Untitled Linux Show 168 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're talking about money in open source. We're talking about ARM, virtual machines and wine. They try to talk me into buying something else that I really don't need. We talk about audio editors, the kernel and more. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned. Podcasts you love From people you trust this is Twit. From people you trust this is Twit. This is the Untitled Linux Show, episode 168, recorded Saturday, september 7th. He pulled a rob. Hey, folks, it is Saturday and you very well know what that means. It's time to get geeky. It's time to talk about Linux and open source. It's the Untitled Linux Show. I'm your host, jonathan Bennett, and of course, we've got the panel, the guys, as we say, we have the OG panel today Rob and Ken and Jeff. We're going to have fun. We've already had fun, but going to have some more now that the show has really started.

00:58 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
With OG. Shouldn't you have started with me?

01:03 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Actually, I'm pretty sure that's Rob. Rob have started with me. Um, actually I'm pretty sure that's rob. Rob was the guy that went and bugged leo.

01:10 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
It's like hey, you're gonna do a linux show now, right, so I?

01:12 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
was there. Rob is sort of the og, but uh, although ken has been programming for unix computers before rob or me or jeff were ever around, I think, so maybe ken's the og. Anyway, we're going to talk about money and open source and we're going to let Rob do it.

01:32 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
We'll fight about the OGs later. So this is going to be a little bit of follow-up last week when you were talking about KDE needing donations. And the thing is, you know many people use Linux and open source because it's free. But there are different kinds of free. You know, when the purists talk about free, they mean free, as in freedom, freedom to use the software as you like with. You know, full access, open access to the code and everything.

02:03
Those not deep in the community often only think about the money aspects of free. You know, they just love the fact that they don't have to spend any money for the software they're using. And although that is, it's all good and it helps spread the software, it helps spread software equality for those who can't really afford to pay for it. But nothing is free. If you really aren't paying for it, then somebody else's, and often they're just paying for it with, you know, with their hard work and their time.

02:39
And this week there are a few examples where things aren't really that great financially. One story in the news this week involves KDE, as they announced the availability of their annual report for 2023, we see their total revenue for the year was just a little more than 349,000 euros, was just a little more than 349,000 euros, while their expenses totaled just over 457,000 euros, and that is a loss of almost 108,000 euros. And then you go back a little further into 2022, their loss was about 99,000 euros, and so those two years alone that's approximately around 250,000 euros of a loss. Now, in 2021, they did show a profit almost 20,000 euros which isn't even close to cover the losses on the past years. So, you know, it sounds like they've been lucky enough to have some cash reserves and, being a nonprofit, I guess they kind of actually have to spend that down. So maybe that's not as bad as as initially it sounds, because they had some money from early donations that they really shouldn't be holding on to that long because you, it's a non-profit, but still, you know, at least if the trend continues you know, trending red isn't good, you know, and maybe now that they've gotten kd6 out, they could take a step back and, you know, save a little money, be back in the black again for a couple years.

04:19
Also, the news of alejandro colomar, who has has been maintaining the Linux man pages for the last four years, has announced that he will have to stop that work. He's been a maintainer in his free time and states he cannot sustain this work economically anymore and so therefore he is temporarily and indefinitely stop and work on the project. So all that free software you're using is costing some people a lot and sometimes, sometimes it's just too much, at least much more than than they can afford. You know from their own personal perspectives. You know in one example, you know KDE. Their income is 75% donations and patrons I think it was roughly 25% is a little more, maybe 24% patrons, 51% other donations. So if you can afford it, donate to your favorite projects and help out where you can. And if you want, if you want to support me, you could donate me a copy too. It's available on my website, right down here I'm curious, was there any?

05:41 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
is there any uh hint of the Mozilla issue where you have the head of the organization making a very large amount of money, or does everybody kind of seem like it's pretty reasonable?

05:59 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Well, the expenses breakdown for KDE seemed pretty reasonable. There is there is a pie graph If you dig in into the link there, what? What all of their expenditures and all their income was.

06:15 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I was just curious. I saw most of it was personnel and contractors, but I know in the past we've talked about Mozilla, where the head head is getting um, I want to say like a million dollars or something like that, or you know, it's a monstrous amount and I just wanted to.

06:31 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yeah, curious anybody's monstrous amount for a monster said.

06:36 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I guess it probably looks like it's about 70 percent of it is staff and contractors.

06:43 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
But well, I guess it says right up here personnel that's like 317 000 euros usually at least half of all your total expense on a contract it depends on what you're doing.

06:55 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Uh, for software, a lot of times even more than that. Um right, yeah, I, I wondered that too. Like, is there somebody at the head that is making the most of that, but their? Their personal expense for the year was only 300 000 euro, which that's also. That's not a lot of salary, no, like that would be a low salary for a ceo, and they are paying several programmers out of that. So no, I don't, I don't think there's anyone raking in a million euro a year what?

07:24 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
300 000 euro is probably, I can't remember how that compares to us just covering the cost of the secretaries that's so like in us dollars.

07:35 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's like three to four, maybe five well-paid um software guys. Now apparently they do not. They do not pay developers quite as much in europe as they do here um, but that's still. That's not that.

07:51 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
That is not the equivalent of very many people working full-time yeah, the euro to the us dollar, it's, it's fairly close 300 000 euro is 332 000 us dollars, so it's ballpark.

08:03 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
You can pretty much think about those us dollars and be pretty close yep, yeah, so they're running a pretty tight ship then they they really do seem to be. I bet a lot of people are on there like it's probably part-time, you know? Okay, we're gonna pay you to code 10 hours a week or something yeah, which I mean.

08:22 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So for a lot of people. They're doing stuff like this we've got other gigs, we're making some money, and you just you have to juggle the gigs to be able to have enough to cover your expenses. And so you go to your open source projects and say, hey, I would love to be able to put in this many hours a week, but to be able to do that and still be able to eat and pay my rent, I've got to have some money to do it, and I think it's great that there are some of these open source projects that can do this. As I looked through this, there was one other thing that I saw that really interested me, and that is that they make sure and mention that they, they hit their predict for the 2023 report. Now, this is this is a, you know, six months old at this point. No, nine months old at this point. Um, but they, they hit their expected both income and expenses within like 500 euro. Um budgeting, yeah so like this is

09:12
good, this is yeah, yeah. So this is not like unexpected and, from what I can tell, this is not even a we need to panic. Um, it's not like they're hemorrhaging now. Obviously that was a lot of money to expend in a year, but it's not like they're hemorrhaging now. Obviously that was a lot of money to expend in a year, but it's not like they're hemorrhaging cash uncontrollably. So it sounds like it's very much like what rob was was getting at that they, uh, they had some reserves and just maybe strategically decided to spend them and fortunately this wasn't the only year that covered funding trying to get the Plasma 6 out.

09:47
Yeah, that's probably fair. There was a big Plasma 6 push. That was a part of this, so it may be that they brought some people on for more hourly and to get that out the door.

10:01 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
But still with expenditures. For a company, however size, this is less than half a million in a year if you donate. Just think of how great KDE could be.

10:14 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, absolutely so, ken. Let's talk for a minute about another source of funding that some open source projects turn to.

10:23 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Well, I'd be more than happy to talk about what Bobby Borisov wrote about this week. He wrote about the Sovereign Tech Fund, or STF as we called it recently, once again being one of open source's great friends and supporters. The STF is a funding pot supported financially by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action and hosted by the German Federal Agency for wait for it disruptive innovation. Now, in past, they provided 1 million euro in financial support for Rob. I've got to say it this way GNOME.

11:12 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Oh, that's the way I say it Good job, good job, buddy, good job.

11:16 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
They also invested 203,000 euros in GStreamer, and what I'm glad to see they funded is with 157 000 euros is ff impact I think the g is silent, g streamer it's just called streamer, ah now the stf is now making another impressive donation to the open source ecosystem.

11:41
It's to the, the FreeBSD Foundation, and has announced a €686,400 investment from STF to enhance the FreeBSD Operating System's infrastructure and security. According to Bobby, the Foundation, which has been at the helm of supporting and advancing the free BSD operating system, will manage the investment Scheduled to commence this August so it's already started, actually and extend through 2025,. The initiative will focus on several critical areas. The first is called Zero Trust Builds. This basically means upgrading tooling and processes to bolster security. The other one is Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery Automation, in other words, streamlining software delivery and operations to enhance efficiency. I'm tripping over all these E's today.

12:44
Reducing technical debt Bobby says that is basically introducing tools to maintain low technical debt. I guess that's what KDE did this past year. And then security controls Again updating and broadening security frameworks to aid regulatory compliance, and we like SBOMs, so they're going to enhance that by improving tools and processes relating to the software bill of materials. That's our SBOMs SRS bombs. Now this investment aims to enrich the developer experience, making it world-class, and bolster BSD's reputation for security and digital sovereignty.

13:37
Aligning with global security trends, this initiative follows closely on the heels of the US Office of the National Cyber Directors' report earlier this month, highlighting the importance of securing the open-source software ecosystem tool. The foundation is ensuring that FreeBSD remains a leader in secure software practices and vulnerabilities disclosure mechanisms. Fiona and I do apologize if I mispronounce this last name Krackenberger, co-founder of the Sovereign Tech Fund, expressed enthusiasm about the partnership. She said, and I'm going to be quoting here this investment in critical digital infrastructure will accelerate the modernization of free BSD, enhance security, hygiene and improve developer experiences. Now Bobby's article has several links if you want more information about the FreeBSD Foundation's announcement and the STF's other investments.

14:53 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, freebsd gets used in a lot of places. That is, you know, not necessarily in your face, like where Linux is in some places, but it's fairly. It's fairly important. The bsds, they're still out there chugging away at places like netflix, or yeah, yeah, um, what's the? What's the router distro that's that's running bsd? Um, is it open by cisco or open?

15:18 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
open sense or what I can't remember.

15:20 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Open Sense, or what?

15:22 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I can't remember the name of it Open Sense and PFSense.

15:25 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, yeah, I mean those are based on BSD. So yeah, neat stuff here. I can imagine the S-bomb thing is really becoming a big deal because there is now some legislation in different parts of the world requiring businesses to have S-bombs. That's a real pain to do if you don't have support for it in your OS.

15:44 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
So cool stuff here sometimes I can lead to f-bombs I think it's intending to prevent them.

15:52 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
But uh, yes, indeed, wow, all right. Uh, neat to see that let's talk about. Let's talk about 611. There's a, there's something really cool that we have been looking for. You know, in my little corner of the world there's a particular chip, a usb chip that you can hang spi devices off of, and this whole time we've been looking for because it'll, it'll, let's do things with mesh testing. This whole time we've been looking for and it's like we just can't wait for this to land. It finally landed and we went and looked at it and it's like we just can't wait for this to land. And it finally landed and we went and looked at it and it's like, and they didn't turn on the gpio support, so we can't actually use it anyways. Very sad. So 611 is is one of those oh kind of moments for us. But what else is going on with 611, jeff?

16:37 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
well, I figured you know let's not talk about money, let's talk about the kernel. Get right to the heart of linux, and I'm starting off with this week with information about the 611 kernel. And I have a trio of stories, none of which were long enough to make into a full segment, so I bundled some of the smaller ones together. The first link in the show notes is about 611 point rc6 being released, and it was released a little early because linus was going to be traveling, so he decided to let it go a day early so he didn't want to have to do it while traveling. Something interesting in this RC is that while normally drivers make up the largest section of the updates, this time there's also a large number of file system fixes, specifically SMB, xfs, bcachefs and NetFS. All got some love. You know the fixes are nothing terribly huge, but they address things like inode handling, file trimming and data consistency. I'm not going to read the specific ones because they read like stereo instructions such as and I'm quoting here fix failure to return error in function data, underscore update, underscore index, underscore update and revert lockless buffered IO path. So if you really want to know what went on in there, the link in the show notes has the official release and you can get all the details for all that stuff the bulk of the updates, though, even with the larger than normal file system updates, drivers are still the bulk of the update and cover things like PCIe configuration, network updates and, of course, sound and graphics updates. Now, if you're new to Linux, rc releases, don't add huge new features but bug fixes in the new and existing features that were added or included in the first release candidate. So when a new release candidate kernel is opened up to the public, many early testers can jump on the kernel and test a larger configuration of hardware than the maintainers have access to. So those corner case bugs come out. They keep giving release candidates until Linus says it's good enough, and then the cycle starts over candidates until Linus says it's good enough, and then the cycle starts over. So hire Colonel Rev with a new release candidate, one after 6.11 is out, so then we'll have a 6.12.

18:52
Now, since 6.11 is out, the maintainers are actually working on 6.11.RC7, which ties into our second story in the show notes, and in release candidate 7, which isn't out but it's getting worked on, there's a fix for the massive performance regression in the AMD GPU graphics driver. Amd's Alex Duchar sorry apologies on that said this. This adds allocation latency but aligns better with user expectations. The latency should improve with the DRM buddy clearing patches that ARUN has been working on. In addition, this fixes the high CPU spikes seen when doing wipe on release. Now, the regression was introduced four months ago when they added the clear page functionality to the AMD GPU driver. Some are also seeing this issue in GIMP, so it's not only gaming anything loading up the graphics card. If you are running AMD graphics and running the AMD GPU driver, you'll want to roll back to an older kernel and or wait for the 6.11 kernel to be fully released, which should be mid-September if things keep on track.

20:06 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Or grab Master and compile it yourself. You know if you're real adventurous.

20:11 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Exactly exactly. But if you're that adventurous you probably already know that. But the last story linked in the show notes is about OpenZFS and it's released with its support for kernel 4.18 up to including 6.11 when it's officially released Maybe. So kernel 6.10 is fully supported and there are patches to help it work with 6.11, but that might not be 100% because it's an RC, so things are not fully stable. But they're trying their best to make it work with 6.11. There might be some tweaking they have to do depending on if anything major takes a left turn.

20:50
We're going to have to see when the 6.11 kernel is fully released. Just know that if you have a testing system and love OpenCFS, you can run the latest file system with the latest kernel and help find any issues in the compatibility. This latest version has several bug fixes and if you want the full details or a link to the changes in GitHub in the story you know linked in the show notes, it was a lot of small little bug fixes. Nothing groundbreaking was added but you know, depending on what you need, but nothing major. It was kind of cleanup and stuff. So I encourage everyone to take a look at the show notes and follow the links to the articles and get all the details that I wasn't able to cover in this segment, because you know it's not just a show about me.

21:36 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
And while it is a Linux show, it is also not a show about covering every change in the Linux kernel. That would be a much more narrow field of view than we take.

21:47 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
And a very long, long and archaic sounding show. Yep.

21:53 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
A daily show too, wouldn't it? You could?

21:56 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I noticed how you said RCs are not totally stable. My initials are RC and I think I'm pretty stable. Pattern holds.

22:04 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Pattern holds I wasn't pattern holds yeah. Uh, you, you walked right into that one. Rob tied a bow on it and everything.

22:15 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Now here's. Here's a. Here's a challenge for our listeners. Depending on how unstable you think Rob Campbell is, you need to get on the discord and and give us a number. Is he an RC one or maybe is he towards the RC7 or 8 end of the spectrum?

22:29 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
And for each RC you think I am donate one coffee. One coffee for an RC1, seven for an RC7.

22:37 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
You know that RC1 is the most unstable.

22:41 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Whatever, he kind of bet against himself there, didn't he? I don't care, white coffee, whatever, yeah, um. So, speaking of the colonel, I did find one of the stories that I wanted to talk about, and that is michael larrywell has a story about the preempt rt in the colonel. The real-time colonel is getting closer and closer and they are looking at pushing that into the 612 once 612 opens up, and so with it may not all land for 612, it might be 613, um, but it's 614 there's no, there's no, definitely here.

23:21
Uh, the, the the process of working with the colonel is is much too human and messy for any definitelys.

23:28 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
We talked about this a while back and it was. I mean, they've been working on this for like 10 years. Yeah, long time yeah, so it's time so they're getting close is still still relative. No, it's.

23:39 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It's about ready to hit soonish yeah, probably possibly 612, probably by 613, um, which would be real interesting to play with for for various things.

23:53 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
But uh, yeah, it looks like it's getting closer.

23:56 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Probably good odds it'll hit this calendar year not guaranteed, but soonish, eventually sometime yeah, I would say either this calendar year or, you know, first quarter of next. It's just, it depends upon how long they take, with everything you know, because if you've got a couple of uh kernels where the rc goes all the way to eight, then you know that's like two months per kernel and we're already in september. So it's gonna be if, like if it's 613, it's gonna going to be kind of on the edge whether that gets out in this year or the next year If they don't get it done this year.

24:29 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
you have a New Year's prediction.

24:32 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, there you go, there you go. That might be an easy win.

24:37 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Meatball over the plate. Yeah, it'll be there. By Colonel White.

24:42 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, yeah, all right, all right, rob, you're gonna make my wife ticked and, uh, you're gonna try to talk me into buying something again. I, I just, I just know yes, yes, when you hear about this man.

24:53 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
It is time for jonathan to get out his wallet as the new furry phone, or maybe it's the fur iphone, I don't know the furry phone.

25:03 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Either of them sound great furry phone. F know the furry phone.

25:06 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Neither of them sound great. Furry phone F-U-R-I. Furry phone FLX1, is here and available for $499. From their Buy it Now page first, it says fast, performant and cheap. You wanted all three. Now you got it.

25:28
The FLX1 from Furry Labs runs a fully optimized system called FurryOS, Packing a lightning fast user interface, tons of storage and a privacy-centric approach like no other. Furryos is an operating system based on Deian, designed and oriented for mobile use. Uh, without any artificial limitations. The phone looks like an actual premium phone. For those watching, you can kind of get a little uh view of this uh beautiful looking thing. So it looks like an actual uh premium phone and it supports 4g and 5g and is even able to run android apps through the use of wageroid integrated into the os.

26:17
The uh hardware of the phone itself comes with six gigabytes of memory, 120 128 gigabytes of universal flash storage. 2.1. The cpu has 2x cortex a78s at 2.4 gigahertz and 6 cortex a55 at 2 gigahertz. The gpu is a molly g68 mc4 whatever that is has a front camera 16 megapixels, a back camera with 50 megapixels with optical image stabilization and then a macro camera with 2 megapixels. Charging is wired and wireless and NFC combo is wired and wireless and NFC combo. The battery type is lithium ion or LIPO, removable battery. Battery capacity is 5,000 milliamps. Usb type C, 3.0, waterproof, dual SIM slots, Wi-Fi 6, and, unlike those other premium phones today, it even comes with a 3.5 millimeter waterproof headphone jack they just don't have the courage to get rid of yet Sweet.

27:39
So the talk on Reddit makes it sound like it's probably one of the best Linux phones yet, and some people are quite optimistic that mobile Linux is kind of soon going to be ready for prime time. There's some debate. Some guys like some. Some people were like within the next few months it's going to be there, because it's almost there with this, they said, and others like ha, it'll be a decade, but so we'll see. It looks. Looks pretty nice, so not bad. Not a bad price for what mobile phones go for these days yeah, now is this actually running Linux rather than Android?

28:16
yes, it is a Debian based OS. I would have to be Debian. Lisa's not alright right, it's got USB, so it probably isn't too hard to install something else if you wanted.

28:35 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, you know it's interesting. Most of the most of the big distros have like a mobile centric uh spin, like fedora's got a couple. I know there are various debian and ubuntu touch spins that are in theory designed to work on a phone. It's just it's good luck finding one where it actually works and it's usable.

28:54 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
So I mean this is interesting and in that yeah, and they make it sound like android stuff is seamless in a sandbox, because that's just how wageride works. But uh, um, I don't know. I'd love to try it now I tell you what I'm kind of.

29:10 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Go ahead, Jeff.

29:11 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I was going to say I'm kind of interested in this One. It's got a Debian distribution, so okay, I'm pretty comfortable there. It's got the jack Love that because I have uses for it. And one of the things they said oh, it's going to get supported a long time. So I looked and I'm like, oh, removable battery, because that's that's a lot of times where I wind up trading out my phones because the battery life is dead and certain phones like I had a google pixel one you basically had to destroy the phone almost to swap out the battery. There there was parts that they said, theoretically you could take it apart, but you're going to wind up breaking you know xyz and with the cost of parts, just you're better off getting a new phone and it's like, oh, I could get security, I could keep a phone for a long time. I'm not a power user, so I just a simple app side run.

30:00 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
It probably work pretty well yeah, some of the caveats about it is I mean you can get apps with f droDroid, but if you need any apps that utilize Google services, obviously you're not going to get Google services.

30:16 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, they can't get the Play services on it because it's not actually an Android device. Right, there are some workarounds for that. But yeah, that's a challenge.

30:28 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, I wonder with wager aid how I think that'd be a little harder than running something like lineage, for example yeah, how much is it?

30:39 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
because I didn't looked at the website and I'm not seeing any price well, you have to click on the buy.

30:44 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
It was $499, which is not terrible for a phone?

30:49 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
it's really not.

30:49 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
You can drop a grand these days and still not quite be there if you want one of the really expensive ones.

30:56 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
It has $550 crossed out, so I don't know if that price is ever going to go up or if that's just the always on sale kind of marketing gimmick that places do yes.

31:06 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Unfortunately, popular these days, you guys are missing out on the major disadvantage of this phone. I hate to be the one to have to say it, but when you pull it out and somebody asks you oh, what kind of phone is that?

31:19 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Flex One.

31:23 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It's the Flex One. Oh, who makes it? It's the fur iPhone it's not a whole lot better the furry phone.

31:36 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, that furry labs, it's uh, I mean.

31:41 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So there's, there's a, there's a group of people out there that all in on this. They apparently are in tech and have lots of money to spend, so maybe it'll be a winner. We'll see.

31:50 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, it's maybe a little unfortunate in some ways, but maybe that was planned. Playing the long game.

31:59 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
All right. So let's go back to a piece of software that we've covered a few times and has had some controversy a few times, but it sounds like they are past the controversy and still kicking. Ken, what's up with Audacity?

32:13 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Well, again, we can thank Bobby Barsoff and also Marius Nestor. They both wrote about the latest Audacity release, 3.6.2. This is the second patch release of Audacity 3.6. It fixes at least 20 bugs and adds a new legacy effects section containing the old limiter, compressor and classic filters. It also moves the time track range to a single dialog and reverts the behavior of selection change when importing an audio clip to the previous behavior. In other words, instead of automatically selecting what you just imported, it leaves it on whatever you had selected previously. This means you don't have to worry about Audacity auto-selecting the imported audio and losing what you had previously selected.

33:06
Audacity 3.6.2 addresses many issues like the disappearing pitch indicator on Linux when hitting double digits, missing zero line, a hang after undoing envelope, appearance for clips offset from zero and broken track header user interface when resizing channels in a stereo track. It also addresses more severe issues such as crashes after recording long sessions and loading cloud projects and a bug that causes the software to use excessive CPU resources when minimized. Audio engineers working with multi-channel formats will appreciate the fixes for porting OGG and Wavepack files. Bobby and Marius also include links to the latest changelog and the official website's download page. You will find links to their articles in our show notes.

34:11 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It seems to me that the new owners of Audacity have recovered from their near catastrophe and are pushing out good releases again. For those that don't get the joke, audacity got purchased probably about a year ago now, something like that, a little over a year, I think.

34:28
Yeah, it could be over a year. Anyway, one of the first things the new owners did is say, hey, we're gonna put in telemetry and then we're gonna make a really hard to opt out of. And the community just lost it. And they very quickly in their wisdom, so, okay, let's not do that, let's do something else. That's not that, anything but that. Uh, but they have, it seems, figured things out and uh, I'm it's very cool to see audacity still kicking around and I I've heard it described as the notepad of, uh, audio editors, like it's not a. It's not a big fancy, um, multi-track recorder. It's not a big fancy. Uh, you know, it's not like an ardor or something, but if you just need to go in and make a little tweak, then it's there and it's true, it's really good at doing that and I want to say they still have telemetry, but it's now opt-in yes, yeah.

35:22
So what they did is they? They, they went in and they added the telemetry they wanted to add, but they added it with everything being completely opt-in, and they then also tightened up, like their privacy policy and you know the things around it. Well, basically, all the things that people looked at and said that's not okay. They, they tightened it all up and fixed it and, uh, you know, it's actually a quite a bit, quite a bit better now it's good to use now and it really is it's it's really simple and it's it's nice for your basic audio needs great tool for ripping uh vinyl

35:55
it. Yeah. Yeah, that sort of thing is really good at. There's a couple of things that audacity has done that, like other other editors have trouble with. Like, audacity has a remove silence function. That's just really really good and it's fast. And some of the other ones, yes, they'll have removed silence functions, but either it doesn't work very well or when you try to edit afterwards it slows everything down really badly.

36:17 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
It's what I found with our door so if uh, if uh, audacity is just like the notepad or the windows movie. Maker of uh, of editors. What's a? What's a good, high-end audio editor?

36:33 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
for open, for open source. It's our door, our door.

36:36 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Our door is the answer there, yeah that's more than just recording you could do. I've never even used our door, but you could do the tracks and it is absolutely a multi-track.

36:44 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Oh, it acts and wicked, powerful, and then I've used it a little lmm there's, there's some other ones out there, but audacity and ardor really are.

36:56 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
There are the two leading ones and and you have audacity being the very simple one and simple is maybe not quite the right way to put it because it is actually fairly powerful in the sort of things that it does, but it's just, it's not like a uh oh, what's the term they use non-destructive um. Audacity historically has not been like a multi-track non-destructive editor, whereas ardor is very much that and with our ardor basically was the place to use jack, the, the jack audio connection kit, and so ardor is all about it. It takes, it, gives you a mixer and other various parts of studio equipment virtually, and so, like you can, you can route audio in and out and around and through filters and through effects and then back out through, um, real hardware, even like. So I've run our door as part of the front of house sound loop for an auditorium before. Just crazy stuff like that you can do. Yeah, it's super powerful.

37:57 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
And I think really, if you want a better analogy, I would say almost it's like word pad versus word. You can do a lot in word pad, but if you start going, well, I need auto indexing with auto footnotes and cross linking and revision control, and okay, now you have to step up to word and have something more powerful. But you know who? Who of us needs more than probably what wordpad has? Not many, you know a lot of it can just be done simply there. So I mean audacity. You just like oh, I just need to make some recordings, I want to do some simple stuff. Yeah, if you're really going, I gotta mix these tracks, I gotta put these sound effects, I gotta fade in, I gotta do all this complicated stuff. Okay, now you're into ardor and you need you know you're really into what you're doing I mean, I know you can do fade and stuff like that with uh audacity.

38:41 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
That's a pretty basic thing.

38:43 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
But yeah, and you can multiple tracks and layering and just yeah with with audacity, don't you have to say, okay, add a fade in here, here's the amount, and then it, like it, does the calculation, and now the audio is faded. Yeah, I think that's about how it works you can do fade ins and fade outs whereas, like in our door, you'll have just a you you can grab.

39:05
I think you grab the top corner of the audio track and you can just drag it back and forth and it'll automatically give you a fade. And then I think you can also right click in there and tell it like here's the, here's the curve of the fade I want you to do. But in ardor you can also, and you don't want to do the simple fade you could go in and say, okay, give me the envelope editor, and then you can draw your own curve in audio. Or you can pull a plug-in in that gives you a compressor and you can do like an envelope curve for one of the compressor control, like just the sky is the limit on what you want to do with ardor, it's it, step it up.

39:50
Let's talk about Ubuntu, and oh, I am not. I do not know what's going on here. This, this seems like a contradiction. If we had a, if we have a critical problem, you would think we would want to update it. Jeff, what is going on?

40:06 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
So last week Ken talked about how 24.04.1 release was now available and some of you might have been even going to update and then wondered why you were not seeing it. Well, that's because if you're on 22.04 LTS and you are going to upgrade to 24.04.1, they've been put on pause because of a critical bug. So some people did update and things didn't go so well and Canonical wanted to make sure everyone had a smooth upgrade. So while they fixed the issue, they put the brakes on things, in Canonical's own words, due to a critical bug in Ubuntu release upgrader in the way it's using the apt solver. So basically there's a conflict in there. If you're running a different version than 2204, you should still have the green light to upgrade and there isn't anything stopping, of course, to clean install a 24.04.1. This is only for the upgrade.

41:00
The article linked in the show notes does mention that the upgrade to 24.04 has caused issues in the past. So this isn't the first time we had the brakes put on. I mean, even when 24.04 first came out 23.10, people wanted to upgrade but they were told not to because of critical bugs, which was unrelated to this one. But you know a different issue and they fixed that Then everything went fine. So, bottom line, if you want to upgrade, you have to be patient and just wait where the issue to be fixed. You know they'll get things sorted out. They'll turn the upgrades back on.

41:36
It's just they've edited the release, the applicable release, that you can upgrade from in one of the files. You know, of course you, like I said, you can do a clean install, as I mentioned before, or you know you can force the upgrade on the command line and take your chances. Now I'm not going to give you directions on how to do that here, because if you're able to untangle a mess your system has, then you'll already know how to force the upgrade. So that's just academic, is all I'm saying there. So you know I should do some plugging for Ken and say that any upgrade changes a lot of files and especially going from one LTS to another LTS A couple of years allows a lot of changes and the risk is there for something to go wrong. So, as Ken says, backup, backup, backup. Make sure you always have some form of recovery for your important files. Take a look at the article in the show notes for more details. I hope everyone, no matter what distribution you're on, has a happy and smooth upgrade path.

42:36 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, it's odd for it to for there to be such a problem with a point upgrade. That's. That's just interesting.

42:45 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I've never it's a trend this year with the Ubin too, it seems like though it seems to only depends on what software you had pre-installed before you upgraded too I mean, that's that makes sense, yeah looking at some of the comments attached to the uh story, some about uh.

43:05 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
half of them were saying they upgraded fine without issues so far and the other half said they ran into a snag while trying to upgrade.

43:16 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So if the problem is the upgrader and its interaction with apt solver, right. So that's the software that maps out the different packages that someone has installed, tries to figure out all the dependencies. So it's not that surprising that if that's what it is, then if you don't have the packages that are triggering the problem, that it's not gonna, it's gonna install without issue.

43:39 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
That's not terribly surprising, yeah it and and a lot of times it's. You know a lot of people are jumping into linux for the you know pretty new or first time, or they, they don't want to. You know an lot of people are jumping into linux for the you know pretty new or first time, or they, they don't want to. You know an issue that maybe you know you can could solve right away. Somebody else is not going to know how to. You know they're going to go.

44:01 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I, I just push the button and now it doesn't work. Build a new computer and just put a brand new install on it I mean wipe and reload every point release yeah yeah, yeah is that what the rolling releases do there's no wipes, there's no wipes

44:21 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
yeah. So you know, personally, after a few upgrades I do like to just do a fresh kind of wipe and just to kind of clean out old cruft, because I I have seen things after you match up that whole gruff because, oh yes that way there's probably one data file you don't realize you needed for something all my data files are on my nas.

44:44 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I have nothing on my computer.

44:45 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I can just wipe it and blow it up today, it doesn't matter a lot of times what I'll do is and now I do like kde, but I'll go in and the kd directories, the specific system ones, underscore them, dot, old or back, you know, dot, backup or whatever rename them so they're still there in case I need something.

45:06
And then I just reinstall everything outside of my home directory because I have my root directory on a different partition. My home and root are separate wipe out the root, then get the configuration files in my home directory renamed, so it's kind of like a fresh wiped install. But I'm like Rob, I've got stuff backed up. So if I did wipe out my home partition, it's it's more of just uh, okay, now I gotta download stuff or I gotta, you know, transfer stuff over and you know like I'll re-download steam games and stuff like that. There's nothing that I critical, that I would lose, but I have. I have seen in the past where if you don't do that, some of the deprecated settings will stick and if you reinstall, things will change and your desktop will look a little different because it's not taking into account some of those old settings that are kind of still hidden in the background yet functioning.

46:06 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
If it isn't backed up, it doesn't exist. If it isn't backed up, it doesn't exist. And the rule of backup is one is none, two is one and three is a backup it pretty much hey stop stealing my poetry corner, and then periodically.

46:22 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Try that backup yeah, that's true, you got to. Yeah, so I'm. I found a reddit thread where people are talking about this and several people say that they went to do the upgrade. So it's from 2204 to 2404. Several people tried to do that upgrade and ended up with a non-booting system, had to boot off a CD. Where did it go? Basically the the fix, apt fix command and the apt dist upgrade, like multiple times together before it finally would get him a bootable system again. So, whatever it's doing, it's uh, it's really trashing people's installs. So here, apt fix broken install, that's what he had. Apt fixed ubin2, apt fix broken and uh, yeah, so it not fun. I would. I've had to try to fix the computer. I had to try to fix my machine after doing something like that before and it's no fun, it's really not keep that ventory uh disc handy yeah, it's a real lifesaver I, I did, I did totally rebuild the system that somebody else had really mucked up.

47:28 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
They wound up trying to uninstall pearl, which had all sorts of system dependencies, and it was more just of a challenge. Could I do it? I I got it unstuck but it took a while, but it was kind of a realistically a good. Better waste or use of time would have been, you know, wipe it and start over, but it was. It was a challenge, you know. Yeah, why climb the mountain? Because it was there, was there.

47:50 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
We've talked about some of the tools to do that sort of thing in the past too, Like CH root into it from a boot drive and some other things like that. What about, Rob, if it's from an ARM machine? What kind of options do you have there?

48:06 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I don't know Pretty much the same options, but Arm, vm and compatibility layers. So a couple of stories this week show the strength and focus the community has had on Arm and focus the community has had on arm. For starters, wine 9.7, the windows compatibility layer that allows support to run windows apps on linux, was released this week with improved arm 64, cpu detection, um, and there is a list of of the ARM architectures that are detected. I'm not going to list them out because they're just well, unless you know specifically these ARM architectures, they just sound like nonsense. So, anyway, another non-ARM feature that is pretty exciting is window surface scaling for high DPI displays, so modern displays technology. That's something that is always pretty exciting when it comes to Linux. I know not in this, but I know Jonathan really likes his HDR yes, other than that, and really likes his HDR yes, other than that, it's a bunch of bug fixes, you know, as they work their way to the big Wine 10, which is expected in early 2025.

49:43
Also in the news this week, I know by now you people know how much I love VMs and how much I love to use the built-in KVM QEMU in Linux. No point in installing some other third party when you have it right there. So this week, qemu 9.1. So all these virtual compatibility layers, they're all in the nine. Compatibility layers, they're all in the nine. So QEMU 9.1 emulation and virtualization software was released this week with improved support for, also for ARM, by adding another good list of ARM architectures. Also in this release is support for another CPU architecture that we really love to talk about. There is about Eight more RISC-V extensions now in QEMU 9.1. Other than these architecture improvements, qemu 9.1 also brings a lot of other nice little improvements here, there and everywhere else, bug fixes. So with all that you know our ARM has been, it's been a thing, it's been a thing for a while, but really it's always kind of lacked the power. And you know we've talked about it lately and I think with the Apple Silicon and the new X Elite, you know we're really it's really shaping up to having the potential of a great ARM future.

51:21
Even myself a little tangent not Linux yet exactly, but even at work I got a new MacBook Air M3 this week and the thing is literally like the fastest, coolest, quietest, most portable laptop I've ever used fastest, coolest, quietest, most portable laptop I've ever used, and I would love so much to have linux running on that thing, but unfortunately it is a work laptop and I would get in trouble if I did that. So I'll have to get donations so I could buy one and install linux onto myself someday, but linux onto myself someday. But these arm things, they're just light and cool and I I'm just tired of old laptops being hot and fans going off like crazy. You know, I did have my, my pine book, which I still have sitting right next to me, my pine book, which is actually about the same weight as the m3 macbook air.

52:22
Strangely, I just opened up that pine book and there's like nothing inside of there. So I don't know what the inside of that macbook looks like. But uh, either way, uh, um, unfortunately that pine book is is too slow because that's like, I don't know, four years ago now it's been around and it wasn't exactly cutting edge hardware when it first came out.

52:42
It wasn't 100 and 125 bucks. It's not even the pro.

52:45 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, it's the first pine book, so 120 I think it was yeah, have you tried yet rob doing emulation like full-on qemu um on arm? Have you done that like?

52:59 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
on a raspberry pi. I haven't used any emulation on a Pi yet. I think it's possible.

53:05 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
With a Pi 5 and an NVMe hat, that probably wouldn't be a terrible, terrible experience.

53:11 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Let's try that. When you say on a Raspberry Pi, are you talking as a host or as the guest OS?

53:20 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
As a host, actually using the Pi hardware for the host. Yeah, I run Docker on ARM, but I've never actually run a virtual machine there.

53:32 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Well, maybe I can suggest a distro that would let you oh.

53:41 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
What distro was that? Let you, oh, what distro was that?

53:44 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Would you believe it is Rhino Distro.

53:48 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Uh-huh, I'm interested.

53:51 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Now, according to Swarov Rudra and Bobby Borosov, the Rhino Linux team announced the release of Rhino Linux 2024.2 this week. It brings many new features, enhancements and community-driven changes. In fact, while I'm going over some of these changes, I'm going to give you a little demonstration here. According let's see lost my train of thought here Saurav reports, rhino Linux is one of the best rolling release distros out there. It is an Ubuntu-based distribution that's been regularly updated since its first release updated since its first release, providing an in-house modified XFCE desktop environment called Unicom desktop. In addition, it offers a Rhino packet dash package tool that allows you to search, install, remove and update packages from multiple sources, such as the native dev repos pack stall, that's, the Arch user repository for Ubuntu, flathub and SnapStore. According to Bobby, the updated Unicorn theme is one of the most eye-catching changes in the new release, as you can see in my background here. The updated unicorn theme is one of the most eye-catching changes in the new release. As you can see in my background here, it departs from the previous Yaru purple scheme by adding a deeper purple tint and greater visual integration across applications like Thunar and XFCE4 terminal. He also reports the setup wizard has been overhauled to offer an array of containerization options, including Docker, podman and Distrobox, for both novice and power users. In fact, let me give you a brief slideshow here. Okay, there's some of the containerization options, as I mentioned Docker, podman, distrobox, apptainer, qmeu, rob and even VirtualBox Rob and even VirtualBox. And then you've got some extra settings where you can choose NALA. You may remember, if you've been a long-time ULS listener, when I first covered NALA as an alternative to using app from the terminal. You've also got GitHub on the command line, aport that's our crash reporting system as well as the ability to redshift or adjust the color temperature of your screen.

56:59
Now Bobby also reports. The setup wizard has been overhauled to offer an array of containerization options and the addition of Nix as a package manager and, like I just mentioned, redshift to adjust screen color temperature tailors to a more personalized user environment. As I mentioned, it does have Paxdal, an integral component of Rhino Linux. It has seen two major updates. The recent versions introduced package base splitting, allowing multiple packages to be built from a single script, and new commands for enhanced package searching capabilities. So Rav starts the updated Linux kernels on the three Rhino Linux variants with Linux 6.10.7 for the generic ISO. That's what I've got in my VM, that I've got running Right. Let me switch back to for it, wait for it right here oh, that is live.

58:14
Ha ha, and here, I thought that was just a screenshot another one was screenshots that I caught from uh when I went through the setup. Yeah, I didn't want to do it twice or try to do it again live yeah, makes sense.

58:30 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
There's some cool stuff in here. Um, I also see that they've got the nvidia drivers just ready to go. You just have to to run their their package or tool to install them and. And that'll get those going. Something else that surprised me is they have a Pine64 version of this.

58:47 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yes, it's got Linux 6.9.0-OKPine as the kernel for that Pine64 images.

58:57 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That is refreshingly new and not ancient. There you go, Rob.

59:03 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
And then for Raspberry Pi images. You've got Linux 6.8.0 dash Raspberry Pi.

59:10 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So pulling the official kernel for both of those, I do need to.

59:14 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
well, first I need to find the power cable for this Pinebook, and then I do need to fix the OS, because I broke it and I could install.

59:23 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
this Sounds like maybe you ought to throw Reiner on there.

59:26 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
It sounds pretty cool for that VS Code pre-install. Oh cool.

59:31 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Not the Microsoft version, the uncooked version of VS Code.

59:37 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I feel like that might run pretty slow on my Pinebook.

59:41 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It might. Do you remember how much the RAM is on that Pinebook, how much it's got?

59:45 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
No, but I remember things being slow. I can't even remember I think it had Lubunt or I mean Alex, whatever that desktop, Alex Q yeah, I think it had that and I put XFCE and it was faster, but some things didn't work right. But yeah, it was slow. Yeah, Web browsing and not a whole lot more Command line Great for command line.

01:00:11 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Sounds like this is a good story for next week. Install it and give us a report. See if it works better.

01:00:17 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, I need to see if I could find the power cable and then figure out how you install stuff on here. I don't know if you boot into USB or what you do. Yeah, that's true. I opened it up. I had it open a little bit ago and I couldn't even figure out where the drive was in it.

01:00:34 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It may have soldered on.

01:00:35 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, apparently.

01:00:39 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
But you might also be interested to know that they've revamped the documentation that the Rhino Linux developers built using Nextra, which is a Nextjs framework for creating content-focused websites, and the Linux developers ensured that all of the content from the old wiki was carried over, with them also integrating PaxDoll's wiki. For a one-stop experience, I do recommend looking at both articles, since they include links to the release announcement rhino's new wiki and for downloading rob.

01:01:16 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
You'll definitely need to download link. Yeah, if you get it installed, let us know how it goes. I am yes, jeff.

01:01:26 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I'll say, if it's still the same thing, looking up Pinebook 64, it's got 2 gigabytes LPDDR3 RAM. That's right.

01:01:36 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
LPDDR3. Oh, that's been a few days.

01:01:41 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
My VM was using 4GB.

01:01:44 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
It's a bootable micro SD slot.

01:01:47 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That makes sense.

01:01:49 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
You might have to put it on an SD card to get it to boot.

01:01:54 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
To install. That's going to be. Nvmes are better. They'll just say that NVMEs are better than micro SD, that's been my experience they're better.

01:02:05 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I mean there's some kind of storage inside too, but that's a 16 gigabytes of eMMC which is upgradeable.

01:02:12 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
It's a one-board flash, Jeff. I think I need to upgrade the Firefox in that VM, don't I?

01:02:20 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
You do, there it is.

01:02:28 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Did you want to handle the hand off jonathan, or you want? No, he you got it. We'll just take it all right. The hand has been offed.

01:02:33 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
We're running on auto here. We've got upgrades. So I think everybody knows by now that I'm a big firefox fan and while I do use Chrome and Edge at work because I have to corporate lockdown and whatnot, at home I choose Firefox. I do have Chrome here at home whenever I have to do something that maybe doesn't work in Firefox but it's pretty rare that I do it it's usually something very Google-ish that I might need Chrome and while it's not the biggest browser by a long shot, it's still getting update love. So, for example, release 130 has just been set free.

01:03:10
Features include having a full page of text that's been translated. You can then highlight a section of that page and have it translated into a different language. The over-scroll animations are enabled as default behavior for scrollable areas on Linux and a new Firefox lab page and settings to make it even easier to try experimental features in Firefox. Now we have covered Firefox labs in the past and it's where you can use the stable Firefox release and turn on new experimental features to help beta test things that are coming out in future releases and squash bugs before the features turned on in, you know, before it's released into stable. For example, currently in labs. They have an AI chat bot and auto open on tab switch feature for picture in picture, and there's several other features you can play with. So just some taste of the goodies that's in there. With the built-in translation ability, there are new languages supported Croatian, czech, danish, indonesian, romanian and Vietnamese, just to name a few of the new supported languages. There's many more. See the link in the show notes for the full list of supported languages. There are, of course, several bugs squashed and things like copy and paste have improved to better work, as expected.

01:04:26
So and 130 is a release and you might have access to it already, as I know I have. I'm running it right now and I just have it updated through normal distribution channels, so your distribution might already have it, or if you don't have it yet, it's probably coming very quickly. Now, while 130 is out, we're looking forward to 131, which is being worked on right now. So Firefox is doing smaller, more frequent releases so we can see features and they can make changes much quicker. So that's why, if you're thinking, wow, firefox is always releasing something, well, that's why they're trying to be more adaptive and we don't have to wait so long for those changes and fixes and you all. They also get quicker feedback to the developers.

01:05:12
So for one 31 translation gets more love and it will also now remember languages you've used in the past. So when it suggests a translation, you should have the languages you used last right at the top of the search so you don't have to scroll through a bunch of stuff. It will also temporarily now remember when giving a permission to a website, such as when you let a site know your location. The Firefox team says that these are temporary permissions and will be removed when you close a tab or after one hour if the tab remains open. For those forming the question in their mind, I'm sure there's a way to also make the permission permanent if you need it. For a specific site. There are updates for web developers and SVG2 support, and I will leave those updates as the exercise for the listener or viewer at the link in the show notes.

01:06:06
Now something I did want to cover is the beta cookie banner blocker feature is present. I say that three times fast Now. This tells Firefox to automatically block cookie banners. This has been present in the past, but Marius Nestor over at 9to5Linux isn't so sure it's going to wind up in the final release version. He's hoping it will be, and it's just my speculation, but it seems some of the cookie blocking issues relate more to politics than technical issues, and now that's just my opinion from what I've gathered around the web. So take that with a big grain of salt.

01:06:40
131 also does fix some crashing. That's seen on Wayland with the 610 kernel and NVIDIA GPU driver 560. Now I'm not on Wayland yet and Marius is, and he said he's not had any issues. So this might not be very widespread, but if you have had crashing, 131 should take care of that. Take a look at the article in the show notes and if you want to try out the 131 beta, there is a link to the Mozilla website page where you can download it for your platform and hardware and give it a shot. As always, keep in mind betas might crash. No testing in production.

01:07:19 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Happy surfing, uh I the the cookie banner blocker is real intriguing. I'm assuming that is intended to do the various sites where you first visit them and they're like this site uses cookies. Please click here to accept it just makes those go away which first visit.

01:07:39 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Some do that over and over again.

01:07:41 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I want that feature, yeah I kind of want it too, and and I think they found that a lot of times it doesn't even matter what you click it, the website's still doing what it's doing. I saw an article that was like I can't remember. Now it's like 30 or 50, just like. No, I won't take the cookies. Yeah, whatever it's still going to do, whatever it wants to do, and yep, well, well.

01:08:03 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
so here's the secret If you say no cookies, no, thank you, and the next time you visit the site the banner does not pop back up, it put cookies on your machine. That is how that works.

01:08:18 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Firefox or Chrome, either one. If you don't want cookies, control-w when you get that banner. I mean I suppose, You're not going to be able to use the site, though.

01:08:33 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, yeah. Although who's to say that they didn't put cookies on your machine before you closed the tab?

01:08:40 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Oh goodness, I guess you got to use links as your browser, right. Isn't that the command line browser?

01:08:48 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, I don't think it has cookie support. Yeah, I don't think it does.

01:08:52 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
No images, not much. You're not filling out forms.

01:08:57 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I have briefly searched the web with links before for various reasons. When all you have is a reasons. When all you have is a console. When all you have is a console and you have to Google how in the world do I fix this? Where all I have is a console, you Google it from links, and they've done that a time or two Back in the back of the day. Before cell phones were quite as ubiquitous as they are now. Oh, all right, let's get into command line tips and let's start with Rob who has a cleaning tip yes, bleach bit.

01:09:32 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
So let me get that on the screen for those who are watching. But bleach bit is for those of you who've maybe heard about this for a while. I'm a little behind the times, apparently, but Bleachbit is a cleaning tool to clean your system up. It's available on Windows and on Linux. It's a Python app. It's in repositories so you can just do an apt install bleach bit. That's what I did here on my Cosmic Pop OS desktop. But also I read that a lot of those repositories are further out of date and recommending you should just get the version from the site or from GitHub because they'll update it, add more things to clean and stuff like that.

01:10:30
So what Bleachbit is? So here? I have Bleachbit open on Pop OS here and it's going to scan what you have on your system. So if I didn't have Firefox, I don't think Firefox would show up here. If I had other things that it could clean, that it's aware of, they would probably show up as well. So by default nothing's checked. But you can go through and you can clean the apt, the auto-clean, the auto-remove, clean package list.

01:10:59
There's a deep scan that will do backup files and dot ds stores and thumb dot, dbs, all the things for firefox, and it's showing me here too, I think, because I previewed it, how much it's going to delete from each of these uh, journal, d, uh, clean system cache clipboard, custom broken desktop files, a bunch of stuff there, temporary files, of course, and now there are some things. Like you probably shouldn't just check everything, like I almost did here, but because some things I haven't had it happen, but it's it said you can pretty much break your system if you if delete things you shouldn't be, and it will give you warnings on things like this Vim swap files across system. You check that. It's like warning regarding deep scan Vim swap files. This, oh this option is slow. That's what it says here, but I think there's other options, so let's go ahead and do it.

01:12:04
So once you select everything you want which in this case I, I got everything here you can do a preview and there it's gonna not actually delete anything, but it's gonna go through and tell you everything it would have deleted. So you can. If you really want to look through, you can look through everything, but otherwise you can. Or if you don't care, if it's a system you don't mind breaking, which this one isn't, uh, you can go down to the bottom and it tells you how much disk space is recovered. And 419 megabytes. And this is pretty much a fresh install of Pop OS, the cosmic version.

01:12:46
So I don't. That seems like a lot of stuff to be deleted. I'm curious to try it. I don't have time to do this live on the show, but I'm going to hit go here and maybe it'll be done by the time I do my plug and we can see how much much what happens at the end. And I have used this on other systems. I believe there is a command line feature too. I've used it on Windows too to clean it up. Only fairly recently it hasn't been too recent that I've just discovered this.

01:13:21 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
And if Rob is not at the end of the show, we know what happened.

01:13:24 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
This isn't actually my live system. I'm running on snow.

01:13:28 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Well, I think you should mention. It's also saying it's what 13,501 files it's going to delete.

01:13:34 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yes, yes, 13,501 and 20 special operations, which I'm not quite sure what that means. But special is good right sometimes.

01:13:46 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Caution to the wind. Yeah, pedal the floor um this I got permission denied already.

01:13:52 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I guess I I did. I must not have ran this as admin and I don't have access to a lot of stuff, so or maybe, maybe for the best, run it as admin by the way If you really want to clean up your system, you probably have to.

01:14:07 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
This reminds me very much of CCleaner and all of the registry cleaners on Windows from years gone by.

01:14:14 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
It's been compared to that. I watched a video on it recently after I've already been using a bike. I was just kind of digging into trying to find out more. Only after I've already been using a bike. I was just kind of digging into trying to find out more and, according to the name sounds so familiar Chris Titus. This is what the pros are using now instead of CC cleaner. Don't use CC cleaner, that's had malware in it.

01:14:34
Yeah, don't use CC cleaner, not anymore, and I never, and it's bloat. It's been bloated anyway always. So this is pretty minimal, not bloated open source, and apparently it's what the pros use, according to Chris Titus Cool.

01:14:49 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
All right, ken. What shall we do if we lose our file system? How do we find it?

01:14:55 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Well, last week I showed you how to use FindFS to find your devices that are connected to your system, whether they're mounted or not. This week, I'm going to show you how you can find devices that are mounted. In fact, let me go ahead and take a moment here to bring up my command line, and the command I'm going to give you, as you can see, is F-I-N-D-M-N-T. I pronounce it bind, mount, and just running it by itself will give you a lot of information. It finds every file system, whether it's a ext4, a sys file system, fuse, cpl, tracefs, tempfilesystem, network, that is, squashfs. Rob, you know what those are, don't you?

01:16:11 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, I hear them. It's a lot of the same information that running just mount will give you, but much prettier, much, much better presentation.

01:16:21 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Especially since it does by default, give you a header, giving you the target the source the file system type and the options.

01:16:30 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I like that. It's at a tree view. Yeah, tree is nice. Yes.

01:16:37 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
It does have that tree view. That is nice. Makes it easier to see what falls under what. Now, if you don't like the tree view but you do prefer the format for from DF you, you can do it that way too, using the space dash capital D. Now it's nice to get this information because it's a lot of useful information that you can use, especially if you want to see the percentage. But sometimes you actually want to be able to just maybe limit that information. One way to do that is with the fine mount dash T. In this case, I'm going to use the T to show me the file system types that match EXT4, which is all the devices that I have currently connected, and if you watched last week, you'll notice there's one that's missing because I don't have it hooked up yet.

01:18:00 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
We'll plug it in. Plug it in.

01:18:03 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I'll go ahead'll plug it in. Plug it in. I'll go ahead and plug it in and give it a minute for it to pop up and dolphin up here and there it is.

01:18:28 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I was going to say if it takes a full minute, you have a problem it's not a good sign if a hard drive takes a full minute to pop up, but it's still not showing it because it's not mounted that's right.

01:18:38 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yeah, show the devices that are actually mounted.

01:18:45 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So I have to mount it. I see what you did there.

01:18:51 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
You were just playing dumb. John thought it was real.

01:19:02 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Now that it's mounted, you see it included in the list, but you can also go through and use it to verify your file systems. This is great if you've been editing your FSTab or file system table, and I'm running it as myself, so I'm getting a lot of permission to knives oh, yeah, yeah, pseudo, make me a sandwich. So it has sudo. I'm only getting one and, jonathan, can you tell me why it's giving me that non-bind-mount-source-own-slash-swapimage? Saying it's a directory or regular file.

01:20:00 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Because it's a directory or regular file. In this case, it's a regular file.

01:20:03 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
That's used for my swap.

01:20:05 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Mm-hmm, can we play and stump the host today?

01:20:10 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
No, I'm just trying to get this interactive.

01:20:16 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I got you. I am impressed with findMount. I will have to try to reprogram my fingers to run that command instead of just mount by itself, because that looks very useful.

01:20:27 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Now there is another command that I want to show, and that's where you can, a few other options. You can add Dash in which gets rid of the header Dash, dash in which gets rid of the header dash, dash, source. And here I'm telling it what the source is by using a label, and then I just tell it to give me an output of just the target, and this will work if it's an SFS stack.

01:20:59 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Ah, gotcha.

01:21:01 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Now you notice something about all these targets. That's the actual one, and I'm going to go in here and add why, Ken, target and source can't be used together.

01:21:31 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It's a comma separated list. Ah, hmm.

01:21:36 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yeah, cool. So and you'll see here I keep going too far off the screen that this is the target directory and the source device is the device-sda5. And then for each one of these, it shows that in my fstab, what I've done is I've done a bind to mount for this directory, so it's showing up under this directory.

01:22:10 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Mm-hmm Bind mounts are cool, very useful.

01:22:12 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Especially if you don't want to have to keep repeatedly moving stuff off of one drive to another.

01:22:19 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, you just put your big full directory in a bind mount and move it over. Once be done with it. Yeah, Cool stuff.

01:22:29 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
And a couple others here.

01:22:33 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Let's save them for next week. Come back next week and give us the rest of them, because we are running long on time. Let's move to Jeff. I have a quick update Quick update though.

01:22:44 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
When I first did that and it only deleted uh 300 and some files because it wasn't root, so I did it again and it deleted everything and it still seems to function. He's not gone away it is, it is not broken.

01:23:01 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
All right, jeff, tell us about uh, your, your your debian thing. What is this?

01:23:08 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
post install and it deb. Post install is pretty much like it sounds. It's a simple bash script to take a new debian or ubuntu install and do some basic server stuff that a person would do post install of a fresh, fresh load. So it does the following One, it creates a new user with pseudo privileges. Two, add it to the public SSH key for secure access. Three, disable its password authentication and root login for enhanced security. Four, setting up the uncomplicated firewall you know UFW to protect your server. Five, creates a swap file to optimize system performance. And six, configuring the time zone and time synchronization for accurate timekeeping.

01:23:52
Now, if you're not into servers or sounds like something you're not interested in, but maybe you're new to Linux I think you should give a link in the show notes to see.

01:24:01
Look at this link in the show notes to see the script. Not only does it show the script but it goes through a step-by-step explanation of what's going on. If there's something you need to do, for example, and you just want to do one of the steps or two of the steps, it shows the command and what it's doing and explains what's going on, and it also shows you how to answer the questions the script will ask. So if you just run it, it'll give you some background on what you need to fill in, and after it runs, it'll also show you how to verify that things went as they should. So while the script might not be epic for those experienced users, I think it does a good job of showing some things that should be done, along with how and how to check the status of your system. The documentation around this, I think, is pretty good, and I think it's a good learning tool, so have fun setting up your new system.

01:24:52 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, very cool. All right, I've got one. A quick one. Now, mine is not a command line tip, I'm that guy this week but I want to tell you about mqtt explorer and if you find yourself working with mqtt which mqtt is a an online data message bus.

01:25:11
Basically, you subscribe to topics, you publish bits of information to topics. It gets used oftentimes for things like home assistant. It runs on mqtt and there's some other things that do, but it's a trivial message bus. One of the things that could be interesting about it is because there's so much data going around because you have to figure out where it's at a program like the Explorer, it lets you just subscribe to all of it and then, as the data comes in, it shows it to you, lets you you virtualize it and it actually looks like you could pull little bits of information out of it, and so mqtt explorer will like make graphs out of your data, which is, which is really cool, some fun stuff here. In fact, it looks like they've added things to it since the last time that I used it, because this stuff was not there before.

01:25:59
Um, so neat stuff. And if you find yourself working with MQTT, the Explorer is maybe the place to go to. All right, it has been fun. Guys, I will let each of you get in the last word. If you want to plug something, you can, and then we'll have you back next week, so, rob.

01:26:23 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Just my usual. Come connect with me. My website is robertpcampbellcom and from there you can find links to my LinkedIn, my Twitter, my Mastodon a place to donate these copies I keep talking about. It's only going to take to get me that phone. It's only going to take to get me that phone. It's only going to take 100 coffees about so 100 coffees and I can get that uh phone. And if you scroll, there's my resume there and some a cool quote at the bottom of the website and and and stuff like that. Come and find me connect, say hi on LinkedIn, mastodon or Twitter. Cool, hope to see you there.

01:27:07 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, All right Ken.

01:27:09 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Well, come back for next time when I finish going through some other options for using FindMail.

01:27:18 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, I look forward to it. That is a very cool-looking little program.

01:27:27 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
There are a couple of uh options that I think you'll really like, jonathan. Yeah, like when it's not in the fs tab yep, looking forward to it.

01:27:36 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
All right, and jeff.

01:27:40 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Jeff is muted, oh yeah, I pulled a Rob, you robbed it up. I did Not much this week, so it's just Poetry. Corner Server poor response, not quick enough for browser Time out. Plum Blossom, have a great week.

01:28:06 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Oh, all right, Excellent stuff. Thank you guys for being here. Uh, things I want to play. Well, of course, we've got hack a day, we've got floss weekly and the security column that goes live there on hack a day and make sure and check those out, uh. And then I've got a YouTube video, that, uh. And then I've got a YouTube video that is in the ending notes and that is something. So, as many of you know, I've been doing work with Meshtastic writing code for that and I've done some videos about it, and one of the other community members decided to try to make a theme song and called out my beard on the theme song, and so go give that video some love and just remember it was all done in fun. But yeah, it's a lot of fun and I promise to give him a shout out.

01:28:48
Other than that, we sure appreciate everybody being here and catching us, those that watch us live, those that get us on the download, and we will see everybody next week on the Untitled Linux Show. Hey folks, do you enjoy the show but wish you could have more Twit in your life? Well, you should really think about Club Twit then, for about the price of a cup of coffee per month. You can join the club. You get access to the exclusive Discord, access to shows, the ad-free versions of shows, and more. You should really think about it. Come join the club.