Untitled Linux Show 160 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 it's about a lot of gaming with bottles. And then we talk about Clonezilla. There's the Zed editor, we're putting M.2 inside a pipe case and it's all about Wayland. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned. Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Twit.

00:25
This is the Untitled Linux Show, episode 160, recorded Saturday, july 13th under the Microsoft. Hey folks, it is Saturday and you know what that means. It is time to get geeky. It's all about Linux. It's the Untitled Linux Show and of course, it is not just me. We've got the whole crew here today. Episode number 160 means we've been doing this for just over three years. We were talking about that just in the pre-show and really interesting to see that we've been around for that long and it's been a lot of fun and hopefully we're going to be around for a lot longer. So we have some fascinating stuff that's happening this week. We've got some news, we've got some tips and we're going to dive in and let Ken kick us off with what I believe to be some wine news. Not the alcohol, but the Windows is not an emulator wine.

01:20 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Actually it's going to be about bottles, because this week Bobby Borisov wrote about bottles and yes, I did say bottles referring to the software tool built on top of Wine, designed to help us manage and run those Windows applications and games on our favorite Linux distro by providing a user-friendly graphics user interface. A key update in Bottles version 51.12 is the added support for the Direct3D 8 via DXVK, allowing older DirectX games and software to run more efficiently under Linux environments, an enhancement that benefits users looking to run legacy games without complex configurations. The new version also removes the at LUR underscore cache decorator from the past class, alongside minor typing fixes which streamline code execution and reduce memory overhead. Code execution and reduce memory overhead Performance has been improved by utilizing case-fold for the drive underscore C directory when available, ensuring faster file handling and search capabilities. Bottles 51.12 addresses several critical bugs that affected users' experience in previous versions. One was a crash on startup. It has been resolved, enhancing the software's stability.

02:50
The GNOME runtime, which Bottles relies on for its graphical interface, has been updated in the manifest, ensuring better integration with the latest Linux desktop environments. Previous issues with handling file names containing spaces and executing commands in the terminal through the KGX launch have been fixed. Syntax warnings in the command line interface and issues with MIME-type definitions that affected application detection and categorization have also been corrected. On top of that, the update introduces several user-oriented features to enhance its flexibility and usability, such as an option to skip checksum verification during dependency. Installation offers a faster setup process for users who prioritize speed over security verification Now why would we want to do that?

03:52
And, of course, the desktop entry specification changes now include a tri-exec field, which provides better integration with desktop environments and ensures that shortcuts only appear when the executable is available. Lastly, the transition from add underscore mime underscore type to add underscore pattern in file filter management marks an important improvement in how Bottles handles file associations, particularly on certain Linux distributions where file filtering poses issues. Bobby also includes a link to the recent release notes, so I would recommend checking on the article article that I've got pinned in this, linked in the show notes, uh, if you want to follow that link and find out more about models it's.

04:54 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
it's kind of like uh, lutris, um, or well what. There was an old application I used to use that was like lutris, uh, play on Linux, play on Linux. Yeah, yeah, it's kind of like those two. It sounds like maybe a little bit more customization going on.

05:12 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
It's a little more advanced than Play on Linux, I believe.

05:15 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I think that's where. Bottles got its start from was. It was just either a fork or Play. Onlinux went into just changing the set.

05:25 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah they're used for setting up different environments and keep them separated, not security-wise. But if you have a program that, for example, requires XP libraries, you can set up a bottle that'll handle that. And then you have another program, that's say Windows 7 or Windows 10 or whatever, then you can set up one for that and you can load whatever special libraries in to support that program which maybe would mess up a different program you're trying to run. So it's kind of like little, maybe Docker containers except no security.

06:00
It just lets you customize the libraries for each program. So that's an interesting comment.

06:04 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It just lets you customize the libraries for each program. So that's an interesting comment. And now I really want to know is there one of these applications that is security-focused, that is, to allow running Windows applications in an actually isolated and sandboxed Wine prefix?

06:23 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, the point is you're running Windows. They just gave up and they just figured this. If you're going to run Windows, you don't really care. Yeah, but have any of you tried bottles or used bottles?

06:39 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, I've used them. I've supported CodeWeavers for a long time and that's how it will install programs into different bottles. If you want to, you can select which bottle you want them to go into and the environment that that bottle supports.

06:54 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Oh, Rob, you mean bottles itself, like the application itself, bottles itself, not wine, but the actual application bottles, but the actual application bottles.

07:04 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Oh yeah, no, I haven't. I've used, as I mentioned, I used to use Play on Linux and then that project went in a weird direction and then sort of dried up, and so I've been on Lutris and Steam. Honestly, Steam does sort of the same thing it puts your games inside individual bottles. I don't think it uses that term. It uses prefixes inside individual bottles, not without using.

07:26 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I don't think it uses that term. It uses prefixes. Yeah, I know I talked about bottles on the show rather early on. I think I still had a different computer at that time and this one is even new anymore. But I remember trying it then and even though I've never heard anyone have these problems or anything, it seems like it works great for everybody. When I tried it it worked. It works like it works great for everybody.

07:45 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
When I tried it. It works for everybody except Rob.

07:49 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
It just it didn't. It was so slow. It slowed down my whole computer to the point where I'd usually end up just having to restart to get the thing to function, and I remember trying multiple times. I really need to give it another shot on this new computer.

08:05 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I don't Was that on an old e-machine?

08:08 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
No, I've never would run one of those.

08:13 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Well, I think it was kernel 5.3, where they had in the kernel they had if rob equals, yes, crash a lot. It was just compiled in back then.

08:25 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I was this close to buying an e-machines desktop way back in the day too, and it's like the silliest thing. But you walk into the store and you want an AMD 64. Guess what it was. Emachines was the only game in town. Anyway, let's move on. Bottle sounds pretty cool, though. That might be worth trying out, just because of their install scripts and all of that. Yeah, yeah, it works now I think it'd be pretty awesome. Yeah, so, rob, you need to try it again, see if it fixes it. Yeah, anyway, let's talk about the m.2 in a pie case. Did you get one, rob? Do you have one in your possession?

09:00 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
uh, no, I don't, I've only read about it. Okay, ken. So I know we have a lot of Raspberry Pi fans listening to this show and also on the panel. Ken used to run that as his daily driver, but he's since upgraded.

09:22
But one of the great things we've been able to do for a while with the Raspberry Pi 5 is to use an nvme nvme drive with with a, an adapter, you know, and among the first was the pomeroni pomeroni add-on, that, uh, that allowed you to put an nvme drive on it. But the problem with that is it was rather large comparably, so you couldn't run it in a standard case, the standard official Pi case. You had to use some alternative casing for your stuff. Then there was the official Pi M.2 hat plus that you could fit into an official case hat plus that you could fit into an official case, but you had to keep the top uh, top of the case had to stay off to give just enough room, which made it an excellent dust collector. Now the folks over at pine boards have released the pine board hat drive nano. That is small enough to fit fully inside the official Raspberry Pi case with the Raspberry Pi five alongside it too. Both of them can fit in there together, with enough room to leave the official active cooler unobstructed.

10:42
So, and also, I mean including all in all, that is the uh. Also included is a 3a buck converter to improve efficiency and lessen heat output. And all this power, all this power in a tiny little case, ken's next desktop. How much would you pay to have all this power? This awesome little pie hat? $500?, $30, $100? How much, ken?

11:14 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
$30 including shipping be quiet.

11:21 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
You get all this, including the cable and screws, for only $10 and shipping. Don't ruin my story. What are you doing there? So you can get, you know, you get the Pi 4, the Pi 5. I don't even know what the Pi 5 is these days. It depends which specs you get on it. But you can get yourself a nice little computer with NVMA E and that really makes a computer these days. That's, that's, that's the key right there. You can get that on a tiny little desktop tower for less than a hundred bucks easily.

12:02 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, so there's one. There's one downside to this, and you know it's. It is, of course, sort of baked into what they're trying to do. Uh, you can only put a 2242 in there, so no full size 80 millimeter nvme drives, uh, which you know for those.

12:21
If you want like a full, um terrible let me put it this way, the, the um, the available like pool of these devices that are being sold and easy to get to places. 2280 is is where you have the best, the best selection for the best price. You get into any of the other sizes and it's kind of oddball size, um. So there's that. Although, looking at it, that's the, the official m.2 hat is, uh, only up to 2242 as well, which I didn't realize. That so is the. Is the pie maroni hat the only one that'll fit a full size?

12:57 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
uh, nvme, uh not probably, at least at least out of those. Just because the last two, they mostly fit into a case. So you kind of have to be a little shrunk down, whereas the Pimeroni or Pimeroni, I suppose it's Pimeroni makes sense being for a pie. Yeah, since it's not trying to squeeze in there.

13:24 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yeah. But I actually went to the Pine Store oh and went all the way through up to the point to checkout and it's €19.99 shipping.

13:44 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's always a little unfortunate when shipping is more than the actual product.

13:51 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Whenever you're saying what were you going to pay? I kept thinking of, but wait, there's more. I'm waiting for a pocket fisherman or a bamboo steamer.

14:01 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
That was the intent, yeah, that's great Nailed it?

14:07 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yup, okay, let's talk about Godot. I can't pronounce it either. Jeff, take it away.

14:18 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I will fix that. So Godot is a free, cross-platform, open-source game engine and it competes with other engines such as the Unreal Engine, just to name one, main difference being Unreal is a commercial product, while Godot is not. Now I'm saying Godot because that's how the official documentation says it should be pronounced for English speakers. I have included a link to a YouTube song which clears it up. It's not quite as good as the Sousa song, but it's still good. You know it's not too bad. But back to the main story. Gato is going to go full path tracing instead of a lumen-like hybrid, and a nanite system isn't planned either. So what does all that mean? The article is talking about how lighting is handled for games. The engines take a light source, or multiple sources, and figure out where the light shines and the light from reflections to try and make a more realistic scene. They're using unreal as an example, as it's one of the top engines out there, and they try to explain why they're not going to be like unreal now. The first is they're not trying to put features in which would not allow lower tier gpus to work very well. They say that their core audience works on lower spec games and they're not going after the triple a titles you know, so they're not expecting the next you cyberpunk to come out.

15:43
On Godot, a lot of what Unreal does requires a higher level GPU because of the complexity of the engine and that's why Unreal is called a cinematic renderer. Godot creator Juan Lintesky said that it's not where they're trying to be and part of the problem is the resources they have. Juan said in an X tweet let's say everything is ready to do a cinematic renderer, referring to Unreal or one of their competitors. The first thing to understand is that Godot is not epic, meaning epic games. The project does not have 150 veteran graphics engineers who can maintain an insanely huge renderer first. First of all it should be ray path tracing only with a base raster pass and this and say saves incredible amounts of work as shadows, gi reflections etc would all be ray traced. Hybrids like Unreal or Unity HDRP are far too much complex and hardware is getting there anyway. So he's referring to a lot of this stuff that is in software is kind of shifting towards hardware. He doesn't come out and directly say it, but in his tweets he kind of is hinting that the problem might be solved anyway with hardware eventually. Nanite is Epic's approach to virtualized geometry, and Juan also gave complexity as a reason he didn't want to follow Unity's footsteps. Gutto is lacking even some of the features which would allow virtualized geometry, like shadow maps.

17:23
What the complexity of game engines like Unity buy is more efficient rendering. For example, pretend you're playing a first-person shooter in a very beautiful museum with lots of objects and different lighting. Someone shoots at you and you duck behind a pillar. The game engine figures out what you can and can't see and only does ray tracing and path tracing on the items that are visible. This lets the game run faster, but the complexity of figuring out what you can and can't see is complex. For example, maybe there's a statue halfway from you to the wall. All the things behind the statue would be hidden and not rendered. But you need to create these virtual maps to make sure you're not leaving anything out. So it's simpler just to render everything.

18:04
But then you're not. You know you're not spending the cycles tracing things which are. You are spending cycles which are tracing things which are not visible. On the other hand, you're not trying to be a realistic cinematic game, so you're not getting hung up on the reality aspect too much. So the GPU load overall is smaller because, again, you're not making these big AAA games. That's not really where the engine's at. Take a look at the article in the show notes. I think it was interesting to hear from a game engine creator why they were not chasing the top commercial engines. And if you want to try your hand at making a game, godot might be a good first engine to start with and maybe you can make a name for yourself in the gaming world. Being open source and free, you don't also have the commercial licensing where, yes, you can get some of those like unreal or unity and make your own game, but once you hit a certain level, then you owe them a lot of money or you need to pay up front to have a commercial release.

19:07 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, you know, unity I think it was Unity in particular this year sort of poisoned their own. Well, by trying to make a change to their licensing and sort of, the community lost its mind temporarily. They were not okay with it. I pulled up the 2023 showre of godot uh, things made with it, and it's interesting to see, like the, the variety of things that you can make in godot. The people have done, uh, lots of pixel art. The one that's playing right now is like a almost almost a hot wheels sort of game. Um, I will throw this in the show notes because it's really interesting.

19:44 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I know one of the big ones is Shotgun Roulette and they hit two million in sales not too long ago. So you know it's much simpler graphic-wise, but you know two million sales even of a lower-tier game is still pretty darn good.

20:05 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, yeah it is. Uh, it'd be interesting to see. It would be interesting to see what would happen to godot and well, I suppose just godot in particular if somebody made like a much bigger game or they they had an indie title that just really went nuts and went viral, um, because suddenly you'd have a lot more interest in it, I suspect, maybe even get some more help with it possibly very possibly, and you know,

20:33 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
you know that that's the big thing when you think about when you compete against. You know why can't you know and you could. You could trace that back to you know, um, blender or gimp? You know why. Why aren't they like photoshop, or why aren't they like Photoshop or why aren't they like whatever? And then you step back and look well, they've got 150 people or more working on it full time for years and that's their only focus. Nobody has a second job, or? You know? It's not a side hobby, it's. This is what they do.

21:02 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
And it's interesting you mentioned Blender, because Blender is really kind of crossed that threshold to where they are one of the industry standards now and different corporations are pouring money and and such into Blender it is. It's a pretty big deal in the commercial space too. So it kind of feels like we are just waiting for one of the open source engines to kind of hit or maybe that is Blender, because from what I understand you can do games in Blender itself. But we're kind of waiting for one of the game engines to really kick over that threshold and really take off.

21:38 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Well, that's really what it takes, right, if you have, say, unreal and Unity, torque, a major studio off, say, I don't know, I'll make something up. Sony, yeah. And they decide okay, you know what, we're going to go. Godot, okay, we need this and that, and we're going to just start dumping resources into it.

21:57 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, yeah you can see it happening. All right, we will keep an eye on what Godot is up to. You can see it happening. All right, we will keep an eye on what Godot is up to, but for now, we're going to go back to the top and we're going to let Ken talk about CloneZilla Live, a new release. What's new in it?

22:22 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Well, according to Marius Nestor, who writes about a new version of my favorite tool for cloning disk drives without installing anything, as you said CloneZilla, this time it's live 3.1.3, and it is here about two and a half months after CloneZilla live 3.1.2, and it's here to rebase the underlying GNU Linux operating system on the Debian SID repository.

22:43
This actually is as of the 28th of June and provides better hardware support by bumping the kernel to Linux 6.9.7. At its core is the part clone 0.3.31 open source partition, clone and restore tool. The new clone Zillow release adds a dash capital V option to the Git-latest-ocs-live-ver script for version sorting, updates the OCS-on-the-fly script to no longer fail during local partitioning during the cloning in command line mode and improves the OCS underscore NIC underscore type script to get exported so to run in OCS dash live dash net config. It also adds a missing usage function in the OCS dash live dash Nick bonding script. Adds a ZST kernel module and firmware name when exacting Nick firmware or extractingIC firmware. Adds the YQ portable command line YAML, json, xml, csv, tuml and properties processor and adopts a bigger scroll back for screens in the live system. This release removes the CPU freak utils package that is no longer found in the Debian repository. Removes the thin provisioning tools package due to breaking dependencies.

24:59 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Ocs underscore param underscore PS and MSG underscore OCS underscore on the fly underscore param underscore.

25:01 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
PS variables from the EN underscore US language file. I recommend reading Marius' article to find out new languages that have been added. He also includes a link to the CloneZilla Live 3.1.2 release notes if you want even more details.

25:16 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I can't underscore enough how good of a program CloneZilla is. But, um oh no, fine it's.

25:28 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It's neat to see Clonezilla still out there and making updates and fixing things. I've used it myself a time or two.

25:35 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
It's my go-to when I want to move partitions from one drive to another. Yep, yep, yep.

25:45 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Alright, let's talk about gnome. Oh, rob, we sort of called this one yes, um, you mentioned it.

25:58 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Oh, you're right. Yeah, we kind of saw this coming, I guess. But we?

26:02 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
we had, we had concerns about gnome and apparently gn. We had concerns about Gnome and apparently Gnome had concerns about Gnome, the Gnome Foundation, that is.

26:09 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, but I do want to start out by saying, personally, I love Gnome these days, but I know you, jonathan, you've kind of had enough of GNOME even before you've even given it a chance. But this week in the news there is one more rather important person who has also had enough of GNOME and no, it isn't Jeff or Ken, because none of them will even give Gnome a chance either. It is Holly Million, the Gnome Foundation's Executive Director. So, holly, she joined Gnome, or the Gnome Foundation at least less than a year ago, back in October of 2023. Coming mostly from outside of the open source industry, she had a little bit of time in one in an open source non-profit, but she comes with quite a pedigree. She has some time at Harvard and Stanford and also quite a bit of other nonprofit experience. So with that, they're hoping that she would come in and help Gnome gain more funding.

27:26
And, yeah, we've had some stories already about the things that Gnome has been doing in their foundation and haven't exactly been too impressed. I don't know if this is her doing and saying, yeah, nobody likes that, or maybe somebody else is doing it and she's saying I don't like that, but effective, because effective end of July and it's like a little more than two weeks, holly will be stepping down and Richard Littauer will be stepping in, and currently he's the organizer of Sustain OSS and Curios, that's C-U-R-I-O-S-S. He'll be stepping in as their interim executive director. You know, I don't know why she stepped out which, if it's one of those things, or you know, maybe they told her she needs stepped out which, if it's one of those things, or you know, maybe maybe they told her she needs to stop using k2e and start using gnome and she's like nah, I'm out of here. So if anyone is looking for a job in the near future, there'll be something probably coming out soon being posted for, uh, canome Foundation.

28:39 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, it's going to take a special person to step into that situation and try to fix it.

28:45 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Somebody who will donate their time.

28:49 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Maybe I don't know.

28:52 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Well it looks like she's going to go focus on her as phd for uh psychology, so so I guess she wanted to get out of this whole non-profit there's no money in this, let's, let's make some money and uh how often you hear the?

29:13 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I'm going to go focus on blah, blah, blah, blah, blah as somebody steps down I mean usually it's family.

29:20 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, my this is actually something. Uh, I'm gonna go, I want, I want to earn more money. Well, she's got a harvard and stamper.

29:28 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Now she's gonna get I can see where c being a uh executive director would get in the way of pursuing a doctorate would get in the way of pursuing a doctorate.

29:42 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Well, you know, I'm I wonder how much of a I not a big fan of people without technology backgrounds running technology companies or techno technological organizations, and I'm thinking that you know, they need somebody on there that's really got some programming background. So some of the stuff they say, oh, we should do x. You know, some of that stuff is like, oh, that's like two lines, and other things are like, oh, my gosh, that's a complete rewrite. We, you know we can't easily do that and they need to be to know the difference. And I, I just think you can point to a lot of companies in the past that have had non-technical people running highly technical businesses where it just hasn't worked out.

30:35 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
There is a magical combination, because I've worked someone can be a good manager without really understanding what's going on under the hood, but that's a small pool of people.

30:49 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
They have to trust their experts. Yes, the subject matter experts. Yes, yeah, that's fair. And a lot of times, people at that level, they don't have the ego to say, oh, maybe I was wrong, let's change direction.

31:04 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yeah, and those self-same experts need to be able to recognize when they don't have the skill set for management.

31:15 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah.

31:15 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Like Steve Jobs did originally when him and uh wasniak started up the apple company but I do think if you have that special skill set being a you know, a great manager persona, whatever it is if you also have that technical ability, that is even better.

31:34 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yes, yeah, absolutely yeah. And that's where you get those one in 100,000 or one in a million type people that can run those companies and they just flourish.

31:46 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I mean, there's me, but nobody's hiring me to run these companies.

31:50 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I know it, man, I'm management, I could be CEO.

31:54 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I just don't know about the GNOME one. I'll think about it when I read the job posting.

32:01 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Well, and FlowConnect has said something very good too Managing is not leading, and too many managers let the power go to their heads, and that's when things go sideways. And it's true. I mean, if you study management, there's actually several levels of management and your top levels of management or your of basically leading people. People lead or follow you because they believe in what you're doing and believe in your vision, not because just because you're their boss yes, right, yeah, I've always.

32:35 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I've always thought of it as the director level well above them, and sometimes director. I mean things bleed into different levels. Director sets the vision, the direction. The manager kind of figures out how to go in that direction and then the supervisors lead more of the day-to-day how to execute on that management plan.

33:02 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Lower level supervisors are the ones that get into the nitty-gritty details of it.

33:08 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, executing that plan that the managers kind of set out.

33:17 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
But even at all levels, you need to have that leader that you believe in, not just okay, that's my boss, I'm doing what he says versus the best leaders at any level. Their people under them are going. I like this person, I believe in what they're doing. I think they've got my best interest in mind.

33:36 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I'm following them because I I I trust them especially if it's a leader that knows to get people to question them. Yeah, you know. So they got that, uh, feedback yeah, you know, yeah, he's.

33:50 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
He's not. He's not popular with everybody, but someone that apparently ticks a whole lot of those boxes and really gets stuff done Linus Torvald. Well, that's true, that's not the person I was going to say. No, if you look at what SpaceX is doing, obviously Elon Musk has some ability to tick a lot of those boxes. At the very least, he's got an incredibly talented group of people that have bought into his vision for the future and they are getting stuff done. Um, yeah, he is. He is a maybe not, um, someone to be emulated in all ways, but at least in his uh, let me put it this way. Let me put it this way there will be, if there haven't already, there will be books written about you know how to lead companies the elon way, the Elon Musk style of management.

34:40 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
It's going to be a thing. It's going to be a thing. Look at those numbers dropping on YouTube. Everyone left.

34:47 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's okay, that's okay.

34:49 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I think it said once that if you're in a room of people and you're the smartest person in the room, you need to find a different room. Yeah, you want everybody that you're leading to be way smarter.

35:00 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, that's fair, that's fair.

35:03 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
You want to be a general leading the specialist.

35:08 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
By general.

35:08 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I mean a general purpose, yeah.

35:11 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
All right. Well, before we take everybody else off by referring to things in popular culture, let's move on to the next story, and that's going to be Jeff talking about GCC versus LLVM.

35:27 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Okay, well, I will put on pause my management course. I was going to teach here for this next story and talk about Linux, I guess.

35:35
So the GCC and LLVm or clang compilers have added support for hints for intel. The hardware which will support this will be redwood cove p cores, so performance, which will have hyper threading. Meteor lake cpus and granite rapid cpus, which and and the granite rapids, which are server cpus. All of these will have hyper threadthreading. Now, just to kind of clear something up here. Intel is walking away from hyper-threading on their mobile CPUs where power consumption is more important than raw brute force. The way oversimplified explanation of all this is the code and compiler can support hints for the CPU on which branch it should take, port hints for the CPU on which branch it should take. The more the CPU can predict the path it needs to take, the faster it can run. A miss on a branch causes a slowdown, as it's going to have. A miss causes a slowdown as what it was going to work on is now not needed. It needs to. You know, flush that out, fetch the new, the other branch instructions and the data for the other path. Now inside the CPU there's something called a predictor. If the predictor does not have stored information, the predictor predicts the branch to be not taken. This is usually, but not always, correct. Now with the new hardware so you're going to have code, you're going to have a compiler and you've got hardware to support this. So there's three pieces to this. Now with the new hardware, the predictor has no stored you know information about a branch. The branch has the Intel SSE2 branch taken hint. So that's the code or the hardware that will support it. It's part of the SSE2 instruction set. When the codec decodes the branch, it flips the branch prediction from not taken to taken. It then flushes the pipeline in front of it and steers this pipeline to fetch the taken path of the branch. Sorry about that, it's a little bit of a tongue twister there.

37:43
The hint is only used when the predictor does not have stored information about the branch. So to avoid code bloat and reducing the instruction fetch bandwidth, don't add the hint to a branch in hot code. Hot code would be, for example, a branch inside a loop with a high iteration count. The reason being the predictor will likely have stored information about the branch and you know it's it already. Basically, it already knows which branch is going to get taken because it's in a loop. So there's no question about where it's going to how it's going to run.

38:17
Ideally, the hint should only be added to infrequently executed branches that are mostly taken, but identifying those branches may be difficult. Compilers are advised to add the hints as part of a profile-guided optimization, where one-sided execution path cannot be laid out as a fall-through cannot be laid out as a fall through. So the documentation goes on to reiterate about not adding too many hints to the code, as it can hurt more than help you. So if you take a look at the article in the show notes, as it goes into much, much deeper detail and also has a link to the official Intel documentation which goes over all the details for this, for those who really love to dive deep into all this, the full documentation is an optimization reference manual, so there's a ton of details in there. I mean it's pretty big size.

39:12
Future Intel hardware should see a bit of speed increase with this feature, though there doesn't seem to be any estimations that I could find where we're gonna have, and we're gonna have to wait and see if michael larabelle over at phronix will compile benchmarks with and without the hint feature to give us the results, because I didn't even find estimations of how how much they thought this was going to help, but it's on future unreleased hardware, so there's that whole level of unknown as well. The released version should see. So this is, this is when you can expect to see it in the compiler. So GCC 15 is coming out next year, probably January, february timeframe and LLVM 19 will be out in September. So those will support the hints for the new hardware that's coming. So we don't have the compilers yet and we don't have the hardware yet. So it's a little ways out yet, but look forward to the future. Happy programming.

40:10 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, so the thing I want to know and you may have mentioned this and I missed it is how much of this is related to the speculative execution problems. Like is a much of this is related to the speculative execution problems, like is this is a lot of this clawing back the uh, the performance gains that got lost when we had to turn on mitigations against inspector and the and the other speculative mitigation problems? Is this kind of response to that?

40:34 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I don't know. Uh, it could be. None of the documentation mentioned anything about any of that.

40:43 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I mean they're not going to call it out right? It's like we made terrible mistakes in the past and we're trying to make up for them with this, and like that's not Intel style. Yeah.

40:54 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I'm just curious. It's not bad, no, and even the comments and stuff. It didn't seem like anybody mentioned anything to do with that. It was just trying to make more strictly, just more efficient branches, branch predictions.

41:08 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, well, so missed branch predictions is one of the ways that some of those problems worked, right, anyway, yeah, interesting stuff, right anyway? Um, yeah, interesting stuff. And uh, you know, it'll be interesting to see whether amd comes along and does essentially the same thing with their processors. Well, that's how that works a lot of times yeah neat stuff, all right um. Do we want to talk about zed ken?

41:36 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
sure, if you don't want to jump in and talk about the open source implementation of I'm going to save that one for last because I think it's pretty cool.

41:46 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I will save that one for last. So we're going to talk about Zed. He's saying he doesn't think yours is that cool, ken, that's not what I said. Actually, this is really cool because I've got a tentative agreement from the COO Chief Operations Officer of Zed to come on Floss Weekly. So hopefully I'm going to get to know about this. So take it away and tell us what is Zed, why would people like it and what does it have to do with Linux?

42:14 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Well, other than being the last letter in the alphabet, we hear from Bobby Borisov about a new open source code editor built in Rust, written by the original creators of the popular code editor Atom.

42:29
The project, as Jonathan mentioned, is called Zed and has been available for Mac OS and now is finally officially launched for the Linux platforms. Built from scratch in the Rust programming language, it sets itself apart with a GPU accelerated renderer, promising an unprecedented editing experience that maximizes efficiency and speed. Bobby states the introduction of Zed to the Linux community brings several benefits, with some of the main ones being high performance, real-time collaboration, advanced code editing features, integrated development environment features, customizability and extensibility, open source, of course, and being community-driven. Bobby expands on each of these benefits in his article, as well as adding one starting with the letters A and I. He also has a brief section titled how to Install Zed on Linux, so I'll recommend reading it instead of turning this into a command line tip. Though I was tempted, I did install it myself and took it for a quick spin. That is still going on, by the way.

43:53 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Fun. Yeah, so the Zed editor was made by the same people that wrote Atom, right, wasn't the name of it? The previous one, yeah, they spun off and they've got their own. I've not used it yet. Now that there's a Linux version, I really need to.

44:08 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I need to go grab it and see what all the fuss is about. I can show you what it looks like. Let me set up a share real quick.

44:13 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Oh yeah, we can do that. So you know, my kind of tool of choice recently has been VS Code, which I have caught just a little bit of grief from, but you know I enjoy it. But yeah, I'd be willing to give Zed a try and see what all the fuss is about, if it's really all of that. Have any of you guys tried it? Obviously, if Ken's going to do a screen share and show it to us.

44:41 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
He tried it. Yeah, I looked at it. I mean, I have not tried it. I saw the articles and I thought about trying it, but uh, I haven't okay.

44:49 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Which one is it?

44:53 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I tell you what we're gonna. Let rob do his story on wayland and if ken can get his screen share set up in time, we'll come back and take a look at what Zed looks like. But Rob take it away and apparently somebody is going all-in on Wayland. Eh.

45:07 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Well, at least it's going to give you the option to go all-in on Wayland. So it's not exactly a Wayland story, but the Wayland piece is what kind of caught my eye. I thought it was the most interesting, in some ways at least. And what this is about is GNOME 47 Alpha has been released and with it they are giving us the opportunity to be all-in on Weyland my words, I guess, not theirs. But when I say all-in, what I mean is that Gnome Shell and Mudder can now be built without X11 and without X Wayland support at all, so you can just be pure Wayland, and so I think that could be fun, to really push the envelope. And you know, as far as pushing the envelope goes, kind of makes me wonder how long it will be then before Fedora uses this feature to make their Gnome spin be all pure whaling, just by default. That's, I guess that's the story I'm looking for. I may have to, you know, have a prediction one of these Decembers on when Fedora is going to do that, but uh, we'll get that when we get there, and there's some other things, though that that was the thing that caught my eye the most. Uh, it might be interesting to try, just because I like to submit myself for torture. But also coming in gnome 47 and available in the office today is support for drm lease protocol to better handle virtual reality. Uh headsets under the wayland session, and I think we talked about some of this already coming for for uh vr support in Wayland.

46:58
I have not tried my. I do have a VR headset. I could definitely try it on a computer. I have not yet, for some time at least, so that'd be another thing I am looking forward into trying. Monitor supports, the XDG dialog protocol, along with other Wayland improvements. There's better handling of different monitor sizes and layouts. My monitors are the same size so it doesn't matter to me, but in the past I've had some weird monitor layouts, so I could be a benefit, Just not one that I need at this exact moment. Better performance by doing asynchronous jobs, and then Gnome's remote desktop now supports persistent remote logging sessions, and there's a list of other nice changes. These are the ones that caught my eye the most. Maybe there's something else in there that I wasn't as interested in that you would be interested in If you're a GNOME user like me. Check it out, see what's coming.

48:11 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I find it so fascinating that our major desktop environments are moving in this direction to go away from X11. Kde is obviously doing the same thing. Some of the distros are trying to move in that same direction.

48:25
I can't wait until they're all in. I'm scared of X. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, well, and one of the reasons is because it's going to put Wayland into the magnifying glass, right, and so those few things, because, let's be honest, there are some things about Wayland that are still broken. It's going to put those few things under the Microsoft, under the Microsoft, under the Microsoft Show, a title, wow, not the microscope, under the microscope, and we're going to have to get those things fixed. And, yeah, it's going to fix it for everybody. Wow, okay, ken, you've got a screen share to show us right. Save us with your screen share.

49:12 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
And here is Zed Real easy to remember and what's nice about it is right now I've got it set up so that it's got a split screen and with that that lets me have a bash file that I've been working on earlier up on this side. And on this side I've got the Welcome to Zed, which lets you go in. You can choose themes, you can even choose your key maps. The default is VS Code, by the way, Jonathan. Oh, interesting, and if you've ever used Atom, you can use that. I was actually looking to see if there might have been an extension that would allow you to change the key map to match nanos. But you can go to the GitHub and look and see how you could change the key map yourself to match nano if you wanted to.

50:09 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, I really imagine somebody's already got a nano key map out there ready to go. You just have to download it.

50:17 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I've been looking.

50:19
That's where some of that was spent yeah, and of course you've got extensions that you can add for uh html support, mac os classic things, since that's where it came out first. A lot of them are theme based uh php supports, php support, github theme. The ones that I've already installed was the HTML One for syntax highlighting for log files, which could be handy, and, of course, my favorite, bash support. Got a Basher and probably one that if you followed Steve Gibson a lot and use assembly you might like. It's a generic syntax highlighting for assembly.

51:06 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
The assembly syntax. Oh, that's great. I've really got to give Zed a try. There's quite a fan base around it and it seems pretty interesting around it, and it seems it seems pretty interesting. Now the question is going to be you know, are they going to come along and get like the full extension support that something like VS Code has? You know, in VS Code you've got integrations for all kinds of things and that's really kind of why a lot of people end up using VS Code. That's how I ended up using VS Code right, because I was involved in a project that uses a platform IO and it's integrated right into VS Code. You know, you just grab the platform IO extension and it makes everything work for you.

51:48 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
So I have a question. I have a question on that. I'm bringing this forward for the audience because I could see a lot of people are making comments on this. Can you change the theming on that?

52:02 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Because everyone seems to hate the color scheme you had there. Actually, yes, that was the first one that I was showing all the themes that you could go through One was if you wanted to have the Mac OS Classic thing Makes sense. Makes sense, Since it came from Mac OS right.

52:19 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, people were describing that as a tea color.

52:23 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, let's have a tea party.

52:25 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I'm just going through and trying them until I find one that I really like.

52:27 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah.

52:28 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Got them through, them all again.

52:30 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I'll take a tea party with that theme and throw that over the side.

52:34 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Throw that theme into the Boston Harbor.

52:36 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
The question I have is with it being using GPU to help speed it up. Would you recommend an AMD or NVIDIA?

52:45 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Well, I doubt it's doing ray tracing, but if it was, Jeff has the down low on that.

52:53 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Well, and you know, sorry that was a little rough there.

52:59
Yeah, yeah, it was I think michael arable might be the king of linux benchmarking, and if he isn't number one, he's got to be really close, and he's always looking at different ways to benchmark different operating systems, different hardware, different kernel settings, just to name a few. This time he's trying out a benchmark tool gpu score breaking limit. So this is a cross-platform ray tracing benchmark tool released from basemark. It's a native linux app, so there's no translation layer that might slow things down, and it uses the vulcan api. So this means it's also using a current method to talk to the gpu and it's going GPU and it's not going through any legacy APIs, which won't show the full potential of modern hardware and software as time goes on. There are two versions there's a free version and a paid version. If you go to their website, you can look at the matrix of features, but mostly you miss out on things like automation, deep analysis of results and the ability to export the results Things you would need if you were running a lot of benchmarks like Michael does. You can turn off ray tracing and still run it, but they tell you it was designed as a ray tracing benchmark, so that's where this is going to be most useful.

54:12
Michael ran the program through a bunch of 4000 series cards from nvidia and 7000 series cards from amd and he was using ubuntu 24.04. And while the nvidia cards ran fine, he did run into a problem with the mesa rad v driver, rad v driver and the run would hang at times. But he did move to the 610, latest rc kernel he had at the time and that seemed to clear up most of the stuff, though the lower end amd cards would still hang and give kernel errors. But the higher end cards ran just fine. So of course you know a lot of the low end cards. You're probably not ray tracing anyway, so you know, keep that in mind. He ran the cards at 1080p, 1440p and 4K both with and without Vulcan ray tracing, just for seeing the difference on the performance.

55:04
The results of this were probably what was expected, as this was for testing out the benchmarking program and looking at how the drivers have aged to support ray tracing. You know, when ray tracing was disabled, amd cards hung in there pretty well with the NVIDIA, but when ray tracing was turned on, team Green dominated the charts. Michael did note that the Mesa Rad-V Radeon driver is working with the Vulcan ray tracing much better than it did even just a few months ago. So there's improvements in the driver that Team Red has that are still going on, so they're showing good progress. To expand on that more, michael's going to be looking up later this week on how the rad v driver is performing versus the amd vlk driver full, full performance results and analysis to follow, you know, maybe this next week.

55:55
One editorial comment from the, though I would like to look at the benchmarking results, but for me, I don't get too hung up on ray tracing. Lots of games don't support it and the ones that do may or may not implement it. Well meaning. While you can turn it on, it might not have a huge visual appeal and you might not see a night and day difference. As one YouTuber said, you might have a better graphical upgrade by replacing that old monitor you have rather than investing in a new GPU. So take a look at the article in the show notes where you can view the detailed results, and let us know what you think on the Club Twit Discord.

56:35 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So I am kind of interested. I've started in on a new game. I don't think it's got ray tracing, uh support, but with my amd card the performance is pretty terrible, and so the back of my mind has been for the last couple of days. I'll try to play it. It's like I wonder if this would do better on an nvidia card. Like no, no, no, I can't, no, no, not going to do that, I'm not going to change teams at this point what game are you looking at?

57:02
uh, what's human? It's a very recently released, uh, mmo, mmo shooter, I guess you would call it, with rpg elements.

57:10 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Um, okay, so any anyway, the not one I have, so I can't. I can't give you any.

57:15 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Uh, it's actually free to play, free to play if anybody wants to jump on. Yeah, it's fun. It's different. It's like it's made by Actually, I think it's made by a Chinese group, so like it's got Some elements of it are kind of that Eastern philosophy on video games, so like they're doing six-week seasons and server wipes and odd stuff like that. Is this on Steam? Yeah, it's on steam, I will. I will last human, uh, once human, oh, anyway, I'll uh, I'll get you guys what server I'm on after we uh after the show.

57:47 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
It'll be fun I've been thinking I want a new game, so yeah, take a look at it, it's fun.

57:52 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
so, um, yeah, but it's fun to see both amd and nvidia working on, working on their ray tracing support on Linux and things are getting better and better. Do you know? Is breaking limit free or is that a paid benchmark? No, it's both.

58:09 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
So there's a matrix on the website of what you get when the free versus paid and the paid is like automation, deeper analysis of the results and um exporting of the data yeah, I have to grab it.

58:24 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I'm to pick it up and see if it'll, see if it'll run. You know, right, that's always one thing, because we're we're still real early in uh support for ray tracing on linux and see if it'll run with the amd card and all of that I did try it and I was running in some problems.

58:39 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I'd have to dig a little deeper. But it was saying hey, you're sandboxed, and it doesn't want to run in sandbox mode. And so I have to kick it out of sandbox mode.

58:50 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I was getting some permission errors.

58:52
Yeah, it makes sense. I'm not surprised to hear it. Okay, let's talk about. While we're on the subject of gaming, I've got a story. Uh, when we have all four of us I don't always grab three stories, but this one I saw and was really pretty impressed with it uh, gog galaxy.

59:10
So gog used to be good old games which their their thing was uh, retro games they would. They would go through the process of finding the original publisher and actually getting the rights to be able to sell these games again legally, which is a huge service to the community, because if you really want to play one of these old games and oftentimes the only other alternative was piracy and a lot of us really have a problem with doing that we try very much to follow the laws and all of that and respect copyright, and so it's been a huge service to the community that GOG good old games Well. So back several years ago they got tired of just selling old games. They rebranded themselves to GOG and one of the things that they did when they did that is they launched the Galaxy service, which is sort of kind of like Steam and the Steam store and all of the integrations that that has. So Galaxy now has achievements and cross messaging and all of that kind of stuff built into it. Now they for a while were working on the idea of having a Linux client for Galaxy and I think that has entirely gone away now.

01:00:24
So, anyway, the story is that there is now Comet, which is an open source implementation of GOG Galaxy's communication service, and so it adds support for all of the SDK calls to be able to do things like achievements, and that is really pretty fascinating. That is really pretty fascinating. Now, hopefully, what this means is, you know, in the near future you're going to see things like Lutris and Bottles and some of these other services implement Because, like for example, with Lutris, it already has GOG integration where you can sign into your GOG account and then just okay, here's the game I want. It's single click, it'll download it, it'll run the script, it'll do the install into your own one prefix. So the hope is that now, with Comet existing, that will get built into these other services so that we can have like a really really slick integration even on Linux.

01:01:29
For now, for GOG. I think it's really cool. I'm going to have to watch this story because you know it's fun. It's fun to be able to have your, you know, to make all these things work, to gamify, your game playing right. That's kind of what you're doing, but it's a lot of fun. It's neat to see.

01:01:49 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Isn't that what we're doing right now?

01:01:52 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Sort, of Sort of.

01:01:58 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Doing it, doing a little different way, though, uh, I agree that is a much funner story than uh ken's.

01:02:04 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Of course I don't want to throw that out. Did you want to help me pick out a theme, rob?

01:02:11 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
we'll have a show special for that. How about? Yeah, there you go all right.

01:02:15 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Well, that's our news stories and, uh, our tech related news stories. Let's talk about some command line tips. We've got some fun ones here, um, I think, some that we haven't ever covered before. We're going to go to ken first. Ken, what do you have for us?

01:02:29 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
well, I'm going to give everybody a chance to go into the show notes. I've got a link to a document where I've put together some screenshots of using my command. I pronounce it find mount. It's F-I-N-D-M-N-T. It's a way of finding the different file systems you have mounted on your file system or on your system. You may be surprised by what some of it refills.

01:02:57
The basic command, as I just said, is find mount and displays the information in four columns called the target. This will be the directory that you see relative to your root. The source is the next one. It's showing the device that that directory is mounted from. Then you've got the file system type, or FS type is what you'll see as a header, and then, of course, the last one, for the default configuration, is the options that were used to mount that file system with. Now, as I said, I've got the screenshots. If you haven't already, go ahead and open them.

01:03:37
The first screenshot in the document shows used at my Chromebooks terminal. Now, since Chrome OS uses a container for Linux, you will see that my root is shown as a target, with its source being and I'll let you just read that instead of saying all of that out. But it ends with the root FS at the end, but it's a long one. Hard to believe. That's the root for my external. I was surprised also to see that if you look there, it's using butter FS as the file system type. Also to see that if you look there, it's using ButterFS as the file system type, and then you've got all the options that are set up for that. It's a long list there.

01:04:32
Now I also took screenshots of the default output on my Lenovo ThinkCenter and my B650 that I am going from today. On the B650, I also demonstrate two of the many options that you can use for filtering the output. I am showing where I only filtered it to show the real file system, and then the second screenshot is to show pseudo file systems. I do recommend reading the man page for fine mount to find out about all the other options. There's a ton of them. Now my challenge, if you want to accept it, is to find out how to get fine mail to display the same information that you'd get out of DF. Aha.

01:05:09 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Fun.

01:05:11 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
There's two different ways to do that.

01:05:14 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
All right, excellent. And up next is rob rob. We've touched on this one before. I know we have uh we've talked about it.

01:05:24 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Maybe we've mentioned when there's updates, and today we are talking about pie hole, not my piehole, but the application that you can set up on your network to block ads. So what piehole is for those who don't know you set it up, it becomes your DNS server and then all devices on your network. So if you set this up at home, like I do, all devices on your network get the ad blocking that is configured in pihole. So with that, for example, uh phone, my cell phone, when it's connected to my home network and uh, I'm doing things on my home network when it's connected to that I it, it has ad blocker. So I don't need to install an ad blocker on my phone because it automatically does it via dns, which means that when I'm browsing the internet on my phone at home, I have ad blocking. And also when I play a lot of games. A lot of games are just completely unplayable. Mobile games are just so unplayable and it's amazing the difference it makes when you have an ad blocker. Now, I'm not all for blocking ads Ads have their place, but sometimes they're horrible. So with Piehole, piehole is really easy to set up. You do have to understand a little bit, but the actual installation is by default the old way. It's called Piehole because it was made to be set up on a Raspberry Pi, but I have mine set up on VM. You can set it up anywhere and all you have to do if you set up first, you just install Linux and then after that installing PyHole on top of that is as simple as doing a curl from installpyholenet, curl from installpyholenet. They have a Piper right to bash, which is not always the best thing to do because of security. But if you trust it or you can always download first, run it or look it over and then bash it. And yeah, run that basic install bash script as the alternate way. I guess what they tell you right down at the bottom. So once you do that it's installed and then you just have to go in your router or wherever your DHCP server is and point your DNS to be where your Pi hole is. And you're also going to want a static IP on your Pi hole. You can also turn off the DHCP on your router and Pi hole also has its own DHCP server. So a lot of that is some networking stuff. I'm not going to get into those networking configurations. You can learn that stuff yourself or ask if you want to outside of this. But once you're in Pi hole, so for those watching you can also see this is my Pile.

01:08:17
The dashboard shows how many queries I've had block queries, percentage of block queries, lots of things to get blocked on my home network. Over half of the queries Total queries over the last 24 hours. There's graphs. There's client activity top permitted domains, top blocked domains, clients. You can look at the query log to see all details of what's being queried. There are different graphs. You can do a 30-day, 7-day, any way you want. You can set groups. You can set client names.

01:09:02
So, for example, I don't have a whole lot in here. I only have one device and that is because it's my son's computer, my 14-year-old. So I have his Mac address assigned here, so that way I can uh make configurations against that. Um, you know there are domains. I have only one thing whitelisted here and that's Reddit. So that way when I get my email from Reddit, uh, the default it was blocking them because it's uh, it kind of looks like an advertisement, I guess. But so I had that whitelisted so it can go through. You can select different ad lists. I have an ad list in there that I selected. I think it was like default or something, or maybe it was an option when I installed it, I don't remember. I installed this quite a while ago. You can just temporarily disable it. You know what I really need? Ads for whatever reason. You can do it indefinitely 10 seconds, 30 seconds, 5 minutes or custom time.

01:10:04
You can also use this as your local DNS server. You can set your own DNS records. For example, playing around here I got one going to my Pi hole, I got one going to my Proxmox. So if you want your own internal DNS configured however you want to, whatever you want, you can do that in there too. See name records, various tools Also down in the settings.

01:10:34
Let's go to the settings. Under the settings you can power off, flush the network, restart DNS, disable query logging, flush logs. You can select what your upstream DNS servers are checkbox, or you can do custom ones, dhcp. I do not have that enabled on mine, I am doing that somewhere else, but if you were to do it, you could enable DHCP and configure your DHCP server. In here there are configurations for the web interface. I'm doing an auto light dark theme because there's no T theme for me to choose dark theme, because there's no t theme for me to choose um. There's an api configurations, privacy configurations and they call it teleporter. That's just backing up and restoring. So lots of stuff you can do with pie hole, but really all it is. For the most part I've just installed it and for the most part just forgot about it and let it run on my home network and block stupid things yeah.

01:11:41 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So one of the things I would love to see and I don't know if piehole does this or not is being able to do something like only blocking problematic ads. And some of the other ad block tools have this like uh, I forget the term that they use but like high quality and non-obtrusive ads, they'll let through, um, and then you just you want to block the ones that are are more, um, problematic, let's say you could do it based off lists, because the it's based off of a blocking list so you can select different lists.

01:12:16 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
So if the problematic ads are normally coming from this place or this place doesn't do problematic, they could not be in that list. So there are different lists.

01:12:30 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, and then the other thing that you really want to do is, like the sites and the people that you want to support, you want to make sure and not turn ads off for them, right? So, like in my case, I've got, I think, well, sites like Hackaday and Pharonix and a few places like that, like I'll go into my ad blocker and whitelist them because I want to support them and the places that I want to support just so happens that they have a pretty strict policy of not running any of those ads.

01:12:58 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
They're really problematic yeah, but some of them I know some of them that even like to support more they put so many ads that if I'm on my laptop the fan just starts going crazy because they just overwhelm you with ads. Yep, and there are some very good sites out there that I would love to support more like that, but they just can't control the crazy number of ads they put on there. Indeed, Indeed.

01:13:36 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Okay, I got a question here, so I get that it's the network wide. You know ad block, but effectively, how is this different than running like something like ublock origin in your browser?

01:13:50 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
so I mean this does it via dns. Ublock Origin probably has a little more advanced detection on it, but what's different? I think the key benefit is that it's network wide and things that you can't run uBlock Origin on like a cell phone or a smart tv, a smart tv, yep, oh, okay, that would yeah, things like that, that you can't run those other tools. Is the the key benefit to having a network wide where ublock origin? I?

01:14:26 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I think probably has a lot more advanced knowing what's actually on the pages you are viewing plus with ublock origin, if you're in one tab, you can select to have the site in that tab. Just pause uBlock Origin for it while it's still working in the other tabs.

01:14:44 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
You can't do things like that with Piehole. One thing I have at home is my wife often doesn't like it because she plays games on her phone and she likes to uh, go to the ads to get more energy to play more, watch, watch the ad to get in-game currency and sometimes, sometimes they work, sometimes they don't, so that's funny. Has her own wi-fi ssid that please show me the ads campbell.

01:15:16 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Underscore ads. Underscore enabled. Password is show me the ads that's your guest, that ssid that's fun, all right, uh, so let's move on with tips. Jeff, what in the world is run zero?

01:15:33 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
so I think most of us know the program sudo. It dates back to the 80s and if you're not familiar with it, the program will let a person run a command as root user or other users, but you don't stay as root all the time, only when you start a command line with sudo. So the idea being that sometimes you need to run something as root, but you don't want to be in like a root shell and just be in there all the time. It's kind of a safety thing. Well, now there's a new command in town and it is run zero and it's meant to replace sudo. The article states that run zero isn't really a new command but an interface for the systemd component call systemd-run. Otherwise it will work a lot like sudo, except there isn't a timeout, so each time you call it you're going to have to re-authenticate. Why change it at all?

01:16:27
Leonard Pottering, who's the main developer of systemd, says that there are many issues with sudo. I won't go into them all because they will get somewhat deep and I don't fully understand it all the way to the bottom. But the biggest is there's unprivileged code which can execute privileged code, and they want more of a separation. Now, he's not saying something's broken. He's not saying that you know there's a security flaw. It's just that with how the code works and the amount of code there's a large attack surface and they'd rather get away from that large amount of code and he feels it's better to migrate to run zero over time. Now no one thinks this is going to go anywhere soon.

01:17:07
Pseudo is pretty entrenched. You know we've been using it for decades, but if you do want to give it a try, for decades, but if you do want to give it a try, you're going to need systemd version 256 or better and really you should be using 256.1 because it had a bug fix in it or greater. If you do want to check your version of systemd, you have type systemctl, which is one word, space, dash, dash, version in your command line and you can see what version you're currently running. I've not been able to test this out. It's because my system is currently running on version 255. But if you're running new enough version, give it a try.

01:17:48
It does have some cool features, like the terminal background on the line that you're running. Privilege changes color on the output, so not the entire terminal, and it's just while a command is in the root privilege stage and once it finishes it goes back to your normal color. Now, of course, based on the Z terminal, you can change the color. You can also have it not highlight the output if you don't like it. There's, you know. You can make it flexible and visually how you want it, but basically they're gonna have. They're trying to get the systemd run command to take over for sudo, so you have a better uh sandbox way to run as root. So look for it in the future.

01:18:41 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So obviously it's not going to quickly take over for sudo for regular computing, but I definitely see a case for using it, maybe inside Docker or inside cloud images where you're trying to do like a really light, minimal, well-secured Linux image. I could see a case made for replacing sudo with run0, something that's simpler, ideally has tighter code.

01:19:13 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Now and doesn't have to have a sudoers file.

01:19:18 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Well, so I'm sure there is some sort of equivalent with run0. But yeah, hopefully it's going to be something a lot simpler. And the other side of that is it's new. It's new code. You want to give it some time for people to bang on it and find the flaws before you really trust it. For new code, you want to give it some time for people to bang on it and find the flaws before you really trust it for your security, because it's easy to say right, it's real easy to say well, sudo is old, old code and has a large security surface and therefore a large attack vector surface. That's really easy to say, but it's really hard to write code that is perfect from a security standpoint.

01:19:55 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Run zero as new code and run zero have untested, undiscovered vulnerabilities.

01:20:01 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, so all that to say, and almost certainly, yeah, so.

01:20:05 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
And I it and it doesn't uh it you. I think it uses Poll Kit as the authentication module.

01:20:17 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That sounds right. I like do, as there's multiple options. All right. So I've got a command line tip. I don't think we've talked about this one before I came across it. It is Hexyl H-E-X-Y-L and this thing is cool.

01:20:38
It's real simple. It prints the hexadecimal output of a file and in fact by default it's just going to give you. Well, on the far left side it's line numbers and then it's got blocks of the hex and then on the far right side it's got the ascii text. You know if it's renderable, and so you can just you can run hexel and then the name of a file. It'll spit the whole thing out. You can use the dash in and then a number of bytes so you know if you just want to look at the header of a file. So hexel dash in 1024 is going to give you the first 1024 bytes and it's actually a really nifty way to look at what a file looks like on the inside. It does some color coding. They try to tell you what it's seeing. It's definitely going to go into my toolbox of tricks. I like it a lot.

01:21:35 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
So it's definitely going to go into my toolbox of tricks. I like it a lot, so it'll kind of have an output similar to kind of like a hex editor.

01:21:41 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yes, yeah, it is not an editor, it's just a viewer. But it structures things and it doesn't corrupt your terminal, which that's the other thing. If you had a cat, a binary file, a lot of times it'll throw your terminal off. Well, you can use Hexel and it'll actually give you a clean output that makes sense and will not corrupt your terminal. So, fun, fun, all right, I think that is it. We have covered a lot. I'm going to give each of you just a couple of seconds to either plug something, if you want to, or get the last word in. We'll start with Rob. What do you have for us? We'll get the last word in, we'll start with Rob.

01:22:14 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
What do you have for us? Just my usual. Come connect with me at robertpcampbellcom, and from there you can find links to my LinkedIn, my Twitter my Mastodon or a place to donate me some coffees?

01:22:31 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
All right, and Ken Well.

01:22:35 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I just wanted to plug this week's Floss Weekly episode where Dave got to be the host and he had a great guest on, didn't he? Jonathan?

01:22:44 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, I enjoyed it. It was a lot of fun. Yeah, so this past week on Floss Weekly we had both the intended guest and the intended co-host flaked out One because they were sick and the other because of a scheduling problem and ended up at the last minute. I'm like I need somebody and David goes I can be there, and I was like, okay, well, what do we do if the guest doesn't show up and David says I'll just interview you? Fine we'll get my origin story, so that's what we did.

01:23:16 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
it was a lot of fun, all right, and jeff, uh, two things. So you're gonna get a little extra bonus here. Uh, if you're on ubuntu or one of the derivatives, 23.10, end of support, get off of it, upgrade. And the other thing I have is, of course, poetry. To have no errors would be life without meaning. No struggle, no joy. Have a great week everybody.

01:23:43 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
All right, awesome, thank you guys. For me, I do, of course, we've mentioned it already, but Hackaday and Floss Weekly want to plug those and yeah, that's pretty much it want to plug those. Um and uh, yeah, that's, that's pretty much it. Um. One of the one of the last things that we want to make sure and mention is club twit. It is time to join the club if you're not part of it already, and that is, of course, where the untitled linux show was born. That's where the I think the video version of it lives. That's where the discord is at, if you want to be able to chat with the hosts all the hosts from Twit all the time, and it's like the cost of a cup of coffee per month and that's what helps Twit keep doing what it's doing. So you should really you owe it to yourself, you should really come and check out Club Twit. Other than that, we appreciate everyone that watches both live and on the download, and we will see you next week on the Untitled Linux Show.