accepting applications by the end of September, with selected maintainers beginning their fellowships before the end of September, with selected maintainers beginning their fellowships before the end of the year. As I said earlier, the links in Christine's article started me on a trip down the rabbit hole. So if you want more details to include numbers and more background, I recommend starting your own trip by following those links in our show notes to Christine's article and Mirko's blog.
17:48 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Ken, are they looking to fund just developers that are in Germany, or is this open to the rest of the world? Do you know?
17:55 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
One of the rabbit hole side tracks was to the United Nations Open Source Conference. I forget the name of it off the top of my head and I don't want to take the time to find that link again. So it sounds like they're going to be maybe going international, especially considering one of the links did mention some of the recent guests on links did mention some of the recent guests on Floss as some of the people that are going to be funding.
18:31
Or may already be funding. Which group is that? I want to say Zed was one of them. Ah, interesting.
18:39 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Very cool. You know it's, it is, and we talk about this here, we talk about it on Floss, but this need for open source developers to keep the lights on and pay their own rent is kind of a big deal. But the other thing that this really taps into is that we as a society, as a world, at this point we depend so much on open source programs and open source software staying up to date and getting bug fixes, and we really don't yet have a good system in place for paying people to do that. We're getting there, but you do have some projects and some people that just kind of get looked over for some of the things that are out there. So we welcome everyone trying to work on the solution to that. I guess, is the way to say it. All right, well, if nobody else has any comments about that, we can talk about Cosmic.
19:34
I know Rob is just chomping at the bit. He wants to talk to him about it. He wants to talk to it too. We're going to talk to Carl Ritchell here in about a week, week and a half. But Rob, are you running the show from cosmic? Surely you're not that brave? I am not that brave.
19:51 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, that's good it may be ready it may be ready soon.
19:56
Uh, I actually had a crash on me once when I was, uh, playing with it in a virtual machine. So, yeah, you know, let's just get on with the story here. But so you know, several months ago we did talk about, uh, talk about cosmic on the show about and the great progress that system 76 was making in developing their new cosmic desktop environment. And, for those who watched the video, I gave a quick look, a quick demo on how it was at the time. And at that time it wasn't too hard to test out simply by installing a few packages, and although the layout was mostly there, they still had some work to do. Pretty obviously you could have got by with it if you really had to, but there was some missing things. This week, popos 24.04's Alpha with Cosmic Desktop has been released with an ISO that you can use to install yourself, which I did on a Proxmox VM. The Proxmox VM had four cores, eight gigs of memory and the entire install took me less than four minutes. So for those watching, I'm going to show the complete installation sped up in the background behind me while I continue on with the state of Cosmic, while I continue with the story. So for those watching, you can see the install. It's only gonna take a little more than a minute. So and some quick background for those new to the show and Linux, or maybe just checking in now.
21:40
System76 has been a computer maker for years, selling some great Linux desktops and laptops, and then, several years ago, they decided to make their own Linux distribution called PopOS. There was a lot of skepticism, but System76 ended up with what most would say is an amazing Linux distribution to go along with their great hardware. At the time their Linux desktop was a highly customized version of GNOME and still is in their current stable release. But the story goes that it was hard to keep up with the frequent changes in GNOME and I guess they thought they could do better. So, being a team of Rust-loving developers Rust the programming language they decided to create their own Linux desktop environment built with the Rust programming language called Cosmic. This week the ISO was released and, you know, with the hopes of a stable release before the end of the year.
22:49
I think I'll stop this in the background because I think it's looped already. As I said, I sped it up, but it's still fast. It was under four minutes before I sped it up. So anyway, this new distribution built on the future of the Linux desktop, built with Rust and Wayland, with support for fractional scaling, refresh rates and NVIDIA hybrid graphics. Yet familiar enough to its legacy GNOME roots that you could jump right in and start using it. But it has a new design, language and theming.
23:29
Comprehensive theming system with shareable themes. So that could be pretty cool If you could theme out your system. Share that out. We might be looking forward to some pretty cool themes to download. Options for horizontal workspaces, new panel applets and applet customization, enhanced customization of dock and top bar, new core apps, including file manager, terminal and text editor, a new settings app and pop store software hub. And although some settings features are still missing, it's mostly stable enough you could probably get by with as a daily driver.
24:11
But like I said at the beginning, it did crash on me. Once I went to the settings, clicked a couple times, all of a sudden I, I I got kicked out to, uh, to the console. I couldn't even type anything in, so it wasn't even a prompt and I had to reboot it. But let's take a look around for those. For those watching here, let me just switch over now. So for those watching. There's the cosmic desktop here.
24:40
You know, you got this little keyboard, or the super key will also bring up this nice little uh um search box, similar to mac os, I would say. You got your workspaces, you have, uh, uh, this, your your files, and oh, hey, what do you know? That's what happened before on me crashed it. So crash, nice, uh, I should have recorded that part too. I didn't realize it's gonna crash so much on me. It seemed like it was going so good until actually, when I was playing with it right before the show is when it crashed on me, after I already had edited that, that, that nice video. I, I actually was playing around with it on that video and it worked. Everything worked just fine. I'm like, hey, you know what I'm gonna do that stuff live, let's cut that out. Well, that's what happens when you do stuff live. But it you know, for the most part it's a lot like it looked like back when I demoed this early I would want to say February. So if you want to catch it, go look at that video.
25:55 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So I was in a media call about Cosmic and one of the things they mentioned is there are some things that it requires like actual hardware, for you know, your, your video acceleration and all that. So you, it is possible that that crash is a result of running it virtualized and you may not run into that when you run it on real hardware.
26:12 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
It could be it. I I've heard that too about the, the hardware thing, and I was thinking everything was working really fast and just fine. And um, and I know when I, when I trialed it way back I want to say it was February I demoed it and played around with it for quite a while. It never crashed at all then. But you know it is alpha, so it'll get better.
26:39 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Oh, yeah, when you said you didn't record it. Don't worry, Rob, this is all recorded. So we got the crash for all posterity.
26:45 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I think you wanted to record the not crashed version of playing around with it. Yeah, no. I am Well, for one thing, I'm impressed with how well they've done the Pop OS guys have done putting this together, in the amount of time that they've spent on it, and I think it's great that we have something that is different than all of the rest, right, so it's kind of its own thing. Uh, it's not a fork, it's not an old version, it's actually something new, which there's not very many of those.
27:13 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Um, yeah, we were talking about that last week where, yeah, like gnome and kde, have been around a long time. So this is kind of a a real contender that's coming out of the gate yeah, and I'm, I'm pretty sure, I'm pretty sure cosmic is wayland only, right?
27:29 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
no?
27:30 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
um, no, it's wayland first, but from what I've read about it, you actually can fall back, go back to x11. I thought it was wayland only too, uh, and, and maybe what I read about it was wrong, but from what I read that there is X11. So I did bring it back up for those watching here. And you still have your tiling here. Your sound Okay Well, while you're bringing that up.
27:56 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
To quote Michael, it says Cosmic is a Wayland native desktop but does support X Wayland.
28:03 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So it supports X Wayland. That's how you run your x applications, but it does not. Hey, that's what I was thinking. You cannot run cosmic on top of the x server, so it is literally wayland only as far as how it talks to your hardware. And then you've got x wayland to be able to run your old uh apps written for x.
28:23 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, I'm pretty sure one of the other ones actually said x11, but it could have been wrong.
28:28 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
They might have met x whalen, you know they're not all well, and I could I could see where they'd focus just on whalen, just from uh oh definitely going, going forward, and x11 is kind of deprecated at this point, and the future is Wayland, so you might as well just totally work on that there's a you can make, a you can make your desktop environment so much simpler by not having to mess with any of the X11 code. I mean, obviously some of it is there with X, X, Wayland, but like the actual talk to X code, it doesn't have to be there, I'm sure.
29:12 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I'm sure that makes it so much cleaner and nicer to work with. Oh, you know, earlier when I was looking under, I didn't, I wasn't, I didn't have any uh things pop up in the in the store, so I didn't. I thought that wasn't loaded yet. But uh, now loaded for me. There is actually stuff in there.
29:21 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I didn't think I thought it was empty but yeah, I was gonna say there should be stuff in the store, um, so yeah, I need to I need to give it a, a trial run myself, see if I have a.
29:31
Uh, I gotta see if I have some hardware that I can put it on. That's not going to be a pain. Oh, I'd I may have a. I may have a desktop to put it on. Ah, it's an interesting thought. Not a laptop, no, I've got, we've got two working laptops like two modern working laptops. One of them is the kind of the family laptop out in the living room and the other one is the one I do the show on, and I feel like either of those would be a bad call for different reasons, but either one would be a bad call. Uh, all right. Uh, jeff, do we want to talk about Canonical again? We talked about Canonical last week. They were doing well.
30:11 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, we're going to talk about them again, are they doing?
30:14 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
good this time.
30:16 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
They're doing some nice things Now. I did have a Fedora story, so I'm not just totally Canonical. Last week, anyway Not this week Canonical has made an announcement and this is going to be a double, double header story here. So canonical made an announcement they're going to ship with newer kernels. Now this is a bit of change, since they're not known for the most cutting-edge software.
30:37
The official old policy was and I'm quoting here the way the ckt, that's, the canonical kernel team, has historically chosen an upstream Linux kernel version was with a conservative wait and see approach. Give the month-long stabilization window required, an upstream kernel version is all but certain to be released would be the tentative selection, with the possible last minute jump to a more recent version should it turn out to release in a workable time frame. This approach would guarantee stability on the appointed release day but was proving unpopular with consumers looking to adopt the latest features and hardware support, as well as silicon vendors looking for a firmer version commitment to align their Ubuntu support. Now the new policy is going to be and I am quoting again the intent behind this post is to describe the new policy of the CKT is taking in regards to the kernel version selection for an upcoming Ubuntu release To provide users with the absolute latest in features and hardware support, ubuntu will now ship the absolute latest available version of the upstream Linux kernel at the specified Ubuntu will now ship the absolute latest available version of the upstream Linux kernel at the specified Ubuntu release freeze date, even if upstream is still in release candidate status Now, as the article in the show notes calls out, this stops short of saying they're going to keep the kernel version updated through the life of the release. So as of right now, when you have a recent release it will have a new kernel, but it's going to age as the life of the distribution goes on, which, you know, kind of editorial for me here, I guess kind of makes sense. As the LTS you want a lot of stability and the other releases are pretty short lived. So maybe the work involved isn't really worth it. You know, if you've got six months in a release before it becomes deprecated, it's like is it really worth switching to a new kernel? Though you know I would be curious on how much work it would take to keep the kernel version fresh. I don't know enough about it to say one way or the other. You know whether that's a major change or it's something that isn't too bad.
32:47
Second article in the notes is how Canonical is trying out the new I shouldn't say new is trying out the O3 optimization for their distribution Now normally and that's for compiler optimization. Now normally when they build all their software they use the O2 optimization. So they're looking at taking it up a notch. They have not decided if they're going to go with this setting or not. It's just an evaluation and the current distributions are still running with the standard O2 level.
33:19
There are concerns of code size and if it's really going to make a difference. Pharonix did run a few benchmarks comparing the differences and found that most of the time it's a wash. But there are specific workloads which make a large difference. We've seen this before. For example, when you look at compiling for newer feature sets on CPUs, there's those certain instructions or features that kick in that make a huge difference. But in general it's not that big of a change, it's kind of a wash.
33:50
Take a look at the article in the show notes and see if your specific workload would support the extra optimization. Would it help you? Would it not help you? We'll keep you updated on what happens if there is a change from canonical and if they're going to start compiling to the O3 level. And as an editorial comment, I would also add that you know the comment section is full of opinions on this. It was kind of entertaining. You know we need to optimize more. If you need more optimization, you need to write better code. If you should, you know you should never try and optimize in code as you need to let the compiler do it. You should never try and optimize in code as you need to let the compiler do it. You should always optimize in code because the compiler will make bad decisions. I'll let the watcher, slash, listener decide for themselves. I don't know enough about coding to know what the truth is.
34:36 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I'm the hardware guy, so any comments from those of you who do code. Both ways are bad.
34:46 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Optimize everywhere is what I was gonna say so well.
34:50 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Talking about that, first off, the, the, the truism is the, uh, the, the premature optimization is the root of all evil. Uh, so doing too much optimization can really get you into trouble because you're trying to optimize the wrong things. I would also say that compilers have gotten rather clever these days about how they optimize. But anyway, that's not. That's actually not the one that I found the most interesting. I'm gonna talk about your first story about the bleeding edge kernels.
35:17
I think that's really interesting because and I think this may tie into some changes that the upstream kernel team has made may tie into some changes that the upstream kernel team has made. First off, they are not doing the really long-term, long-term support kernels like they used to, and they've also become a CVE numbering authority, which basically means that every time the kernel has a CVE, the people at the kernel are in charge of putting that out, and they've changed things and it's kind of funny. It's sort of a malicious compliance situation. Um, the upstream kernel every bug fix is now a cve, every bug fix gets a cve, and their rationale is because you're in kernel land, pretty much any bug can be a vulnerability, which is a valid thing to say. But what it means is if a company wants to ship an old kernel and backport.
36:18 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Rob.
36:20 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
For those that don't have video and are listening Rob's got a cat just walking in front of the camera. A whole bunch. Just a lonely kitty Tail.
36:30 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Anyway. So if you're a company and you have an old kernel version and you're trying to backport CVE fixes, you can't just say, oh well, these five bug fixes are the CVEs. Now, according to the kernel, all of the bug fixes are CVEs. And so a lot of people are looking at this and going this is the kernel guys trying to get away from companies running ancient kernel versions because now we can go to them and then say you know, on this five dot kernel there are literally 5,000 CVEs. Show me where you've backported all those fixes and you know the company's going to go. We didn't backported all those fixes and you know the company's gonna go. We didn't backport all of those fixes. So I think malicious compliance is what's going on here. So anyway, I very much suspect that this change from ubuntu is them trying to stay up to date with the kernel because of that, because there are so many more cves out there now and it would take a herculean effort to try to backport all of them.
37:28 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Well, yeah, and if, if companies are going to use ubuntu just for regulatory purposes, those cvs had to. They have to be fixed.
37:35
Yeah that's also going to affect all the other uh industries out there to include red hat it's going to make life real hard for red hat yeah my big comment is I think it's awesome because, just because uber 2 has always been kind of known for being just a little bit behind, I mean not like way behind, like debian, but just a little bit behind, yeah, you know, not, not, not, not cutting hedge, not bleeding edge, but even though a lot of their releases have been right, pretty close lately with a lot of things except they missed the mark with their KDE 6 last time, but anyway, Well, I guess we can forgive them for that.
38:18 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
What's the opposite of the bleeding edge? Is it the dragging edge?
38:31 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Anyway, I boring and safe. It's, it's, it's the clotted bloodstream, I think it's the clotted blood stream.
38:33
There you go, something like that but uh, you know, I've seen, I've seen other other people like I've seen some comments, being really concerned about release candidates being in the uh final release, which my interpretation of it was the release candidate it would be when it's frozen, with the likely expectation that by the time the uh distribution is released, the release candidate would be a final release also. Yeah, I don't know if I've seen that explicitly said, but what it? What it has said is that when it's frozen, even if it's a release candidate, my, yeah, so you have.
39:13 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
You have a month after it's frozen, my concern with this is uh, if they happen to lock in a recent kernel, that's going to end up hitting end of life well before there's support for that particular, especially if it's a long-term service release.
39:33 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
If it's not an LTS kernel.
39:36 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Or are they going to fall back to the last LTS kernel for that long-term service release?
39:43 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Well, there's no more LTS kernels, really.
39:46 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I mean, there are some, just not as many, and they're not supported for as long.
39:50 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, they're only a couple years Because, like the end of I think it's this year, there's a ton of those old LTS kernels that they're just going end of life and there's only going to be like one or two LTS kernels and I think they're only for two years now.
40:03 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yeah, not the 10 or 12 that a lot of the distros are trying to provide support on the LTS.
40:11 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Well, right, and either way, uh, canonical has because of their 12 year support. Now they have to do so much of the maintenance beyond that point anyway to to keep it going in their LTS. So it really doesn't change too much. But did they say necessarily it is the latest one they're going to do, not like the latest in the LTS, right? I believe that's.
40:38 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
It's the latest, even if it's a release candidate and they did say in there that it's during the freeze, so then you have a month past that. So it most likely will be either a very late rc candidate so it should be fairly stable or it will be fully released by the time the actual distribution comes out so there is the possibility that a bunch of versions are going to ship with a late RC kernel and not a fully released kernel.
41:07 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That will be interesting.
41:08 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Might just be a reason to wait for the 0.1 release.
41:14 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Or maybe the 0.3?.
41:16 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, something like that.
41:18 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Or you just say you know what Our late RC candidates? Yolo yeah pedal to the metal, just go for it roll it out, yeah, oh goodness.
41:30 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
So um let's chat about, I guess, how we would download those isos ken yes, this is gonna touch on that, but how you would download from within Chrome, for example. We're going back about two weeks, because that's when we last talked about curl 8.9.0's release and we have another release. The most recent stable version is 8.91.9.1, rather, which was just released on the 31st of July. Now included with cURL is a library called libcurl. It is a free and easy-to-use client-side URL transfer library supporting multiple protocols and the ability to resume file transfers. Hard to believe. The first version of Libcurl this was back version 7.1, was released back in the 7th of August 2000. So happy birthday. Now. Sk from Oztek Next provides us a look back at Libcurl's journey to becoming a cornerstone of internet connectivity across countless devices and applications.
42:51
Its creation was largely a solo effort by Daniel Stenberg. He envisioned a world where applications could seamlessly integrate internet transfer capability. Imagine that Now. Why did he create LibCurl? Imagine that Now. Why did he create libcurl? He believed that the power of a shared library for internet transfers could benefit other applications. Inspired by functions like the IOCtl and the FCntl, he introduced curl-easy-sitop, opting for a relatively low-level, protocol agnostic approach, aiming for extensionability without frequent API changes. If I were programming, I'd want to not have to worry about frequent API changes myself.
43:47
Now the good news is, php adopted Libcurl as an officially bundled extension with their release of PHP 4.0.2. This move exposed Libcurl to a wide user base, bringing valuable feedback, testing and, as always, bug reports, testing and always bug reports. So we saw Libcurl expand from the 17,000 line of codes in its first release to, with the latest release, over 171,000 lines of code. Now what is remarkable is that much of the code written against the original API remains compatible with the latest version, despite the ever-evolving landscape of internet protocols it has grown to include. I'm going to leave the last half of SK's article for you to read in your leisure. As we all say again, happy 24th birthday, libcurl. Here's to many years of successful internet transfers and continued innovation.
44:55 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I've written some code calling on Libcurl before and it is actually a pretty nice interface. I dig it. It's decent to work with.
45:04 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
And in the United States it's old enough to drink.
45:07 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah.
45:09 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
It's almost old enough to get kicked off of its parents' insurance.
45:21 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
No, libcurl is great. Now, there was for a while, a bug in what kind of authentication was that? It's one of the other projects I work with, sometimes a zone binder. There was a specific lib curl bug that was just our bane for a while. Every time somebody would come in. It doesn't work. What version of lib curl are you running? I think they finally got that fixed, though there's enough of us that started hollering about it that people put their heads together and fixed it all. But other than that, libcrawl has been just a great experience to work with.
45:52 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
One of the good ones. That's why you do want to try to update to get those bug fixes yeah, yeah, that's true, that's true.
46:00 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
All right, what is next, rob, you are buying a macbook. What, what? Well, wow, well, well, I don't think he's buying a MacBook.
46:07 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
What, what, wow, well, well.
46:11 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I don't think he's buying. I think he's begging for a MacBook. How many copies is that?
46:17 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I was going to ask that.
46:22 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Keep the copies coming. Three coffee shops worth yeah.
46:27 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I haven't found the money yet to get myself a new M1 MacBook yet to install Linux on. But I could probably afford an older MacBook and maybe one of those useless touch bars on it. I mean, you know I love myself a good gimmick, something fun like a useless touch bar. But would that even work on Linux? If not, then you know, the machine would kind of. It wouldn't even have function keys, because that's what that row where your function keys are gone, you know. So maybe it might not be the best device to install Linux on. You know, even Apple realized that the Touch Bar was kind of stupid and discontinued it quickly after it first kind of released the hardware. But it's a fun gimmick. It's like, hey, look at this, this is cool. Nobody else has this.
47:24
I've seen other gimmicks but you know, somebody thought it was worthy enough to send out nine patches, because nine patches were submitted for review this week to get the touch bar to function in Linux. Some snippets from the patch cover letter say quote the touch bar found on x86 Max supports two USB configurations on x86 max supports two usb configurations one where the device presents itself as a hid keyboard hid keyboard and can display pre-defined sets of keys and one where the operating system has full control over what is displayed. The patch series adds supports for both of these configurations. So, breaking out of that quote, these include these patches. They include first one is backlight on the touch bar, so and you can even control the brightness to max, min, middle or whatever. And then next it has support for those predefined keys such as escape and function keys, like, apparently, windows, when Windows is on boot camp it uses the predefined keys for basically just gives you a function row.
48:40
My work MacBook. I actually have a MacBook for work with this lovely touch bar. I pretty much only use it for the volume part and the brightness sometimes. Otherwise I never use it because the icons are always changing. Now, if I have this app open, this app open, I never know what's going to be up there.
49:00 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
And.
49:01 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I'm not going to look down and say, oh, what can I do today? No, I'm just going to push the button on the screen, because I know I see it on my screen. Anyway, the next thing, the next thing that it supports, is OS control keys, where the operating system has full control on what is displayed on the touch bar, and that's how Mac OS does it. The Mac that I have at work, you know, I believe if you have a browser open, it'll show a back button on there, and honestly, I don't look down on my keyboard that much, so I don't know what else is on there but stuff.
49:34
So, although I think it's a dumb feature, as you can tell on the mac, as also, I think, most people do, I've never heard many people say dumb things. It's a cool gimmick, really cool. Uh, still, maybe, maybe I would give this a try if it gets mainline into the linux kernel. It's been submitted for review. So if it gets mainline, maybe I'd give it a try, but really right now I'm really kind of more interested in linux. On the m1 mac, solidifying though this older mac would be cheaper than m1 decisions, decisions.
50:09 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
There's a lot of things on the m1 that I think pretty much everything on the m1 works now. Uh, it's. It's when you get into the newer, newer max that things are still not working well, they even have this for the uh intel based version yeah, yeah, but rob just now was talking about the the m base max.
50:25 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah yeah, this is for the intel touch.
50:28 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
But yeah, I, I guess, like jonathan said, I mentioned the m1 max this one of those cases where we say too little, too late uh, there's a lot that's too little, too late with the mac touch bar I mean maybe I mean the touch bar isn't that old of a thing I want to say 2016 to 2019. There you go the last.
50:51 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Intel based system. It's five years old now.
50:53 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I was gonna say around 2018. You know that's about right.
50:57 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I don't know it's in there but in the ranch, and Apple's still supporting those right yeah, hey, sure, yeah, to some extent.
51:07 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I don't know when the last update is going to be for the 2019 Max. That might be real soon actually.
51:17 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I think mine is a 2019. Mine actually has the escape key on it, where I looked at some pictures and some don't. Mine has a physical escape key, whereas some actually use a touch bar. I think mine is a 2019. Maybe, maybe, it's a touch bar. Uh, I think mine is a 2019. Maybe maybe it's not. I don't know, but it still gets updates and maybe, when it doesn't, I can type my work into uh, um, recycling that, recycling that into my, uh, my hands and they'd get it.
51:48 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Get it like an m2 or m3 at work. You can put linux on it yeah, they won't.
51:54 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Let me install what on.
51:57 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Well, it's, it's for testing.
51:59 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
It's for your job you get a quality assurance.
52:02 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
So is that?
52:02 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
old. Uh, mac, you've got yours or the company's, it's the company's, yeah, yep. So when they replace it, do they give you the option to buy it? You've got yours or the company's? It's the company's, yep, yep. So, when they replace it, do they give you the option to buy it or they recycle them?
52:17 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's what Rob was saying. He's going to try to convince them to recycle it in his direction. Yes, right.
52:25 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I had one of my former companies just say keep the iPad, you don't need to return it. Yeah, that's handy, that's nice, it's an iPad 10. Oh wow, that's when they had, or no, it was running iPad 10 OS. Oh yeah.
52:43 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
In all honesty, we don't recycle, we don't give them the option to buy it, we just run it until it dies.
52:56 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I'm just kidding, kidding, I'm just joking if anybody ever works when it dies, then I'm just without a computer, or when it's more expensive to ship it back to them than you keep it.
53:09 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
This is about to get real dark. Let's go on to something else. Let's talk about Firefox.
53:15 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Oh, now we're getting dark Firefox and Mozilla, or both.
53:19 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Well, mozilla Firefox 129. But Firefox, yeah, there's pain on the horizon, potentially for Firefox, that's not what you're talking about, though, is it Jeff?
53:32 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
No, I like Firefox, mozilla, some of the leadership we've talked about that but this is all about Firefox and it's not about impending doom, gloom or anything like that. It's about. 129 is now available, and it's pretty well known that I'm a fan of Firefox browser, and so I have a double header of stories. For those who are fans as well, or people that maybe want should look at it. Maybe would become fans again. So the first story is 129 has been released on August 6, and it's ready for download if your distribution is not already put it into the channels. I'm on Kubuntu 24.04. And I already on 129, so it should be quick if you've not received it yet.
54:12
129 is a minor update and brings improvements in the reader view with a text and layout menu which replaces the type controls menu. It'll let you change things like character spacing, word spacing, text alignment and a new theme menu and other changes to make your reading experience much better. There's also a new tab preview which displays when you hover over tab. It means you don't have to switch tabs to see what's on another background tab. It now has the ability to resolve the HTTPS DNS records using the operating system's DNS resolver in Linux, dns resolver in Linux. And this is also where HTTP in version 129 is replaced with HTTPS as the default protocol for non-local sites. Oh good, there's also. You say Jonathan.
54:59 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Oh good, it's time, it's past time.
55:03 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yes, I'm. It actually kind of surprised me that they didn't already default to that, but now now they're defaulting to https. There's also features added for web developers, such as querying the encryption key system configuration, and there are a host of other features for developers and people to get into the code. So take a look at the first article in the show notes to see all the updates. That being said, the second article in the show notes covers Firefox 130, which is currently being worked on and should be out September 3rd. This, like 129, is a smaller update, so 130 will enable over-scroll animations on Linux as the default behavior for scrollable areas. They're also working to improve translations of web pages.
55:48
I think one of the biggest changes they're going to add is a lab section. Basically, excuse me, the lab section will allow users easy access to turning on experimental features that are not ready for general public, but some users might want to try out and give feedback. Some things you can turn on now are you can enable an AI chat bot, an auto open tab switch feature for picture in picture, support for service workers in the debugger panel and address bar features to show results during IME or input method editor composition. Now, this is from Mozilla and IME input method editor is a tool that allows you to enter complex symbols, such as those used in East Asian or Indic written languages, using a standard keyboard. Enabling this experiment will keep the address bar panel open showing search results and suggestions, while using the IME to input text. So if you have a language that requires some complex symbols, this should help you.
56:57
There are, of course, features which have been added for web developers and I'll let the audience follow the second link in the show notes to get all the updates which are coming in September for Firefox 130. I didn't want to go over all the functions and whatnot that are being added into the into the browser for those that are into the web development and coding. So get ready for 130 and happy surfing.
57:21 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, so it's interesting you say both 129 and 130 are sort of smaller updates. I kind of have a feeling that Firefox is just struggling to keep up with Chrome because Mozilla just doesn't have as much money to throw at it as Google does.
57:37 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Well, they also talked about a while back they were gonna kind of switch to a smaller update cadence, to where they could just fire them out and you don't have to wait so long to get those features. So they wanted to kind of complete a feature and get it out instead of okay, let's bundle a whole bunch of them and you have to wait six months. So, it is somewhat planned, but yeah, google has got a lot of money.
58:03 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
They could stop spending money on stupid stuff. Get rid of all these dumb projects that they don't need. Focus on the stuff. Get rid of all these dumb projects that they don't need. Focus on the browser. Maybe let Thunderbird go off to LibreOffice or something.
58:15 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Just focus on the browser. I still like Thunderbird, but there's a lot of other stuff I would say.
58:24 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Right, I like.
58:25 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Thunderbird.
58:26 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I'm not saying it's, no, I don't like Thunderbird, I lied, I don Thunderbird. I'm not saying it's I don't like Thunderbird, I lied, but I think it's. I don't like many. I don't like any email clients. Really, they're all horrible.
58:39 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Rob's our curmudgeon, get off my lawn.
58:43 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I'm not saying they should get rid of it because it's a bad project. I just think somebody else should handle that.
58:50 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Mozilla needs to be Firefox, and Firefox only Now there's VPN or whatever their other projects Firefox and Thunderbird.
59:03 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I would agree with that.
59:05 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I don't think a web client belongs with the browser ecosystem. You don't see Google and their email client or really anybody else. That kind of goes with the, as Microsoft did it, at least the Office suite. So let that go with LibreOffice. Let LibreOffice have their email client. Microsoft Office has their email client. Let it go with LibreOffice. Let LibreOffice have their email client. Microsoft Office has their email client, you know, let it go with the Office Suite because it's more of an Office tool.
59:37 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
So I would agree that you know. I would say get rid of the VPN, get rid of a bunch of the other projects. And I would also say you know you're the head of the company and their buddy, that you know will head step down and got somebody else in there and they're making, you know, way too much money.
59:56
You know that those need to be like their. Their salaries need to be dropped by a zero power of 10. Yeah, and they're still making good money. And and yeah, I think they really need to work on I would even say on Firefox. They need to maybe work on speed compatibility. Don't add all the weird stuff trying to come up with funky features, just make it a good, solid browser.
01:00:26 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Work on the UI, fix the whole look and feel of it. That's what drives me nuts is?
01:00:36 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
it just looks so old, still it's classic.
01:00:37 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I guess I haven't thought about it because it's just what I'm used to and I know where everything is and it works.
01:00:47 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I install it and I feel like I'm in 2005 again.
01:00:50 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
One thing I do like about Firefox over Chrome is I don't have to go in and enable the title screen that it's in, so I have something to right click on for managing the window that it's in.
01:01:08 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That has a lot to do with your desktop environment too.
01:01:11 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I hate the search on Chrome. I despise the search on Chrome.
01:01:18 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I also hate the search on Firefox, too, where it's all the way down the corner there.
01:01:22 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
See, I like that better because I search on one page for a phrase. I hit it and it's like oh okay, it didn't find what I wanted. I go to another page on that same tab. That search is still there, I can hit it again. I don't have to retype it in. On chrome, I get I have to hit alt f and I gotta retype it in again, and I get it's like yeah, I get that but microsofty I get that, but it doesn't need to be at the bottom.
01:01:46 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Every other user interface or every other user widget, the back button, the URL bar, everything in the browser is at the top, and there's that one thing that I got to go all the way down here for it can stay on the screen when you go tab to tab. But why is it all the way down there all by itself?
01:02:10 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I bet you, somebody will. Somebody will chime in on the discord. There's probably a way to move it in one of the bajillion settings in Firefox. There's probably a probably probably a way to move it.
01:02:23 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I use Firefox. I just don't like the search. I don't like where it's at, and and every other tool in the world always has it up there. Everything's at the top. Stuff needs to be at the top.
01:02:33 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
All right. Well, let's talk about SerpentOS, Ken. What is SerpentOS and why do we care? Why is it cool?
01:02:43 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Well, we can thank Marius Nestor because he started this particular article with. The wait is finally over. I had to ask myself what have we been waiting for? Basically, it's IKEE Daherty's long-anticipated SerpentOS distribution to have an ISO image that we can download and test on bare metal hardware or virtual machines to see what the fuss is all about. Four years ago, marius wrote about iQiY's making a new distro called Serpent Linux. Iqiy's aim is to provide the Linux community with a truly modern distribution for people who just want to use Linux. The name of the distribution is inspired by the Serpent game that was created by Aiki Daherty.
01:03:34
The original plan was to ship Serpent OS with KDE Plasma desktop environment by default. Plans change. Gnome was chosen as the default for the initial release instead. Sorry about that, jeff. You will be offered a minimal GNOME desktop experience with only a handful of apps pre-installed. It will include the recently released Z code editor. Serpent OS does not have a graphical installer yet using a command line installer. You access it by typing sudo l-i-c-h-e-n lichen lichen. And CircuitOS is not based on an existing GNU Linux distribution. Aiki eroded from scratch to include a new package management tool called MOS. That's M-O-S-S written in Rust, so we're seeing more Rust in Linux again. Now MOS supports offline rollbacks. I've just relayed some of the information in Marius's article, so if you do want more information, just follow the link in the show notes and maybe take this serpent for a spin.
01:05:00 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, so it's not the final release yet, right? It's just like a preview release, Right it's basically a preview release.
01:05:09 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yeah, interesting. So if you want to try it in a VM, see if it might be something you might hop to later be adventurous.
01:05:20 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Also, I don't think you mentioned it, but this isn't the first Linux OS or distribution that iK has created. Did I miss that?
01:05:31 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
No, you didn't miss that. I didn't mention it. I don't think Marius mentioned it either.
01:05:37 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
IK. His first thing. He was the creator of Solus, so he created Solus, which I know that was idle for a while and tried to come back. I think he left it for a while and I know it was probably over a year ago, when we had a story about him coming back and helping and they wanted to base Solas on Serpanois, which wasn't even a thing yet, and still it's still just getting there. But, uh, yeah, so solus was this thing, which was also built from scratch, so it's not the first time he's done this. Uh, another thing I wanted to mention is, uh, I had read, I thought I was, I was. I forgot to mention my talk above, I think, or maybe I did. I forgot about it. But I also heard Serpent has some interest in the Cosmic Desktop too, even though they're starting with GNOME. They may, there's a chance they may become.
01:06:34 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Cosmic. I believe Marius did mention that in his article.
01:06:38 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, I've seen that it's interesting.
01:06:43 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It's hard to say when you look at a new Destro like this. First off, obviously, do not put this on a beginner Linux machine. Do not put this on your grandmother's machine. If you want to play around with SerpentOS, more power to you. Knock yourself out, especially in a VM. A VM is even better.
01:07:00
But going to this with both eyes open, we have no guarantee that there's going to be a next release. We have no guarantee the packages are going to be updated. So not to knock the project, but just that is the reality of it. But then the other thing that goes along with that is this like just, for instance, moss, his Rust-based package manager, who knows what kind of a life that'll take on. Right, I could see somebody else that wants to do it. I could see Cos cosmic come along and say, oh, a rust-based package manager, that's a great fit. And pick it up as theirs. And then you see, suddenly this, this project, could take on life of its own. So I I do not at all knock people doing things like this. Just again, it is important to keep in mind as potential users that this is essentially an experiment. It is an experimental linux distro which is cool.
01:07:48 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
All more power to him but I think I I think we need some of those synergies to happen, just because I mean, when solace I, I actually used her, I tried it out for a little while and I thought it was a great os, completely different than anything else, but I thought it worked pretty. It was pretty slick, but you know the history. He creates it and I don't remember if, if I've ever even read why he left. But you know, creates it, works out a little bit, got bored of it, left, did some other things. It's like let's create another. One is like I don't know how long before he gets bored of this one. I think there needs to be some, some synergies and maybe some other things to keep it going forward. It seems like I don't know.
01:08:34 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, and part of that is whether or not it's it's it's going to get critical mass right. Like, are there enough people that are going to be interested in it? That suddenly you have other people helping to maintain and, uh, I don't know, it's hard to say.
01:08:47 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
We will see that always drives me nuts. When I hear people talk about you know. Someone asks a question well, what? What distribution should I start with if somebody fires off some weird distribution and that nobody's heard of yeah and it's like no, if.
01:09:02
If you want to start out, stick with ubuntu or Fedora, yep, that's your starting place, and then you can branch out from there, because they're the ones when you do a Google search. You're going to find answers, you're going to have the pre-done packages. You're going to just start there and don't get anything weird. And then, because you'll hear well, my grandmother uses this weird thing. Well, your grandma hacks compilers. Most people's grandmas don't do that, you know.
01:09:29 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Your grandma named your dad Bobby Tables. Come on.
01:09:32 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, exactly.
01:09:35 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
It's like no, just I hate to say it, but I think another good one, at least if you're coming from Windows and really want a very similar experience. I think Linux Mint is another one of those good ones. There I'm the one out on the forums always ragging on people when they say Linux Mint, but all honesty, I think it's a fine beginner distro as well. But yeah, what Slackware? That's what I started with. Why not? Hey on Montana. Linux has been around for quite a while too. I mean that's.
01:10:12 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I don't think it's being updated anymore. I think that's what I heard just the other day Slackware.
01:10:16 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
No, Hannah Montana.
01:10:19 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
And for those that don't know, mint is a derivative of Ubuntu, so you just have to.
01:10:25 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Well, that's that. Pop OS is a great option too.
01:10:29 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's true, that's. That's another one to throw in there, I think.
01:10:32 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I think that's worth standing with, especially if you get the first one that has actually running cosmic desktop. It's going to be a little while still mostly release, like you said, stick mainstream.
01:10:45 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
There are a couple slightly off just like a tick off. Or mainstream like, uh, linux, mid pop os that I think are very good too, but you know.
01:10:55 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
If you don't know, yeah, they are so so you can search the ubuntu problem. You know how do I fix whatever ubuntu. You can apply that to mint or pop yeah. Pop for the time being.
01:11:07 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
If you don't know, just stick with the most popular one out there. Stick with Ubuntu.
01:11:16 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
The one caveat I've got with that is if you're running the Raspberry Pi, you should be running Raspberry Pi OS. As a beginner, don't try to run Ubuntu on Raspberry Pi. Yes, it works, but when you go to slap hardware on it, there's a decent chance it won't. Yes, I run into that, trying to help people quite a bit.
01:11:32 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
And this is the recommendations section.
01:11:35 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, those are our official recommendations. All right, I've got one story that I'm going to bring because it's security related and it's interesting. You may have heard about Ghostwire and this is the face-melting and it's interesting. You may have heard about ghost wire and this is the face melting, hair on fire. Vulnerability in risk five that came out this week. Well, hold on, don't panic. Well, what's what's? What's the line? Everyone, stop panic.
01:12:02
Uh, it's from one of the like naked gun movies anyway, um, there, yes, there's a problem with some risk 5 chips. I'm sure somebody will get the uh, get the animated gif in the uh in the in the discord. For us, um, there is a problem, but it is specifically in the t head zound, t risk 5 cpus and it's only a couple of them. It's like the 9, 10 and 9, 15. That's not the, that is not the right uh numbers, but it is uh, it is just a couple of their um, of their devices, um, the c910 and the c920 I was really so the C910 and C920 CPUs, and these do have a really, really bad problem. Nothing to see here. Please disperse, that's the line I was thinking of. Thank you, mashed Potato and Ken.
01:13:04
So what happens here? You have to understand what the idea of virtual memory is and how memory gets mapped and so on a modern 64-bit CPU, most of the time the memory is literally 64 bits wide. So when you say a memory address, that is a 64-bit number, which that is a very, very large number, number, which that is a very, very large number. And it's kind of a pain for each individual application to try to keep track of where it is in memory. So you would have to do things like, okay, where's my base address? And then add to this for every memory call it's just we don't do that, we don't do that. So what? I think Intel came up with this idea way back in the day, maybe, maybe another company before Intel, and Intel stole it before everybody else stole from Intel. Anyway, we use something called virtual memory addresses, which is okay, mr Application, just assume that your base memory address is at zero, work off of that for everything, and then we do some magic in the processor itself. You use these special extensions or these special instructions and you just you assume it's zero. Those are technically virtual addresses and we'll do all the math behind the scenes for you to put you actually in memory where you want where you're actually at and you can just ignore all of that. That's the real, simple explanation of virtual memory addresses.
01:14:25
Okay, in the RISC-V chips, one of the cool things that you can do with RISC-V is vendor-specific ISA extensions. Which ISA? That's the instruction set, so a vendor can write their own instructions. So one of the ones we talk about with Zen 5, for example, is the AVX-512. These are things that are fairly new in AMD and Intel has added them as well, so you can do that sort of thing over in Riskland.
01:14:58
Well, in these particular chips there were some of those vector extensions, one of them in particular. When you make the call to it it is written. It says you know you make the call and you use these virtual memory addresses. The problem is, when you make the call to it, it does not interpret it as a virtual memory address and in fact it doesn't talk to this chip's cache at all. I don't even know how you do this, but they managed to wire up that particular extension directly to the physical memory bus so that an application running in user space, when it makes this particular call to this particular processor instruction particular call to this particular processor instruction it talks directly to memory at the physical location that it specifies, and that's real bad. To put it simply, that means that it can write to any memory anywhere on the system and the kernel really can't stop.
01:16:03
It is essentially what it boils down to, um, and the only way to fix it is to completely turn off these vector instructions altogether, which, when you do that, you lose like 77 or no you you incur. The way specifically the paper put it is you incur a 77 performance overhead, which basically means you lose half the performance of your chip. You just drop almost a 50% performance. It's it's not good, but it is not all of risk. It is not every risk chip out there. You know, if you've got your, you know your vision, five to risk five chip I don't think that is that is impacted by this. It is just these few chips. Now they have gotten fairly popular because they were quite performant before the fix for this. But anyway, if you heard about RISC-V and RISC-V's hair being on fire this week, that's what it was. There's no need to panic unless you have one of those chips.
01:17:03 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Unless you have a T-Head, zontai risk 5 cpu yes, those, those two are bad.
01:17:11 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Those two have serious problems. What's?
01:17:13 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
in the vision.
01:17:14 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Uh, the vision 5 chip is a vision 5 cpu. It's, it's, um, let's see, is it on here? Yeah, it's the jh7110, right? Yep, I happen to have it right here. It lives on my desk, not plugged in anything, but it lives on my desk, um. So does it die on your desk now? No, I bet if I plugged it back in it would come right back on. So it it's. It's in a really, really, really deep hibernate state.
01:17:49 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Kind of a little side note here. Mavsguy842 says do you think risk can get good enough that Apple dabbles in a project to contribute to risk as a way to eventually stop paying ARM for their instruction set? I could see it Now. I read an interesting article because they were talking about power savings on these chips and the argument was that the x86 is just as power efficient as RISC and ARM.
01:18:16
The thing is you lose a bunch of power savings because of all the cruft that's in there from legacy stuff, of all the cruft that's in there from legacy stuff. So if you could clean out all the, the 16 bit, the 32 bit and clean out a bunch of of that uh other stuff in there, that it would. It would be transistor wise just as efficient. And they're saying arm is starting to lose the power because of all the stuff going in and added on. Because risk is a very new clean slate. It doesn't have a bunch of transistors supporting old garbage but as time goes on it's probably going to have that problem too. So at a device level they're saying if x86 they could just make a break and kind of say you know what? We're cleaning out, a bunch of this old garbage.
01:19:04
You know, now they kind of try to do it with itanium it didn't work, but at some point at some point they're going to have to say, okay, we're going to simplify this down and get rid of that ancient stuff and it's. It's going to break things, but it would help the layout but his.
01:19:23 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
His reason for asking was uh, so they don't have to pay arm, and if they were using intel they would still have to. You know, they stopped to pay to have those chips made too from from the intel fabs, whereas if they went risk, they could truly design and make them themselves and not have to pay any license fees for any licensing or, yeah, the ip.
01:19:48 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So I I would actually not be surprised in fact I would almost guarantee that modern mac machines have some risk cores in them somewhere, because intel cpus already have risk cores in them. In fact, the management engine on Intel CPUs runs on a RISC core. For exactly the same reason, you can make it tiny, you can make it super energy efficient and it doesn't have a whole bunch of cruft. A lot of hard drives have a RISC core inside of them these days. Risc 5 is almost everywhere. It's just in a lot of those places. It'sisc-v is almost everywhere. It's just in a lot of those places. It's so small you can't see it, or it's running proprietary code, or it runs firmware instead of a full operating system, and so you don't ever interact with it. So I bet you there are already RISC-V cores in MacBooks.
01:20:43 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
So, even though you think, or they may already be there, I think the real question there is do you think RISC-V alone could get powerful enough to where Apple could completely dump the ARM Intel anything they had to pay license for and just use RISC alone to save that money and increase their profit margins?
01:21:06 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Sure, it's possible, possible. I don't think they're going to do it anytime soon after moving to arm. It wouldn't make sense for them to jump off of the arm ship after only being there for this well, I think.
01:21:17 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I think it's going to be a while before it's ready. I mean what they were on intel for 20 plus years, I want to say, and my response to him in the Discord was I think it's going to be 10 to 20 years before it's ready anyway, and it might not be RISC-V that they go to.
01:21:33 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It could be something else that is developed between now and then RISC-V. I would not be entirely surprised to see Apple come up with their own ISA. That seems like a very Apple thing to do.
01:21:44 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
That stuff seems to grow up slow, though it's true it's it's hard to make a chip yeah, I mean risk five has been around for decades and it's just getting to the point where the average user can really use it.
01:22:04 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, and you know I see what you're saying about licensing, but I guess I was. I was looking at it from a quality of chip perspective and as all these designs age, they pick up stuff and hold on to the legacy. And until you keep getting bigger and bigger and more, monster silicon correction too.
01:22:26 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I guess it hasn't been around decades, it's been around. Ten years, 14 years Founded. Risc-v was founded May 18th 2010.
01:22:35 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Okay, the first version released, though, was in 2014. Sure, wasn't RISC, though, or that was RISC-1. Okay, so we're talking specifically about RISC-V, which is not the same thing as RISC-1. Okay, so we're talking specifically about RISC-V, which is not the same thing as RISC. No, but RISC-V. Risc-5 is the open source ISA.
01:22:55 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, so RISC itself is. The RISC is reduced instruction set chip. There's also SIX, which is complex instruction set chip, the difference being one says we're gonna have simple instructions and do them really fast, the other one says we're gonna have a big instruction that does a lot of things at once. Yep, which one is better? It changes throughout the years, yeah.
01:23:19 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It, it, it. It depends on what you're doing with it too.
01:23:21 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, but I mean in general, they've gone back and forth, of which one's faster over the years as technology keeps advancing one leaps in front of the other.
01:23:34 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
So there is no right answer. The very first Risk alone, I think, was 1957. But that's kind of like you said, a completely different thing than Risk 5, and I was getting those things all mixed up.
01:23:52 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
See, Rob has been talking about the board game this whole time we're talking about computer chips.
01:23:57 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Oh uh, so you needed a breadboard to program? Oh yeah the board game was 1957.
01:24:06 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
yeah I, I mentioned risk chips to rob and he's looking. Do they come in nacho flavor, you know?
01:24:12 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
oh all right 1981.
01:24:18 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I think risk one chips 1981.
01:24:20 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
that sounds worse, that sounds all right, uh, my google foo.
01:24:25 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I've had too many days off. Failed you. Real bad there.
01:24:29 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Now my concern is, even though you've got that open instruction set architecture that was developed by the RISC-V Foundation, the implementation of it can vary from vendor to vendor, and I think that's what actually caused this ghost right.
01:24:46 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yes, absolutely. So that is like sort of one of the hidden disadvantages of RISC-V is there's no guarantee that the implementation is going to be open source, there's no guarantee that the implementation is going to be solid. You kind of have a at least presumption with Intel and AMD that they're going to have solid implementations of x86-64. Now, recent news notwithstanding, but you just don't have that necessarily with RISC-V and somebody could just shovel something out the door. That's terrible and that has severe security problems built into it, which happened here.
01:25:29 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
So Do you think Steve will dive into this a bit more on security now.
01:25:34 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I don't know, it'll depend upon whether it comes across his radar or not, but it's the sort of thing that he would like to talk about, I'm sure.
01:25:41 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Along with the Quad Zero vulnerability.
01:25:44 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I heard about yeah, that one's interesting too. I wrote about that one too. So the link to Ghostwrite also has some about the 0.0.0.0 day vulnerability that all of the browsers have and are slowly getting fixed. That one's fun too. All right, let's move into some tips. Rob's got us up first. Now I'm curious, rob, I now I'm curious, rob. I want to know. Burning, burning minds want to know. Is this one ko, is this oniko, is this onako? What's your command line tip? So it's like I don't know how to pronounce it. Man, would you stop asking me these questions?
01:26:25 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I've been calling it 1KO in my head, but based on what it actually is, I think it's probably Anako. Oh, it's Oniko. Oniko, because.
01:26:37 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Niko is cat.
01:26:38 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yes, okay, it's Oniko then, because it is a cat. But if you want to know how to spell it, how to find it or how to install it, it's spelled one as an O-N-E-K-O. So it's a lot easier to remember 1KO unless you know what Niko is and all that stuff. Anyway, so 1KO or Oniko is just a fun, quick little app, maybe something to throw on your computer if you're bored, or or something to throw on your friend's computer when they're not looking. It's, it's in the vein of the old xis kind of, and for those watching I'm gonna show you what it is. So a simple pseudo apt install oniko. Uh, got this installed for me and then I'm just gonna run from the command line. But you're, you would want to run it in the background or something, because it is graphical.
01:27:45
It works from the command line right, but you're not going to want to have your command line running all the time. Well, okay, that's true when you do this, so you'll want to run it put in the background or whatever, because what it does when you have oh, nico, what? Oh, I spelled it wrong.
01:28:08 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Rob fails typing.
01:28:11 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I'm like what, Okay, Oniko, is it makes us look at? Chase your mouse around.
01:28:19 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Kind of, there's also a dog version.
01:28:21 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yes, that's not all. So let me just kill this and do dash dog, and you got a little dog that runs around. Or if you want some more interesting things, let's try dash toro, t-o-a or t-o-r-a, r-a. If you do that, there's this little stripe that chases you around, and there's a couple more. I'll show you too. There is Sakura.
01:28:59 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Sakura.
01:29:00 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, sakura, whatever, and you have this little girl that chases, and you have this little girl that chases your mouse around. And one last one. I think this is actually all of them. There are some other settings you can do for speed, inverse. Have it so it doesn't have an offset to your mouse, and all that Tomoyo, t-o-m-o-y-o. And that is another uh little girl that chases your mouse around. So, hey, maybe funny fun to put on your computer. But I think you could really have more fun. If your friend leaves your computer open, it's perfect. It sleeps too when you stop, I didn't even know. Or she sleeps.
01:29:56 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's great. That's a lot of fun. There's a cat.
01:30:01 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I would actually recommend running that from the command line, but maybe use the prefix with something that would move it to the background after you've run it.
01:30:12 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
You can do that so.
01:30:14 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I'm trying to remember. This reminds me about the same era. As there was Bonsai Buddy, there was also a cats or a pets Maybe it was just called pets A similar application and I'm getting very similar vibes. Um, very, very nostalgic. Rob, this is great, this is fun.
01:30:35 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
sometimes we just need fun things for our computers, and that's me I'm fine rob, are you going to go through and demonstrate some of the uh other uh fun uh apps from the link that you've got posted?
01:30:49 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, maybe I will. I save those little fun ones for when I have nothing really strikingly awesome. So hands off, hands off.
01:31:04 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I think that's what I just heard. All right, jeff. What is FEH? Is that how you say it?
01:31:11 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, feh. Feh is a command line image viewer and it focuses on being a command line image viewer. That's all it does. It's designed to be fast and light because it doesn't have a big GUI weighing it down, though they do say other programs which have a GUI can be used if you want to call FEH to display an image. So I should say it's FEH, that's what it is. It's pretty powerful and when I tried it out it was really fast for me.
01:31:42
Some of the features it has it opens any format supported by imlib2. Full screen mode for slideshows or single images. Also had a booth mode to change the full screen image periodically. Various operation modes you know it's like slideshow show all the files in or below a directory. Change slides with your keyboard or automatically after a delay. Thumbnails you know you can list like an LS type output with image dimensions and etc. Multi window it can open all images at once. Optional HTTP FTP support via lib curl can be used as a wallpaper setter. Supports RXVT.
01:32:22
Transparency you know file list support, recursive file openings, sorting of the files. Transparency you know file list support, recursive file openings, sorting of the files. Loading, saving file lists. You know montage creation, collage creation, in-place editing, background setting, dynamic zooming, a ton of stuff. I haven't even gone over it all. So I would take a look at the link in the show notes and get this powerful image display tool and it should be found in most repositories. I know it is on the Debian side, you know sudo apt-fe install. It loaded right up and yeah, it was really snappy to display images. So give it a shot if you want something light and simple and quick.
01:33:06 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yes, I am just a little disappointed that it does not support sixles. It's a uh, it's a command line photo viewer, picture viewer. It should be able to open the pictures in the command line. With sixles, they're falling down on the job it must not for those who don't know a sick. For those who don't know, a sixel, that is a term for doing graphics in the terminals that you can actually do things like show pictures right in the terminal.
01:33:34 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
It's it's similar to ascii art.
01:33:38 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It's. It's basically modern ascii art.
01:33:40 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yes, it, it, it.
01:33:43 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Any format supported by imlib2, so it probably is not supported in there well, no, so sixles would be the output, rather than opening a new window it would actually put the output on your terminal. So that's what. That's what. That is all right. Uh, let's see who is up next, ken. Ken, we're talking about the clipboard.
01:34:07 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yes, we are. And with talking about the clipboard, this week I ran across the linked article that I've got in the show notes again by S Key at Oz Technics, explaining how to copy or manipulate your clipboard from your command line. This article covers two commands xclip and xcl. That's xcl that help manage the clipboard efficiently. I am just going to give an example of their usage and recommend reading SK's tutorial for each command or the man pages for other uses. The two examples I have in the show notes are how to view clipboard contents on the command line. For those of you all listening, I'm about to switch to the command line, by the way, to demonstrate using them to just capture whatever I've got last in my clipboard. Let's hope it's not my password. Capture whatever I've got last in my clipboard. Let's hope it's not my password, but are you seeing my command line now?
01:35:12 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I see it mirrored.
01:35:15 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Mirrored, yes, unmirror yourself, that's hilarious Gotten by the mirror.
01:35:22 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
We done been mirrored.
01:35:26 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Where is it mirroring me at there?
01:35:29 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
you go, all right, so command line, command line copy paste.
01:35:39 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
So here we've got Xclip. Now I've added a comma or semicolon echo to force a new line out, Otherwise it put it right behind the without that. Oops, that's your Rob the? No, that's not.
01:36:04 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
That's actually a that'd be a good password.
01:36:09 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
That may be the one that everybody was using if they wanted to go straight to the restream to watch it. I think isn't it.
01:36:16 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Could be.
01:36:20 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Better be a lot let's wait that out.
01:36:36 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
And out and yes, now does it? Does it interact with the?
01:36:38 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
like the desktop copy paste, or is this just for the terminal? Well, let me switch back and copy something real quick.
01:36:51 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
All right.
01:37:00 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
And that's using Xclip.
01:37:03 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Mm-hmm.
01:37:04 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
And there's using Excel. They both are basically doing different things. As you can see, with the x clip it's space dash selection, space, clipboard, space dash o to basically output it, whereas Excel it's dash dash, clipboard, dash dash, output. As I said, if you really want to play with this, look at the SK tutorial, because he goes into how you can use it to manipulate the clipboard to add stuff to it, capture it into a file and even read a file into the clipboard. Cool and even read a file into the clipboard.
01:37:46 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Cool. Now I wonder if either of those work with Wayland. That is going to be kind of the interesting one, because a lot of things don't work with Wayland that you would think maybe should.
01:37:56 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
These commands do require an XLS in session. So next time I will be showing how to copy text to the clipboard when using.
01:38:04 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Wayland Ah, that's the one I'm going to be interested in. I'm Wayland, where I can be Cool. All right, I've got a quick tip for you. And it's sensible. Let's be sensible and specifically sensible.
01:38:21
Editor, which is essentially just an easier way to do your preferred alternatives. It's do your preferred alternatives. It's an alternative to alternatives. And so the first time you run Sensible Editor, it's going to say hey, here's the editors you have installed, pick one. It'll even tell you Nano is the easy one. So you tell it which one you want to use and then the next time you run Sensible Editor, it will run the editor that you chose. So it's a really easy way to set up your default editor.
01:38:52
And the neat thing about it is it's not just editor, there are a bunch of sensible commands. I think it even has choosing your Java version and all kinds of other stuff what browser, your sensible pager and some interesting stuff like that. And I was not. I had not come across this before, so wanted to let folks know about it. It's another way to pick your alternatives favorite browser and what have you. So, all right, that is our show. That is the news. Quite a bit that we have covered this week. We will be back next week. Before we leave, though, I'm going to let each of the guys get the final word in or plug whatever they want to. We're going to start with Rob, who is asking for a lot of coffee money to be able to buy a Mac Right.
01:39:40 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, so to get the Mac I need 500 coffees. I don't know, I'm just making up a number. Give me a bunch of coffees. I don't think that's enough. I think that's too much. It's times.
01:39:56 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I don't want a math in my head he needs like 200 coffees 200 coffees, good enough.
01:40:01 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
And to do that, connect with me on LinkedIn, twitter, m mastodon, and there's a link to buy me a coffee. And you know what? I didn't say this, but you go to robertpcampbellcom and then this web page will show up with those links there coffee mastodon, twitter linkedin. Say that with me LinkedIn, twitter Mastodon. Buy me a coffee.
01:40:29 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
All right Ken.
01:40:36 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Well, I've got a link in the show notes under Indie Notes. I'm giving you a brief bit of hacker history. I want to share the complete quote from which the misquote, and I'm sure everybody's heard this. Information wants to be free. But where it comes from my source is Stephen Levy's Hackers Heroes of the Computer Revolution. Now, I'm taking this nearly verbatim from his book, but let's picture it. It's November 1984, marlin County, california. We've got 150 canonical programmers and techno ninjas gathered for the first hacker conference which was hosted by Whole Earth Catalog founder Stuart Brand. Now, at Stephen Levy's the Future of the Hacker Ethic Discussion, stuart said and here's where the quote comes from on one hand, information wants to be expensive because it's so valuable. Information wants to be expensive because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.
01:42:10 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's the full quote and I would yes, it's a great book. I would. I would say, go. If you've not read it, go and grab stephen levy's hackers here. The computer revolution. It make sure it's the 25th anniversary edition. Oh, I'm not sure if I've got the anniversary edition or not. I probably do, because he goes and adds a little bit of context that was not available when he first wrote the book about, like how the things that he wrote about have continued on and some of these people have continued to be in the game.
01:42:36 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
And he adds another appendix to it in the anniversary edition.
01:42:42 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, there it is. My copy is right up there on the bookshelf. I found it. I knew it was over there somewhere. Yeah, great stuff. All right, Jeff, I know you've got a bit of a fun story. What were you up to this last week?
01:42:58 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, nothing to do with Linux, but I had mentioned that I was going to go run the Bonneville Salt Flats and I did this week. We had five of us down there and took my motorcycle down and I have a link in the show notes to, on August 6th, motorcycle 1006B, we set a record for 148.994 miles per hour for the class we were running in. It was a lot of fun. Getting out on the salt was amazing and I will tell you, it was about 100 degrees, 102. And 100 degrees on the salt is like probably 110 or 115 anywhere else, because of a flat reflective surface that was so bright. I can't describe how bright that is, but we made a couple runs and we did it and it was a really great experience.
01:43:53
So I was definitely thrilled and I would say, if you get a chance to even do anything in your life, have a little adventure, go for it and you only get a just you, only. You only get a certain amount of time in this planet. So just, uh, do, do adventurous things. You know, live, live, life a little. It was great time, great memories, yeah.
01:44:18
Yeah, excellent you lived I, I did, I made it, made it in the record books. It was really interesting. And just seeing the different cars and you know we were out there with people also running 400 miles an hour and you know you'd see turbocharged 125 CC motorcycles to you know, multi-engine vehicles, to crazy stuff.
01:44:42
Our mine is. Ours is a little slower than some of them, but we have the aerodynamics of a brick, so we were never going to be super fast. It's not a. If you look up what a Triumph Rocket 3 is, it's the second generation. It's kind of a brick.
01:44:57 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Oh, you meant your bike.
01:44:59 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, ha Not my mental capacity.
01:45:06 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
All right. Well, I better get these guys off the airwaves before they get us all in trouble. Goodness, we appreciate them, though, appreciate the group of hooligans that I've got with me, appreciate everyone watching and listening. The one thing I will make sure and let you know about is Hackaday. You've got my security column goes live on Friday morning. There is Hackaday. You've got my security column goes live on Friday morning there, and so you could have found out about both the 0.0.0.0 day and the RISC-V issue we talked about today this past Friday, and then there's also Floss Weekly there on Hackaday. We record on Tuesdays now, but you can look for the new Floss Weekly YouTube channel and subscribe. We go live and catch the live recordings as we do it there, and then we also upload the edited afterwards. So that is a lot of fun. Make sure and check that out. This upcoming week we are actually talking with the folks behind Homebrew, which is the what do they call it? The package manager that is missing from Mac OS, and apparently you can run homebrew on Linux as well, so that's pretty cool, anyway. So that is the main thing that I will let you know about, and we sure appreciate it Again, everybody being here, both live and on the download, and we will see everybody next week on the Untitled Linux Show.
01:46:24
Hey folks, do you just want more? Not enough ULS in your life? Well, you need to join the club. Are you not part of Club Twit yet? It's just about the cost of a cup of coffee per month. It goes to support your favorite podcasting network and it's really worth it. You get behind the scenes, look, you get access to the Discord, lots of stuff going on. You need to join Club Twit.
