Untitled Linux Show 157 Transcript
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've got proof that people are listening to us. And then, of course, there's the long-term support battle. Kitty Plasma 6.1 is about to come out. X-window system is still hanging around 40 years later. Cinnamon goes 6.2. And Darktable is moving away from artificial intelligence. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned.
00:26
Podcasts you love From people you trust this is Twit. This is the Untitled Linux Show, episode 157, recorded Saturday, june 22nd. Squid Game Installer. Hey folks, it is Saturday and you know what that means. It is time for the Untitled Linux Show. Get in here. We're going to geek out about all things Linux and open source. It's going to be a lot of fun, and, of course, it's not just me running the show here. We've got the whole crew in together today and some of us are getting flooded out. Some of us are baking at 100 degrees. It's a lot of fun wherever we are across the world, but there's some neat Linux news going on and Rob is going to kick us off. And Rob, you have it on very good authority that somebody listened to us.
01:19 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Well, maybe, yeah, so last week Jonathan shared his great idea with the world right here on the Untitled Linux show His idea for the Framework laptop to develop a laptop where the SoC can be swapped out from ARM to RISC-V or whatever else comes and follows that form factor. Well, here is the evidence that people are listening to us and they responded fast based on this story. They heard jonathan's idea and we're like whoa, that is an awesome idea. Why didn't we think of that? So I'm not 100 sure if this is the exact form factor Jonathan was talking about, because I'm not quite familiar with the form factor he's talking about. So I'll let him chime in at the end. But here is what is happening.
02:14
Last week I also talked about Deep Computing releasing an Ubuntu RISC-V laptop. This week it has been announced that Deep Computing is working with Framework Computer Inc on a RISC-V main board. And for those out of the loop, framework makes the famously modular Framework laptop that allows you to easily swap out components. So you can keep using that thing virtually forever. So you can keep using that thing virtually forever. So of course, this new RISC-V board will drop right into any Framework Laptop 13 chassis, following the Framework's modular ethos, which uses the RV64GC instruction set architecture with a 64-bit quad-core U74 processor running at up to 1.5 GHz plus an integrated GPU running up to 600 MHz. This is the same SoC used in the Pine64 PineTab 5 tablet and in the Star64, pinetab 5 tablet, and it's in the Star64 single board computer.
03:36
As noted last week, risc-v is still going to be rather low performance, with. The main intention of this is just to get RISC-V in the hands of developers so they can get started developing. So once this hardware is really ready for us, the apps will be there and with this framework, owners will be able to just drop this into their system or maybe purchase a used framework to drop it into. So I have two questions here for Jonathan. One, what do you think of this now? And two, since people listen to your ideas, what big idea should they announce next week?
04:15 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So Rob is, of course, telling this story very tongue-in-cheek. First off, this is on the heels of last week, closely enough that obviously we didn't have anything to do with it as much as we would love to think that we did. And second, it's not actually quite the idea that I was pitching, but that's okay, we still were excited to see it. The thing that's interesting about this is the processor that they picked. It is the same processor that's in the Vision 5 II, I believe, is the name of the board. It's an odd name, but I think that's the name of it and so I'm familiar with this.
04:51
I've got one of those. It's on the desk behind me, or no, it's right here in front of me actually. Yeah, the star five, it's this guy. I've got one, I had a, I've had one for a long time and yeah, so right here on it you can see it's the JH7110. It's, I believe, the exact same chip and this is the first RISC chip that has come along that has hit a reasonable price point performance to be useful for running Linux. It's not a great how shall I put this? It's sort of like using a Raspberry Pi somewhere around a Raspberry Pi 4 as your main desktop, it's possible, but you're not going to have the greatest time with it, as opposed to a really powerful desktop machine. But what it is is it is powerful enough and kind of like what Rob said, I think he's got the idea it's powerful enough to start compiling and start testing on Like it's a good bootstrap machine. And so you know, as we look forward into this, maybe RISC-V, future things like this is a great stepping stone to get there.
06:10 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, unfortunately I don't think you'll be able to plug that Vision 5 into it as it is.
06:16 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
But no, no. So what? They have a form factor. What they've done is they've taken like the framework has this established form factor of what their motherboards look like, and the idea is that, going forwards, you can take their motherboards will be replaceable. So you buy the whole laptop once and then five years, three years, however long you want, to wait down the line they release the next motherboard. It's got the integrated chip on it. You can just pop one motherboard out and the other one back in and do an upgrade that way, without having to buy a whole new laptop. Like it's a. It's a neat idea. It's caught on um, and so this is something really interesting, where they're offering the, the new architecture and so you could see a future where there's going to be arm 64 chips or motherboards. It's full motherboards, you know it, just the chip. But with them doing this, I very much see a future where there's going to be ARM64 motherboards going into the framework and then hopefully eventually a more powerful RISC-V chip. That'll be a little more useful for daily computing.
07:17 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
When they've got enough developers screaming for it. Yeah, Because they'll probably be screaming after getting this one.
07:29 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Well, I think I would hope that most people that get it know what they're going to get. Like obviously you're not going to run Windows on this thing. You're not going to be gaming on it really there's something you can do but you're not going to be doing high-performance gaming. You're not going to be installing Steam on it. That's just totally a no-go Pong. It's a little more than just pong.
07:49 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
So like um, yeah, but we got to have the high frames per second.
07:53 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah you can emulate on it like you could emulate, probably up to, like, the playstation slash n64 era. No problem um going past, that could be 800?. Oh, yes, definitely All the frame rates for that. But yeah, in my opinion it's just going to be great for bootstrapping the RISC platform. I think that's what it's going to be really important for.
08:19 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
But you're definitely not going to be able to run KDE on top of. Wayland on it, you probably could.
08:25 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
KDE's pretty lightweight anymore yeah, um, jeff, you want to tell us about kde 6.1 yes, I would love to uh walk into that segway, don't trip over it.
08:37 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
So it doesn't feel like that long ago. Plasma, kde plasma 6 first appeared this year. Now kde plasma 6.1 has been officially released, bringing a host of improvements. The kde 6 series continues to evolve with added, polish and new features. So while version 6 focused on correctly migrating to the underlying qt6 framework and making sure everything you know, the the actual nuts and bolts were working, version 6.1 and future releases they start going into introducing new features that go beyond basic functionality. Notably, one of these features requires Mesa 24.1 and the NVIDIA 555 graphics driver and if you meet those requirements, you'll gain explicit GPU synchronization support for NVIDIA. You'll gain explicit GPU synchronization support for NVIDIA. So NVIDIA users should enhance the Wayland experience for Team Green, which is good news because Team Green's been needing a little help with Wayland. But you know we're closing the gap Now. 6.1 also brings triple buffering and Nate Graham was quoted as saying now this is his quote probably the most impactful thing is triple buffering support for Wayland. This should make animations and screen rendering smoother in general, ideally up to the level of X11 sessions, which X11 already did triple buffering. So we're starting to get some parity on some very important things here.
10:05
One thing is that KDE, in their release announcement, says that they're really proud of. You can now start up a remote desktop directly from the system settings app, and this means if you need to log on to a remote machine, setting up that connection is now just a few clicks. You will still need a remote desktop client, such as KRDC, but it does simplify the process. Something that comes from X11 and now is coming into KDE is persistent apps. So now, when you shut down your machine and say you had several windows open, Plasma will now remember what you were doing and get you back to where you were before you shut down the machine. Now the developers do say this is a work in progress, so it's not going to be perfect yet, so be patient with this one. Some basic user functionality changes are when you go to shut down Plasma.
10:53
They've simplified your options. For example, when you press shut down, now KDE will only list shut down and cancel, not every single power option. So, for example, cancel, not every single power option. So, for example, those who aren't running KDE. If you hit shutdown or log out, whatever it is, you have a menu that pops up and it shows shutdown, restart. You know lock cancel. So now it will simplify and you get specifically what you clicked on. They've added an option when locking the screen to make it behave like a traditional screen saver, where you can make it not ask you for a password to unlock it.
11:32
To help those with disabilities they've added Shake Cursor, which makes the cursor grow when you shake it. I mean, who hasn't lost their cursor on a monster monitor or multiple monitors when there's a ton of windows open? And it'll make it easier for people with vision issues to find their cursor on large, cluttered screens. Edge barrier has been added and is useful when you have multiple monitors and you want to access things at the very edge of your monitor. So the barrier area is sticky for your cursor near the edge between the two screens and it basically makes it easier to click on things right at the very edge.
12:11
A few other changes include updating the look of the system settings pages and several widgets got some love visually as well. So these are just a few of the enhancement and features added to 6.1. Take a look at the show notes for a full list of changes and added features. I should note the work on 6.2 has already started, so we should see the fruits of those labors in the coming months. Right now, KDE, I think, is under an exciting development time and I'm really looking forward to the future. Every point release is another reason to leave X behind, so I'm excited.
12:43 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, kde 6.1. That's fun. You know one of the things that they did a lot of people gave them feedback about things that don't work in Wayland, and so now in the KDE 6 kind of stream, they're working on tools for artists. They're working on just like the pain points that were left for Wayland, because KDE is, you know, one of the desktop environments. It's moving full steam ahead to the point to where I would expect before too long it's going to be Wayland only and KDE is going to stop supporting X11.
13:13 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I hope not. But, now I've got Tumbleweed with a KDE desktop on X11. Though I do have the option of logging in with the Wayland version. But then I've got to recreate everything again.
13:31 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
We need to recreate things. Everything should just work.
13:37 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I'll check next time I boot up in the Wayland session, but I was noticing that I didn't have all the you should be able to go back and forth without even noticing a difference.
13:50 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, really when.
13:52 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I noticed is with the terminal history. It didn't seem to be there.
13:59 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's very unusual. That strikes me as a bug. So the other thing that's fun here. This is just an interesting show. Jeff is taking a nap on us.
14:18 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Well, I can tell you about the alternate desktop environment that you might be interested in.
14:24 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, let's talk about Cinnamon. Let's let Ken take it away and give us the lowdown on Cinnamon. The scoop, the scoop of Cinnamon. That's like the challenge from boy when I was a teenager. That's a long time ago, the Cinnamon challenge. Anyway, ken, take it away.
14:37 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Well, this time we're hearing from both Marius Nestor and Bobby Barasoff. They wrote about another desktop environment release. This time it's Cinnamon 6.2, developed by the Linux Mint team to balance functionality and resource efficiency. It introduces several enhancements aimed at improving usability and functionality. Bobby believes one standout enhancement is Nemo's file manager. It has been upgraded with an actions organizer tool enabling users to customize their menu actions more intuitively, whereas Marius states other noteworthy changes to Cinnamon 6.2 are updates to the user applet to allow the displaying of profile pictures on the panel, improvements to the workspace switcher, adding shift plus click actions to the corner bar applet, fixes to the desktop peak function and it adds a science category to the menu. Now, since I've only touched on some of the improvements, I do recommend reading Bobby and Marius' article, especially if you want to find out what Linux distro will have Cinnamon 6.2 as its default desktop and how it addresses concerns over software credibility software credibility.
16:04 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Hmm. So for those that don't know, cinnamon is the desktop environment that sort of forked from GNOME. It stayed with GNOME 2 when GNOME 3 went the direction of the GNOME shell and you could say they abandoned GNOME, abandoned the traditional desktop setup when they went to the GNOME shell. So Cinnamon sort of said no, no, no, we're going to stick with that idea. What's interesting is, apparently Cinnamon has at this point rewritten all of GNOME stuff. So from what I'm seeing, there's really not any GNOME code left in Cinnamon. It is now its own desktop environment.
16:45 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
It is not just gnome 2 hanging around, I guess I can't uh give people a hard time saying they're just running old code anymore.
16:53 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Then yeah, it sounds like it and uh, it is. It is, of course, the flagship there for mint, so if you're on mint, you're probably running cinnamon. All right, jeff woke up from his nap. Welcome back, jeff. It was great. It was great the shot where we had you. You were like back and eyes closed and everything. It was outstanding.
17:17
I think Jeff may be muted now, but we will get him back here in just a second and let's see, oh, let's talk about a bug fix. Let's talk about a bug fix in. Uh, is this? I think it's mesa, I think it's technically mesa mesa the kernel proton somewhere in there. So this is uh, mike blumenkratz who is fixing things, and I believe this is technically going to be in Proton, or maybe it's DXVK or GStreamer. See, all of these things are all connected together. Probably had to touch code in a bunch of places.
17:53
So the problem was, when you have a game that runs a video file, gstreamer is used to play the video file and, as he says, dxvk goes brr in the background. Gstreamer is used to play the video file and, as he says DXVK goes, brr in the background. Gstreamer uses GL and he pulled this up under perf. It's a tool to do performance checking and you can see that at the very beginning, before it starts doing anything, there's all kinds of processing and RAM copying going on, and so he's got a blog post here we linked to about what was happening, how it was less than ideal and how they fixed it in Mesa.
18:33
It looks like he says, with a few copy pasted line and a sprinkle of magical SGC dust, the flame graph, and then he shows it and much better, much, much better looking and uh, it's like a hundred percent improvement in time in a code time. Uh, he was able to go. Uh, let's see his. His little benchmark went from, instead of running in 13.8 seconds, is now down to 9.8 seconds. So just quite an improvement. And so, specifically, if you've noticed, in Proton the loading and playing of pre-rendered video files is terrible. Well, in theory it's a little less terrible now, so definitely a win.
19:18 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Excellent.
19:19 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah.
19:20 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah.
19:22 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Alrighty, so that one was an easy one, rob. What about that Office alternative?
19:30 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
All right. So on Linux, libreoffice is pretty much the de facto standard, but it isn't the only option and many would argue because I've heard them argue it it may not even be the best option. So this past week Softmaker released their free office offering called Free Office 2024. Let me just transition for those watching so they can kind of get a peek here. So Free Office comes with a text editor similar to Microsoft Word, a spreadsheet editor similar to Excel and slideshow software similar to PowerPoint. I took a first spin and the first thing when you start it up is you choose a toolbar style and you can choose a light, a dark theme, a classic, a modern. I selected a theme that looked like a modern Microsoft Office as I wanted to see how close I could get it, and those watching can see that it looks a lot like Microsoft Office, probably much closer to Office than any other options out there, except for it may be a toss-up between the next one that I'm going to mention here and I think just looking like Office itself is a massive hurdle to clear, just like the looks of Libre. Sometimes it throws people off. So, although I haven't been testing it long, the file compatibility with Microsoft Office seems pretty solid as well, opening all the major Office file types such as DocX, xlsx and PPTX. Free Office is their freemium, to give you a taste, to get you to upgrade to one of their subscriptions, or you can purchase it outright Soft Maker Office. But honestly, when I compared the free versus the paid versions, there wasn't really anything that caught my attention in the paid versions that I needed. So I guess if you want to support them and although Free Office has the word free in the name, it isn't open source, not free as in freedom, just free as in it won't cost you any money. So if you are one of the peers using only open source software on your system, only Office 8.1 was released this week also, and I know I've showcased that one here before, and it also looks very much like Microsoft Office in its appearance. And with this release, onlyoffice includes a new app that isn't available in free office, and that is it's a new pdf application suite which can open, open view pdf files and handle basic pdf editing like form filling, highlighting simple annotations and scribe scribing on the documents with a pen tool. So it's like pokemon catch them all.
22:44
Give all the Office tools a shot, see which one fits your needs the best, and that's really all I have to say about it. I just want to do a quick for those watching. Quickly show you. You know, right here is their text maker here and it looks a lot like Office. As you can see, office Word or Microsoft Word. What they call Plan Maker kind of threw me a little bit at first, but that's basically like their Excel. They got the ribbons. It looks a lot like it. And then they have eight presentations. It started with an S. I can't remember what the S. I don't know what the S means, but that was on the logo, but it's presentations basically like PowerPoint. So there's plenty of alternatives to Microsoft Office. Give them a shot. Maybe one of them, will you know, cover what you need.
23:42 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So we've looked at only Office office before and it looks pretty interesting. I I've got to admit I'm a little skeptical of free office, like it just comes out of nowhere and it's not open source code and I'm not gonna run that on my machine they've.
23:57 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
They've had free offices been around. They haven't had a release of their free version for a few years, quite a few years, it seems like, but it's not completely new, just maybe not one that gets a lot of you don't hear about often.
24:17 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, so apparently it's from Softmaker, who's been around since 1987. And they have been developing a word processor, the text maker and all kinds of stuff for since then. So I suppose if they've been around that long, let's see they're out of germany, so maybe it's. Maybe it's legit.
24:36 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
The pre-paid one is just called soft maker um office or whatever, and I know I've heard of it. It's just, I suppose, because it's not open source, people don't talk about it as much.
24:53 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Makes sense. It does All right. There is a new installer that might remind you of Squid Right Ken.
25:05 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
We're not going through, jeff, oh we have jeff. I, yeah, I'm back, he's back I thought he was going to talk about my favorite windowing system see I uh windows 11 oh, shade has been thrown all.
25:25 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Jeff, now that you're back, we have your audio and everything. Tell us about X.
25:31 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Well, 1984 was a pretty cool time in the computing world. Apple Macintosh arrived in the beginning of the year and what would become the Commodore Amiga was displayed at CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, while on TV Peter Davidson turned into Colin Baker in the long-running show Doctor who. Also in 1984, we got the first X windowing system. Forty years ago, robert W Schilfer hope I said that right brought us X. This was also one of the reasons when we talk about Wayland not having full feature compatibility. X had four decades to get where it's at, so that's a lot of time to develop something. You know it's got a pretty good head start.
26:12
The X windowing system went through a lot of versions early on and X11 first appeared in 1987. So a lot of versions in a very short time and X11 is where everything kind of stayed. The very latest release is X11 R 7.7 or revision 7.7. And that appeared 12 years ago, you know, and we're probably not going to get a 7.8. So there's still a few small changes that go into 7.7 now and then, before the X windowing system there was the W windowing system and Schilfer admitted that he stole a fair amount of code from W. So if you look at how old where X comes from it's even older than 40 years. I mean a lot of its roots. You know a high-level overview of X and greatly simplified is that it uses a client-server model and your computer is the server and the application you're running is the client, and they can both run in the same machine or different machines. So it doesn't it. But it doesn't provide any user interface design though. Just know there are a ton of graphical user interfaces that use x. You know gnome and kde being two very big examples of that. You know they're working hard to keep Ken happy.
27:26
So if you look at the hardware architecture of machines from the early 80s until now, the hardware has changed greatly and that's one of the reasons that X developers have stopped developing and started working on Wayland. Now there are certain fundamental ways that X is structured that to make it more efficient and secure, would require major hardware rewrites of large parts of X. That's where the developers decided it's better to just start from scratch. That's where they said, ok, let's start this on Wayland Now. If you're working on a Raspberry Pi, then you will know that Wayland is the display system of choice over X for Pis.
28:05
The article in the show notes has a tagline saying, and I quote never underestimate the stickiness of legacy technology. Now this article is from the Register and they talk about in 2022, if Weyland had what it takes to replace X. They go on to say, two years later, the question is still open, though. The direction of travel is clear, so we are heading to Wayland. But they do talk about the stickiness of it just works is not to be underestimated, and they would not be surprised if, for the 50th anniversary rolls around, there's still someone clinging to X for that one old app that won't run properly on anything else. But you know, time, time will tell.
28:48 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I would love to know your thoughts on this and you know you can always, uh, drop us a line on the discord as well so I've just gone down a rabbit hole and I think everyone will enjoy itically it's another article from Lunduk, who is again the Linux sucks guy, but apparently he has discovered that there is no copies of the W Windows system anywhere on the internet.
29:21 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
You don't need copies of it. A fair amount of the code is in X.
29:26 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Well it was, but that doesn't help if you want to actually run W and see what it looked like. And so he went looking for you know anything, a screenshot, the original code to be able to try to run it. Any of that and it comes to some interesting stuff. Apparently there was a W Windows system from the 1990s and you can find screenshots of that. It looks very Mac-esque from that same time period, not the same thing. And then he's got one screenshot from a VAC station 100, and it's like maybe this is what we're looking for, but it's just kind of an open-ended mystery. So throw that link in the show notes because I found that very fascinating and maybe one of these days somebody will find a copy of it and we can get one of the great retro computer YouTubers to set it up on their homebrew system or something.
30:23 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
And I've got just the same to help you with installing it.
30:27 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
What's that? Oh, yes, yes, the Squid Game installer.
30:32 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I would say, though, before we segue, is that that one will be tough, because, if you think, okay, this was in 84, he copied the code before that, so it would probably exist on tape or something like that. And then back then you know the Internet was like universities and governments, so it wasn't. Oh, here's a big open source, everything and everybody's sharing. It would be in some locked cabinet somewhere.
30:59 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
It wasn't called Internet, it was called Sneakernet.
31:04 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Well, they had the ARPANET. Sneakernet was taking the tapes and walking them where you were going.
31:11 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I was a little older I thought the Internet was like the 70s and then before, that is, when it was ARPANET.
31:19 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
No, it was around the 70s and 80s was ARPANET 1969.
31:25 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
And ARPANET was decommissioned in 1989. Oh, and when it became the internet, which is essentially when it was opened up to the public, that one I'm not sure it looks like that early 92?, 91? No, it would have had to have been before that.
31:44 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I believe that's when Al Gore created the World Wide Web 92 91. No, it would have had to have been before that, I believe.
31:45 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, that's what al gore created the world wide web yeah, I remember being on the internet in like 91, but it was like everybody had a dot edu uh mail address and no language was either german or english, that was. That was pretty much the language of the internet back then.
32:06 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, I will find that out. We will go to the next story and I will find out when the internet was opened. It looks like it was early 80s, but I'll do a little more research. We're going to let Ken finally talk about the squid installer. It's my third or fourth time to try that segue.
32:25 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
And yes, it's like third or fourth time to try that segue. And yes, we're hearing from Bobby Borosoff, since he's the one who reported about the Calamaris team officially releasing version 3.3.7 of their popular distro agnostic Linux installation framework. Here are some of the new features in Calamaris Installer 3.3.7. It comes with enhanced code formatting and standards, advanced command list capabilities, module improvements and bug fixes to include file system table or F-Tab module, partition module tweaks, various QT-related fixes and preventing sleep and suspend during installation. I always hated it when I'd walk away and come back 30 minutes later to see how far it is, to find out it hadn't gotten anywhere because it's suspended. Yes, well, bobby's article does include a link to release notes for Calamaris Installer 3.3.7. Calamaris Installer 3.3.7. I do recommend reading the release to see what this releases, just to see who this release's contributors are.
33:45 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, interesting. I must agree, I definitely get annoyed. One of the other times is the Fedora Live CD, the Fedora Live DVD. For whatever reason has suspend turned on. So you start something like trying to rescue a disk and it suspends partway through. It's not a good time.
34:07 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
And you have to start all over again.
34:09 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yes, yes, yes, all right. Well, let's move along, and we're going to talk about AI. I think I'm up next. I don't know, I'm a little discombobulated today, but I'm pretty sure it's my turn. We're talking about AI. In fact, we're going to talk about AI not being everything it's cracked up to be in this particular case. And so the story is from Pharonix and it's Darktable 4.8.
34:34
Darktable, of course, is a piece of open source software that is essentially for photo editing, not in the way that photoshop is, but more like, uh, adjusting your white balance, taking your raws and turning them into your final photos um, things like that. And dark table had some artificial intelligence to do some of those things automatically. You know, here's my picture. Please, ai, pick the right white balance settings for me and come to find out those weren't working anywhere near the way that they were supposed to.
35:09
And so, with Darktable 4.8, the AI features have been well, they've not been entirely removed. From what I found looking through the bug reports, they've just been hidden, which is a nice way of saying that they were really terrible and they didn't work. So we're not going to expose them for people. I'm just fascinated by this. There's not a whole lot of meat here. I'm just fascinated by this. Lot of meat here. I'm just fascinated by this. Ai is changing the world and yet, you know, in another time, another example of the shininess has worn off and maybe it wasn't quite as great as we thought it was.
35:43 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
AI almost incompetent.
35:47 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Like he says, Apple intelligence.
35:51 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Oh, almost, that's pretty good Apple's interest? Well, not in this case. Apple didn't have anything to do with Darktable.
36:02 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Biggest place I use Darktable is Digicam. It does a lot of photo type stuff and they have Darktable in there, yeah.
36:14 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I find AI to be excellent in some circumstances, like Windows Recall, recall. I don't want things like that, but I think it has its use case.
36:26 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I still prefer ML.
36:29 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
The machine learning of artificial intelligence.
36:32 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
You know the one thing side note here I know it's Linux, but the recall you know. I can search for an email in Outlook from three days ago and I know who sent it and I can't find it until I look some other way. How is that? They can't make simple email search work? How the heck are they going to make recall work?
36:52 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Well, recall was going to be the solution. Recall was the answer to that.
36:55 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
That's where they need to put the AI just in the search.
37:00 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, it's still not going to find it. It's like you know, I know I hear you.
37:05 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
If they put A and I in search, we're going to be mispronouncing it.
37:12 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's not how you spell that.
37:14 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
All right, let's not how you spell that.
37:17 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
All right, let's move on. You better hear what Rob's got to say the LTS battle.
37:24 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Oh. Long-term support yes, yes. There's some interesting things going on in this space right now Wouldn't happen to be related to the final dropping of support for Rell 7, would it?
37:37 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
It wouldn't, but I will let you follow up with that if you want.
37:41 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I think it may be related. I bet you it's actually secretly related.
37:44 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
There is some relation to it, but there's a lot of content here without that. But yeah, so besides that whole dropping of that, there is a major long-term support battle going on and we haven't been paying attention. I guess. You know, distros, they've kind of gone back and forth with their LTS support, long-term support, you know, three years. It's not really long-term, but three years is pretty common, five years for some long-term, six years. And then you know it wasn't that long ago that Red Hat and Canonical, you know, with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Canonical's Umin2, went to 10 years of support. And then recently, you know it wasn't long, after 10 years, they went to 10 years of support. And then recently, you know it wasn't long, after 10 years, they went to 12 years of support. For the past few years there has been a clear battle between RHEL, red Hat Enterprise Linux and Ubuntu to have the longest support cycle. Well, we have a new contender in the ring and they've always been there. But you know, maybe, like Free Office, nobody seems to talk about them much. But maybe, maybe this will get people talking.
39:06
As we record this today, the year is 2024. And SUSE this week has announced that their SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 will be supported until the year 2037. That is, 13 years from now. But that alone is it's you know, sure it's more than Red Hat or Canonical's 12 years of support by one year, except that SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 was released on July 16th 2018. That makes a total of 19 years of support.
39:49
So if I switch my servers to SUSE, you know, in 2036, I could be running PHP 7 or something like that, while the rest of the world is like on PHP 15. I don't know Whatever. I don't know what's going to happen. Who knows where I'll be in that many years. It's a long ways away. So now that you know, that's just insane. I can't even imagine the same distro version for 12 years, let alone 19. Three years is about it usually, and I'm upgrading, except for that one server I mentioned a few times. I had one that was well past its prime, but I'm done with that, I'm upgraded.
40:33
So anyway, why are they doing this? Well, to beat Red Hat and Canonical. Of course, that isn't exactly the reasons they provided, but SUSE general manager of business critical Linux, rick Spencer, explained in an interview that the reason is that on Tuesday, january 19, 2038, we reach the end of computing time. So you know, might as well end support there too, right? Okay, not really. It's not the end of computer time Exactly.
41:11
For those who don't know when computer, when computer time, you know it's just a number that ticks all the way up from zero. When it was first created, it started january 1st 1970 and it had a four byte integer which only had enough space to get to january 19th, 2038. So you know, much like the y2k bug. Um, this has already been fixed in modern systems and shouldn't be a problem. But it could have been and who knows, maybe there's going to be a system that hits. But anyway, the Y2038 bug was fixed in Linux kernel 5.6 with SLE, suse Linux Enterprise. With SLE, suse Linux Enterprise doesn't have a Y2830 kernel until their service pack 4. So for SLE 15, they have different service packs throughout the years. So it wasn't until service pack 4 that was released in 2022 that they actually had the Y2038 bug fix.
42:15
So if they're going to support the initial release of SUSE 15 as long as possible, it just literally can't be supported past 2037. You know, not in its original form, because your time's going to break and who knows what's going to happen? End of the world, I don't know. So anyway, that's a long time to support a system. I don't really know why they're doing it. They didn't really give a good reason. The only thing they gave is a reason why not to support it any longer. So I don't know what's going to happen after the next version. They're going to just support it forever. I don't know what's going to happen after the next version. They're going to just support it forever. I don't know what LTS who's going to try to beat that. Which LTS is going to beat it next?
43:02 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So 19 years ago was 2005. Can you imagine still running Linux from 2005? Do you remember what Linux was like in 2005?
43:13 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
It. I mean I used it.
43:18 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
We used it but, man, it was pretty bad in comparison to what we have these days. It was like Fedora Core 4 or 5 for me which worked. It was great. But I don't want to go back to those days. I don't want to still be running it.
43:34 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
It's going to be so much better. It's going to be so much better by you know, the 2030s, that why do you still want to run something from 2018? But yeah, there's those systems that you know, like my old PHP server that had some old code that was too much work to update.
43:53 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
So here's my question for everybody, including those in the audience who's still running an 8-bit computer system.
44:04 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Probably you.
44:07 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
An emulator Via an emulator, yeah.
44:11 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I still have my Commodore 64 and my Atari 2600.
44:16 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So those ran the what, the 6802? 65. 65. 6502,? Yeah, Apparently the 6502 is still in use for various things. Yeah.
44:30 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
So Jonathan was hinting at something about CentOS 7 end of life, and does anybody want to try to pick that up real quick here?
44:38 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Oh sure, so Suze has Liberty Linux, liberty Linux Lite, which is essentially their option, for if you're on CentOS 7 and it just end of life or it's about to I guess June 30th is the deadline for that you can switch over to Liberty Linux.
44:57 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Now, it's actually not. You're not switching over, You're purchasing a subscription. Yes, so Liberty Linux that gives you provides you service for that CentOS 7.
45:10 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
But you do have to switch over your repositories.
45:13 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yes, so there's a switch. That happens, I was getting there. Yes, it's not free. In fact, it looks like it's $199 for one machine Per year, I think. Is that per year?
45:25 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
No, that's three years, I don't remember.
45:26 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's a three year, Right. I mean, if you really need it, that's not that much, it's not that terribly expensive honestly. But yeah, if you have a whole bunch of machines it gets expensive, I mean a couple of things on that, though.
45:42 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I mean people using CentOS. Are you using it because they don't want to pay for it? That's sometimes true. That's sometimes true. Otherwise they could be using RHEL. And there was another point. I'll think of it. I don't know.
46:02 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I mean to me the whole thing. You know, support these super long-term supports. It's the equivalent of you know, the redneck hold my beer, it's like you know a bunch of programmers are like, woohoo, we're partying. It's like, hey, watch this, hold my code, you know, oh yeah.
46:17 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
So Liberty Linux. What I read is it's not exactly new, I don't think.
46:21 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I think it's been around. It's been around, yeah.
46:23 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
But they're just providing an upgrade, or maybe not an upgrade path, a transition path to seamlessly have your CentOS get its updates from liberally Linux rather than from the CentOS 7 repositories that are going to go away soon.
46:42 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, there is a tool. I'm trying to remember the name of the tool. It's either Alma, linux or Rocky developed it.
46:51 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I think it was.
46:51 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Alma yeah, I think it is Alma Linux. What is the name of that tool? Uh, there's a leap, leap upgrade l-e-a-p-p. That might be it. Anyway, that is a great tool for switching between your upstream you know, going to rocky, going to Alma, but it also has really good support for bumping versions, so like going from seven to eight or eight to nine. So if you're in this situation and you're still running S2S7 and it's about to be time, I believe Leap is the tool that I was thinking of and, yeah, it's pretty nifty. It's something to look at for sure. So, anyway, let's move on. We've got more to cover, jeff. Firefox. Firefox 128, a notable number. It's a two to the power of.
47:50 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
It is, and there's a few of us out there that really love the Firefox browser, and luckily for us, it continues to be developed, and an example of that is Firefox 128 enters beta testing, and one of the biggest features it's coming with is a revamp to the dialog box for clearing user data. Now, if you use Chrome, that dialog box is going to look very familiar, because it's going to give you the ability to clean data from a specific period of time For example, last hour, two hours, last four hours and so on and it will also give you insights into the size of the data it will be clearing in that time frame you've selected. So you might pick a time frame and then it'll tell you oh, you've got, you know, 30 megs worth of stuff it's going to clean out, and so you can select exactly what you want to clean and when, and just more granularity and control over keeping your security, keeping the browser locked down a little more. 128 will also bring the ability to play protected content from streaming sites like Netflix in the private browsing mode. So now, if you're in a private window, you'll be able to play Netflix or other type of protected content without fear. They've added support for proxying DNS by default when using SOCKS V5 to avoid leaking DNS queries to the network. So that's good. A little more security there. More text line inline file types are now supported. So definitely good there. Web developers get some love as well. Definitely good there. Web developers get some love as well. They promise support for the at property and the CSS properties and values API. There are now resizable array buffers and growable shared array buffers in SpiderMonkey, basically, so you can change the size of an array buffer without having to create a new one and then copy the data into it. So you can just adjust it on the fly without all the data transfer. Firefox 128 also now has better lines with the fetch standard and other browsers, so it's aligning itself to industry standards. There are other updates that I haven't gone over, but if you take a look at the article in the show notes, there's links to the official testing site and I should note that, although we've talked about this before, certain features still have not made it into 128. So future versions will have things like trending search suggestions and the cookie banner blocker feature. So that'll be in the privacy and security settings. So they're coming, they're being worked on. They just haven't made it into this beta test, so look for it in 129, maybe 130. And maybe it's time to give Firefox a little love and try it out again. And you know, if you have it for a while, maybe you'll want to give it a little love and you'll want to switch back. You know, personally I'm okay without Chrome.
51:02 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, what Firefox notably does not have is the new Chrome manifest. That is breaking some plugins over on Chrome's side, although I looked into that and it doesn't break them as bad as I expected it to. There's a few issues, but it's not quite the nuclear meltdown that people sort of act like it is.
51:26 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I'm holding off to move to Firefox, moving back to Firefox as my main until they get some sense and put a progressive web app, uh functionality, back in.
51:39 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I see you know, I think I think with firefox, part of the deal is they have limited resources right now, and so there's a whole bunch of things that they would love to do and people would love for them to do, but it just takes money to hire programmers to be able to do it. So I'm kind of stuck there.
51:58 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
But I bet they take your contributions, rob. Oh, that's true, that is absolutely true.
52:04 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
How else are they going to pay their CEO?
52:08 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Well, you know All right. So there was an interesting tidbit of news this past week and I saw it and apparently Ken saw it too, and that is Linux 6.11 is going monochrome. What is up with that, ken?
52:26 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yes well, pharonix's Michael Larabelle wrote about several graphics-related kernel patches coming from Raspberry Pi developers this week. First, as Jonathan mentioned, is a new user space API change to the direct rendering manager subsystem. With Linux 6.11 that's adding a new monochrome TV mode variant. It's the DRM underscore mode, underscore TV, underscore mode, underscore monochrome. Now it's for representing video with no color encoding or burst and no pedestal. Now the second story that I got in the show notes is about Raspberry Pi engineers who have also begun the trek toward upstreaming their kernel graphics driver support.
53:21
Dave Stevenson of the Raspberry Pi crew sent out a set of preparatory patches for the Broadcom BCM2712 system on a chip support as used by the Raspberry Pi 5. System on a chip support as used by the Raspberry Pi 5. The Raspberry Pi engineers have submitted a set of 31 patches for various fixes they have been carrying in their downstream kernel for a while. These patches also make some infrastructure improvements that will help facilitate their streaming of the system on theip support that they've got. The BCM2712 is the 16-nanometer application processor that's at the heart of the Raspberry Pi 5 that integrates an improved 12-core video core, v7 GPU, a hardware video scaler and HDMI controller capable of driving dual 4K, 60 frames per second displays. I also echo Michael's hoping more of the Raspberry Pi 5 support will be upstream before this board celebrates its first birthday. For more details about each of these patches, I do recommend reading both articles by Michael, especially if you want to find out how many lines of code in the CV4 driver are touched by some of these patches.
54:46
Jonathan you want to take a guess at that.
54:48 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It's a bunch Um, though. So if, if you mean just the, uh, the VC4 driver, that's actually not very many, because it's like building on things that are already there, um, but the full on support is going to be a bunch of code. I'm sure I'm I'm really fascinated by the, uh, the monochrome stuff, and I have an idea as to what this is about. So the first thing is, you got to remember on the older raspberry pi boards they had composite video out, that's like the, the single, it's usually yellow rca cable and so on old tvs.
55:25
You can just do video out over that um, and I'm imagining that what this is is for supporting rca out for really, really, really old TVs, like places where people still have black and white TVs and their signal did not work properly, and somebody sent in a bug report and said this really ought to work, because there are places where we still have black and white TVs. I'm just, I'm just humored by this, by this idea of you know, like kids trying to program on their raspberry pies and trying to use it on their black and white tv, it's, it's. It harkens back to my childhood of, you know, visiting my grandparents and trying to play the old atari 2600 on their their spare black and white tv I briefly had a black and white tv when, uh in in the 80s and it was, had an atari hooked up to it.
56:15 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
It is, it is a common experience. Does it even work anymore? I mean, come on, all right, send in your comments to the show if you are still using, or even have, a black and white TV.
56:27 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I'd love to hear it, not necessarily a black and white, but maybe one of those monochrome monitors that had like a green cast to it.
56:38 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I had them, at least in the early 2000s. I still had some of them around, yeah that's true.
56:43 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Some of the early computer monitors were monochrome as well, so maybe you're supporting those.
56:47 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Actually, I still had them around like five years ago and I finally got rid of them.
56:54 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Seems like that's like about a VT100 mode or something.
56:57 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Something like that. Yeah, I still would love to be able to get my hands on one of those, by the way, but that's a different story. Yeah, fascinating stuff with the Raspberry Pi. Okay, we got one more story to cover, and this one is interesting.
57:12
This one is a callback to something we talked about last week. It's about Kaspersky, and so kaspersky, of course, has released that fancy new scanner virus scanner for linux, the free thing to find malware on your linux machine. And we were going back and forth whether you know it was a good idea to ever run one of, to run that software. And I came up with the idea of well, you clone to a virtual machine, you run it in a virtual machine, then you delete the whole thing. That way, you get to see if it finds anything, but you also don't have to trust any Kaspersky code. Well, I was apparently not the only one thinking about maybe it wasn't a great idea to trust Kaspersky code, because the US government has come out and banned the usage of anything Kaspersky in the United States. And yeah, so they're officially now on the list, the no-no list. You are not allowed to use Kaspersky antivirus. Okay, it's humorous.
58:15
In the show notes I've got a link off to Troy Hunt's take on this and I very much agree with what he has to say. His take is I'm sympathetic to the individuals working at Kaspersky that are caught up in the political quagmire, and I've got to agree with that. There are some great programmers at Kaspersky. Some great security research comes out of Kaspersky, and I too I.
58:38
It is unfortunate that this is a thing that we've had to come to At the same time. I absolutely understand why it would be considered a bad idea we talked about it last week why it would be a bad idea for US businesses and particularly US government places, to run Kaspersky Code. There's just kind of an inherent potential for the conflict of interest, kind of an inherent potential for the conflict of interest. Now, the other side of that, you know national security letters are a thing in the United States and so if you're outside the United States there's a bit of foolhardiness to running software made by US companies. So I mean that's a blade that cuts both ways for what it's worth. Anyway, I don't have a much deeper take on it than that. I'm curious if you guys have anything, and one of the things I'm curious about does this mean that we legally can't go and grab the Kaspersky scanner now Are we committing crime to go and get the Kaspersky Linux scanner?
59:41 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, who's accountable for that? To go and get the Kaspersky Linux scanner yeah who's accountable for that?
59:48 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Well, it depends on where you physically are when you download it?
59:51 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, I suppose that's true, but I mean coming back to the United States. So like if you go to your undisclosed Caribbean country you put it on your laptop but then you come back into the United States with it on your laptop. Are you then committing a crime like that's not the kind of crime that you want to commit? That's, you get it. You get a visit from the wrong people for committing that sort of crime would that be considered trafficking?
01:00:13 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
uh, something like that so a mega man, uh, in the discord did ask a good question, which is one I I kind of said in a back chat a few days ago, and he says I thought well, he thought the government already banned Kaspersky back in 2017. He remembered having to dump it on all of his clients and the government did ban it for government use. So, as I answered the discord, but and as someone responded to me earlier this week, uh, governments basically banned it, so nobody working in the federal government could you had it now.
01:00:56 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Now it's banned for everyone in the us yeah, so if you had a contract with the government, you were required to remove it if you did have it Pretty much.
01:01:05 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I'm sure they wrote a FAR rule, the Federal Acquisition Regulations which, if you haven't ever had to work with FAR and I forget what the other one is be glad. Oh, those are some of the worst, most dense documents that I had to do that once. No, thank you. But I'm sure there was a FAR rule added for that. For Kaspersky, they got their own rule in the FAR and so you know you get a government contract and it'll just have lists and lists and lists of FAR rules. You know like pages and pages of this contract falls under FAR rule 273-25-7. And you've got to go look it up, print it out and make sure you understand what it says. So there was one of those.
01:01:47 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
That's where you need an AI.
01:01:48 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
for summarizing Is that new Kaspersky app? Was that free, or was that something you had to pay for? It was free, it was free.
01:01:58 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Mm-hmm.
01:02:03 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah. So I was wondering if it was just like things were going to block it so you couldn't actually purchase it. But if it's free, I mean, that's, that's hard to block and we don't have the great firewall of america to my knowledge. But uh, uh, I kind of want to get it now, just just because I would no, seriously, seriously, rob I would be.
01:02:20 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I would be very careful about doing that, um, because this is the sort of thing that agencies do not have much of a sense of humor over.
01:02:27 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Seriously, rob, I would be very careful about doing that, because this is the sort of thing that agencies do not have much of a sense of humor over. I mean, the general public doesn't know this, though, either.
01:02:39 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So I mean people are going to get it unless they're actually blocking it. I would imagine that ISPs will be forced to block it. Unless they're actually blocking it, I would imagine that ISPs will be forced to block it.
01:02:44 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I thought it was like you could get it but they would block. Or if you had it, for example, it would block all updates and it sounded like they were shutting down access to it.
01:02:54 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, I think they're going to try to make it difficult to get to it.
01:03:00 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah from what I read, it did say update so if you had it already installed, it was going to become useless.
01:03:06 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, see, Rob didn't even want it until you told him he couldn't have it.
01:03:09 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Kind of yeah, yeah.
01:03:14 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I like what was said once where it was like well, is it because it's leaking information and stuff, or is it because it's too good at finding the NSA's programs?
01:03:28 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
None of the above. Okay, so we should. You're right, we should chat about that real quick. Why? Why? This is a thing I've made allusion to it, but we should make this explicit.
01:03:34
The danger is so Kaspersky is made by a company that is in Russia. They are, I think, in Moscow's, where they headquartered. The danger is that, similarly to the way that the United States occasionally does things over here, we call it a national security letter, and you can go look at the Snowden revelations to see some of how that works. The danger is that in Russia they have the exact same sort of mechanism the Russian government I forget what they call their equivalent of the NSA. But they will come to a company as well, and because Kaspersky is a Russian company, they do not have a whole lot of option other than to do as they're told.
01:04:32
It's the same reason why in the United States, we are blocked from using Hawaii, the Chinese company, so their hardware. It's the exact same thought that the Chinese government could come to that company and say hey, when you ship off that cellular modem that's going to go in the United States, we need you to put this extra little bit of code in there and not tell anybody about it, and so that's the danger. That is a legitimate concern is a legitimate concern. Whether the response here is appropriate or not is a much deeper discussion, but that's the concern. That's the reason why the United States government is doing this, and we did joke in the back chat that maybe this means that if you're looking for NSA written malware, kaspersky is the way to go.
01:05:25 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Um, and that's about 50 50 between a joke and serious well, who better to detect it than, uh exactly, probably russia or china.
01:05:36
Yeah, exactly but there, but there is and and but. To go back there, there is a lot of that stuff that really gets taken serious, because even dealing with Huawei, even to sell hardware to them, there's a whole lot of and to make sure that it's. You know, is it the chip really what it says or is there any little added backdoor or something in it? And a lot of these governments take it really well. I mean, they do take it really seriously and it creates a lot of paperwork and scrutiny.
01:06:23 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah. So if you think this is all overblown and no government would ever do this, I would recommend going to hackaday and reading my coverage on project rubicon. That was something, and uh, yeah, I'll just leave that little tidbit there and that was us. Uh, that project rubicon was us.
01:06:40 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yes, working with us yes I can still get to the kaspersky website. In fact they have a usakasperskycom so and they ask for donations. They ask I'm just saying before you do- anything with kaspersky.
01:06:57 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Go read the new regulations and wrap your mind around what exactly it says you can and cannot do, because I I would not want to be found to have intentionally, uh, disobeyed that. That. Uh, yeah, that could be a big deal. Um, I honestly I imagine this will probably end up as a supreme court ruling one day, where kaspersky or some other company says, well, this is a and who knows, it's a first amendment violation that people can't run what software they want to on their computer. Like a lot of tech. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a straw.
01:07:30 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
How are you going to tile those walls?
01:07:35 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Well, if we're ready to move on, I will show you how.
01:07:41 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That took. That took me too long to figure out that segue. Alright, so that is the news. Let's move into some tips. They're not all command line tips, of course, because we're running out of command line tips. There's only so many things you can do on the command line and Rob's going to take it away and tell us about, apparently, how to tile the shell.
01:07:58 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah. So since we've told you every command in Linux already, we're moving to some GUI stuff. So what I am going to show you here is I'm sorry, kde users, you guys already have some decent tiling. This is for GNOME users because you have to use extensions to make it do what you want. But I came across this extension and it is the Tiling Shell extension for GNOME, and I thought it was pretty awesome. It works pretty slick. So let me just transition over so you guys can see my screen and hold on there. We go, let's get the right screen there, so I'll use these again here.
01:08:42
So I have the tiling windows, the tiling shell extension, which you can get from gnome extensions. Have it installed, you can edit, uh, the um, the tiling layouts as you want, and I have done some for my personal preference. But so on the screen for those watching, you can just click, drag the one you want. If you drag to the top, this nice little drop down of of the ones you have will appear the layouts you have and you guys drop it right in there. Drop that one in there, or while you're holding, if you hit control or hold control, it's going to kind of show up on your screen and you can drag it to whichever section you want.
01:09:30
Now, when you hit control, I believe it just only shows the first option you have. Otherwise you can do however you want. If you want to do a new layout, it's easy left click to split a tile, left click plus control to split vertically and you can just put those however you want. I don't want to do any more right now, so I'm going to cancel that. Another thing when you if you already have them laid out, you know, if I got these guys laid out where I want them and then I manually decide to drag a little different, it's going to basically adjust all your tiling there. So it is just a nice uh nice tiling extension for gnome. I really like it. It's.
01:10:18 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
It's pretty slick for me for my uses cool tiling is one of those good, I was gonna say. Omega man 55 is asking uh, can you use the arrow keys to move the windows?
01:10:34 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
can I move the arrow keys? I don't think so, but there's probably a shortcut to do it. There might be, I'm not aware of it yet.
01:10:41 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Most of those tiling shells will have their own like keyboard shortcuts to get in and manipulate things.
01:10:46 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
There was a bunch of settings. I just came across it this week, but uh, yep, yep, uh, the tiling.
01:10:55 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
My experience tiling works better on the big monitors. You have a little like a little laptop monitor. It's like you don't need to tile that it's it's too small already yeah indeed. All right, jeff, let's talk about fuser. Is this, the uh, the way to build a nuclear fusion reactor on your desktop? That, that kind of fuser?
01:11:14 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
no, no, no comment, comrade. Um, I I will say you know, know, I'm back after a couple weeks and this is a command line tip, woo-hoo, yeah, I want to be proud of that because Jonathan teases me when I don't have command line tips, I just have tips Anyway. So my command line tip of the week is called Fuser and it's actually short for File User and its use can be a little complicated. But it's very simple to explain and the really short version is it's a command line utility used to identify the processes that are currently using a file, a directory, a socket or a file system. So the link in the show notes goes into great deal about how you use it and different options it supports. I'm not going to go into all the details about it because it's too long to go into for just a little command line segment.
01:12:11
But some basic uses would be like identifying a process using a file. So I'm sure a lot of us have tried to delete a file and you get an error saying that's in use. Well, maybe you don't know the program that has the file open, but now with Fuser you can find out which program has it open. The same thing goes for a network, socket directory, any of that, and you can even use Fuser to kill the process that's using a file or socket socket. Now an example, a simple example of using it would be fuser space, dash v for verbose space and then the path to a file.
01:12:50
In my case I did it with a file in my show notes and it gave me, you know, the user information. So it had my name, process, id, access to the file. So it tells you is it? You know, reading what, what's it, what's it doing and what command is using the file. So I could see what text editor I had that was accessing the file. Now, if you want to find out who's using the current directory, it would be fuser f-u-s-e-r space, dash v space period for the current directory.
01:13:23
Now, in my case, it gave me a small list of different programs all under myself because I was in my home directory. But that way you can track. You know, if you're trying to delete a directory, you know, file system, whatever it is this will help you get to the root of it and not have to just go, oh, the heck with it. I'm just going to reboot and then clear everything and then delete. So take a look at the show notes and see the other switches that are supported, and I always love to hear from the Discord. If adding this to your toolbox would be helpful I know there's times in the past I've needed it and it would have helped me out a lot, so give it a look.
01:14:10 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, I like it. I I have historically had to use lsof and then grew up through it. Um, this is a way to do it. I like it. I will definitely add it to my toolbox. I can't tell you how many times I go looking for how to do something and I find myself back at our master list of all the command line tips that we've ever given. That thing is great.
01:14:26 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Guilty on that too yeah yeah, a lot.
01:14:28 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Quite often, All right Ken what you got for us.
01:14:31 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Well, I've got a command line tip for a command that we have not covered yet. For the command line, it's in process. This isn't another one of those core util commands that I've covered in the past that I recently used when checking out my new system. As I said, it's N-P-R-O-C. N-p-r-o-c is how I pronounce it. It's for printing or displaying the number of available or installed processors, of available or installed processors.
01:15:04
Now, on the show note, I've got a link to a demo document where I've gone through the systems I have to demonstrate checking, like, for example. When you open the document you'll see the first screenshot is for my Lenovo ThinkCenter A63. I first ran NeoFIT so you can see what kind of processor it is, that one's got the amd athlon 2 dual core processor and you'll see in the screenshot that improv comes back with the number two and it goes on down and shows that you have the. That. You have the screenshot for my ASUS Chromebook, which has an Intel i3 quad-core CPU in it, and you'll see that it also has reports for cores.
01:16:16
Then my son last October gave me a Lenovo ThinkPad L560 laptop which has an AMD Ryzen 7 7700 8-core CPU and, as you see, jonathan's got my terminal up. I'm going to show you how I can double those 8 cores. Today I'm going to run NeoFetch again and if you look where it says CPU, you'll see it says 16. And I type nproc-a to count all. Just go in and you'll see that report's 16. That's because I've got the SMT, or multi-threading capability, of my motherboard turned on to take advantage of the multi-threading capability of the CPU, in essence, doubling the number of virtual cpus that the system sees yeah, so that's.
01:17:27 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's like hyper threading. Um is what intel called it, I forget what, uh simultaneous multi-threading uh, smt just refers to having multiple cores. Um, the the, the idea of hyper threading is like not all of those cores. It's's not exactly what AMD is doing. I must point out, though, that really Ken just picked that command line because he wanted to show off his shiny new processor and all 16 cores that it has. I do have a question, though.
01:17:55
All eight cores that it has. Well, okay, so with the new AMD processors? So with the new AMD processors, you get deep into processor theory with this, and how much a core is and how much hyper-threading is going on. They actually have 16 cores, but only eight full cores and then eight mini cores that stack up. Yeah, it's weird. Modern multiprocessing is weird good, rough, but ken.
01:18:28 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
The one question I have is why are you using obsolete, uh, abandoned software?
01:18:36 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
neo fetch. Yes, neo fetch, because I haven't found a good replacement yet. You got one to suggest.
01:18:45 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Well, we did suggest it on the show when we talked about it. I mean you probably got all kinds of viruses now with that old thing. Got to get Kaspersky on it.
01:18:56 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Oh, thankfully that's not how that works. Oh goodness, all right, I've got a super quick tip. I had to do some work on my network here in the past couple of days. I was given some new IP addresses and I was unable to get into my guest router because the IP address disappeared that it was trying to use. Well, I've also got some IPv6. So I said I can just go to my web browser and punch in the IPv6 address, and certainly I can pull it up.
01:19:27
And if you don't know, when you go to type an IPv6 address into your web browser's URL, it runs a Google search on the text instead of interpreting it as an IPv6 address. And so, if so, quick tip surround it in square brackets. It is square. Open square bracket, then the IPv6 address and then close square bracket, and that will force your web browser to actually see it as an IP address. So super quick for me, not really on the command line, but if you need it, you need it. Good tip, yeah, all right. Well, I think that is the show. But if you need it, you need it. Good tip, yeah, all right. Well, I think that is the show, and we've covered a lot of ground. I'm going to let each of the guys close it out, get the last word, plug anything they want to we're going to start with Rob.
01:20:16 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
All right, as always, come connect with me, robertpcampbellcom, as it says right down there. On there you can find my LinkedIn, twitter or X Mastodon or a place to donate coffees to me so I can drink coffees. And yeah, come connect with me, say hi and that's all I got.
01:20:42 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I am humored by the number of people that are begrudgingly returning to X. It's like, okay, fine, maybe we overreacted a little bit. We'll come back to Twitter.
01:20:52 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I'm not saying I overreacted a little bit, but somebody linked me and I thought I should be there.
01:21:01 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Okay, okay, I can't go back. I never be there. Okay, I can't go back. I never had Twitter.
01:21:07 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Well, maybe it's time Go ahead and get your plug in, Ken.
01:21:12 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Well, I just wanted to share a link to the Destination Linux podcast interview with Thomas Kreider, also known as Glorious Egg that does sound.
01:21:26 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That does sound interesting. I've. I have followed the glorious egg roll for a while and, uh, he does some cool stuff, so it's only an hour and a half long.
01:21:35 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Oh, that's nothing.
01:21:36 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
We go longer than that on this show all the time. All right, jeff, like now, you like now. Yeah, how?
01:21:43 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
does your ride go? It went wonderful. So my my ending note today has nothing to do with linux. Uh, and no poetry, sorry. I got something else to talk about. I did and I have a link to the show notes ride 1k in a day. So I did, and it's been a bucket list item for me. I rode a000 miles in 24 hours on my motorcycle Nice. So we went from Idaho Falls in Idaho all the way north to the Canadian border. We didn't cross the border, but it was a beautiful ride through the mountains, it was wonderful and wound up getting a certificate for it and we supposedly, I think we set a record because we had 16 motorcycles that did it all together and we started with 16 and we ended with 16. And everybody made it and everybody was safe. So it was a wonderful ride. So that's why I missed a show.
01:22:38 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Other than that, a worthy thing to be out doing. Yes, yes, yes.
01:22:44 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Well, it was, you know, and it's like, why would you do that? Well, it's, why do you climb the mountain? It was there. It's something I've always wanted to do, so I did it and I'm happy I did, and I just love riding on a motorcycle.
01:22:56 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yep, yep.
01:22:56 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Very cool. So, other than that, everyone have a great week and I look forward to seeing you next week.
01:23:03 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
All right, appreciate you guys being here. If you want to follow my work. There is, of course, over on Hackaday we have Floss Weekly, which records. Well, for the rest of this month we're recording on Wednesdays and we are actually about to move the recording to Tuesdays. And if you were to go to the Floss Weekly YouTube page you will find that our latest episode we actually uploaded with the video enabled. We're going to give that a try for a little while and see how that goes, so doing some upgrades over there.
01:23:30
And then, of course, my security column goes live every friday, friday morning over attack day. Uh, lots of interesting stuff there, because the world of security is hardly ever boring. Almost always something, something going on. So you can follow that stuff there. And yeah, that's pretty much it. If you really want to throw a tip in the tip jar, for me personally it's over at buymeacoffeecom and I use the name JP Bennett there, so feel free to look that up if you really think I've earned the tip.
01:23:57
Other than that, if you appreciate Twit, if you appreciate Twit being the host of the Untitled Linux Show, you can join the club. Let's see if I can. There we go. That's what I wanted. Get the QR code right there to get in on Club Twit and that's just $7 a month. It's like a cup of coffee per month and it keeps Twit on the airwaves and it's a way to show your support. We sure appreciate it. And yeah, think about that. And so, yeah, I think that's about it. We appreciate everybody being here and we will see you again next week on the Untitled Linux Show.
