Untitled Linux Show 179 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 talk about releases, bug fixes, even some Windows news. There's CAD, there's Digicam and there's Wine. It's a lot of fun. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned. Podcasts you love From people you trust.

00:16 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
This is Twit.

00:21 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
This is the Untitled Linux Show, episode 179, recorded Saturday, november 23rd. Shape up or compile out. Hey, it is Saturday and everybody, I think, at this point, knows what that means. It's time for the Untitled Linux Show. We're going to talk about open source and some hardware, lots of Linux news, all kinds of good stuff. You don't want to miss it. And it's not just me. We've got a trio, not the quartet. We're down our quartets down to three to mess up a line from a beloved cartoon feature film. But hey, it's fun to be here. We got Jeff, we got Ken. How are you guys doing?

00:57 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Really good, really good Good.

01:00 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I got a couple of good articles that I'm really looking forward to talking about.

01:04 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I have some'm really looking forward to talking about. I have some I'm looking forward to talking about too. Before we get to that, we've got a new segment in the show and that's called Reviewing Stuff. Rob Convinced Jonathan to Buy, and we're going to start with the Crowview.

01:21
Note this laptop there. Let me get in the picture with it. It's kind of big, this laptop sized thing it's not exactly a laptop with a Raspberry Pi 5 hanging off the side of it, and I figured I would tell you guys about it. It has indeed come in and there are a couple of things I really really like about it. And then there are a couple of things I really really like about it, and then there are a couple of things that really sort of irritate me. And, uh, and then one more thing that I just I hope that they fix at some point in the future. Um, so it is. It is essentially a keyboard, a monitor and a battery. So inside it is, you know, keyboard, touchpad, it is all the guts of like a laptop, but without the motherboard. And then you have the motherboard hanging out the side of it in the form of the Raspberry Pi, and then they also send along the little adapter board. That's what you see between the Pi and the device. And then I've got one of the NVMe carrier boards on top there, because who wants to use an SD card? Not me?

02:26
There are a couple of things that's cool about it. I didn't realize this at first. It does have a built-in battery, so it does work as a laptop. So I'll hit the power button here and you might be able to see lights come on, green light on the pie, and it's probably not going to show up real well on my camera here, but it is booting and there is a button you can press to get the battery life. How much battery life is remaining? Yeah, my camera is. Oh there, we go there. You should be able to see part of that. I hold it just right, and so that's the Raspberry Pi booting up. It's ready to go.

02:59
I don't have a GUI on this particular Pi. It's cool. I really dig it. I really like having the extra screen here and the fact that the raspberry pie hangs off the side of it. I like it For a lot of things. It's going to be really cool. I already have some thoughts about what I'm going to do with it. I'm plotting, I have plans.

03:22
There is one thing in particular that was obviously not thought through very well, and that is that when it ships it comes with a couple of laser cut acrylic pieces, that sort of sandwich in with that carrier board, and so it goes under it like this, and the idea is that you know you've got your carrier board here and the Pi sits here under it like this, and the idea is that you know you got your carrier board here and the pie sits here. Uh, if you have the official raspberry pi cooler, that cooler has pegs that go through the bottom of the pie to hold it on and the pegs don't fit when this thing is on there, that that annoys me, that that's not okay. That was, that was not. That was not the thing I wanted to find. Thankfully, take a screwdriver, take it off. It works just fine without it.

04:12
The other thing that is just a little bit of a problem is you've got a Raspberry Pi hanging off the side of your computer. As Loquacious says, it sort of mad maxi-esque it it's. It's a little. It looks cobbled together, um, and so the only thing that's holding that on there is on one side it's a usb-a, a usb-c and hdmi and on the other side it's two. Is that mini or micro hdmi and a single usb-c, I guess? I guess there's also the USB to USB bridge board up here, but still it feels to me that might be a little fragile in the long term.

04:53 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
But it doesn't look good in a kid household.

04:56 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I would not want my five-year-old or my three-year-old to try to use this Correct or even be around or something Right, to use this correct or even be around or something right. Um, it's, it's like it needs. It's like it needed just a little bit more work on the, the actual like fitting together. On the other hand, the way that it's put together does make it very, very flexible, and I don't mean that like in a physical sense, like it's. It's flexible. No, that's not good, but it's flexible in that like you could just you can plug any device in because it's got an HDMI port and USB port. It'll spit power out. So that part is good. The feel, the fit and the finish is not bad. The keyboard is not the greatest keyboard, but it's not terrible either. It works, it's serviceable.

05:42 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
So you plug a good keyboard into the Raspberry Pi, right?

05:47 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
At that point, you would just use a portable monitor as well instead of this thing, right, so you could do that, but you're sort of beginning to defeat the point of it. There is one more thing that I just now realized that's on here that is really cool, and that is it does have a power switch. On this little adapter board between the two, there's a power switch to be able to turn things off all the way. So that is cool. And then, of course, you can shut things down, power it off and save your battery life. So overall, I really like it. I am legitimately going to use this. I've got to figure out a way to give this, to give the Pi itself a little bit of support, rather than it just hanging out beside it, because it's not great. And I will tell you what I think they need to do for their next version.

06:35
I don't understand why they did not do this yet. There's a good reason why they did not do it yet, but it makes so much sense for the next one, and that is when the Pi CM5 finally comes out here, I think in just another month or two. It's coming soon, like we've already seen. I've already seen official leaks about it? Um, when the pi cm5 comes out, rather than hanging the pi off the side, they just need to make a cutout here, put the pi cm5 right there and then ideally have another cutout to be able to put an nvme drive in there.

07:11
And uh, there you go. That would be the way to do it. Then you have a full-on laptop that is powered by a raspberry pi cm5. That, theoretically, maybe, when the cm6 comes along, maybe it'll just fit and just work. I don't know. So I would love for elecro to do that with the crowview note 2, and if they won't do it, then, um, maybe framework can come along, or even even somebody else can partner with framework and make a, a board for framework laptops that you can just slot a CM5 into.

07:45 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Do we see a partnership between Raspberry Pi and framework? Maybe in the future?

07:52 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I would not be against that. That's the sort of thing I could imagine people doing. I would like to see it. I think it'd be really cool. I would love to have. I'm excited about having this right, Like the ability to have a Raspberry Pi 5 in a notebook factor. I just would love for it to not have the entire Raspberry Pi 5 hanging off the side.

08:16 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Like the old time NIC cards that you would use with laptops.

08:22 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, when you said, if it was underneath, kind of inside there, I immediately thought a framework. I was like that sounds very framework.

08:29 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yes, yeah, it does. It sounds a lot like something they would do, uh, but I could. I could see elcro doing it too. Like it's so close. What they have here is is so close to it, um, yeah I've only got one question can it run Blender?

08:46
I think so. I'm pretty sure the Raspberry Pi 5 can well. I mean you can run Blender on this display because, like I said, it's got an HDMI port on it so you can run anything you want to on that just make sure you got a lot of free time yeah, I think Ken is itching to tell us about Blender and something that happened with them this week.

09:10 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Actually, jonathan, you're right, I am. First, though, I do want to thank Marius Nestor, since he's the one that wrote up about the Blender Foundation's release of a major update for its powerful, free, cross-platform and open source 3D graphics and modeling software. Of course I'm referring to Blender, in this case version 4.3. It introduces an experimental Vulkan back end on Linux and Windows systems to render the user interface. This can be enabled over the default OpenGL backend. And here you're going through the menu by selecting Preferences, then Interface, developer, extras, then System, then Backend.

09:57
According to Marius, there are some limitations, like lack of support for GPU subdivision and OpenXR and slower performance compared to the OpenGL back end.

10:12
Now Blender 4.3 also introduces a toggle for fast GI approximation, improved light and shadow linking to be feature parity with cycles, a new metallic BSDF node in the Shader Editor, a new Gaber Noise Texture node, a Theme Entry to drive the color of the Motion Path line before and after the current frame, an Eyedropper button for properties where a bone can be chosen and support for action selectors for data blocks in the properties editor.

10:50
This release also brings support for hardware accelerated ray tracing on Linux, a revamped grease pencil feature to remove deeper limitations and improve overall performance, an updated volume scattering node that now supports more phase functions, more compact representation for B-splines for optics, a diffuse roughness input for principled BSDF and a new minimum stretch iterative unwrapping method. The video sequencer has been updated as well, with support for adjusting sound strips on a subframe level with the slip operator, much faster color balance and tone map modifiers, as well as saturation and multiply strip color controls, snapping support for the preview area, faster loading of thumbnails for movie and image strips, box select as a default tool for timeline area, as well as connect and disconnect strips for easy selection and transformation. Since I have only mentioned about half of the changes and improvements, I recommend reading Maria's article for the rest of the details, and it includes a link to Blender 4.3's release notes and a 27-minute video recap.

12:23 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
You know, I know that Blender does video editing stuff. I've never tried it and I'm now thinking that I need to try it. I use for the video editing stuff that I do, which is Floss. I use Kdenlive, which works well most of the time. It has a tendency to be a little bit off on the audio video sync, like it will sync properly in the preview, but then I render it out and upload it to YouTube and it's off just enough to tweak me when I go to listen back to it. Um, and then I've tried um open shot. Which open shot is more powerful? Open shot has terrible problems with performance, particularly when you're doing stuff on the timeline. So I got to go in and try Blender and see if it would work as a nonlinear video editor. It would be kind of weird to use it for that, but it's in there, right, it's part of what it does.

13:20 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yeah, you can do that yeah. Got to try it or you could just go straight to FF Impact. Yeah, you can do that.

13:24 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, got to try, or you could just go straight to FF Impact. I like being able to scrub back and forth on the timeline to make stuff work. You know, when you have an audio source from here and a video source from here, you got to line them up. Trying to do it on the command line it's a little dicey.

13:38 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
We're not all like you, Ken.

13:42 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
We're not super wizards on the command line, not a super wizard. I've just got a lot of experience using the command line.

13:51 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's how anyone gets to be a wizard Lots of experience. That is how that works.

13:56 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Well spoken, like a wizard, oh no, it's just, it's nothing.

14:01 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
All right. Well, there's another release this week that I am pretty excited about and I've not I'm not on it yet, but I think I will be soon and that's wine 9.22. And specifically, this one has some more whalen stuff in it. Um, we talked about this a couple of weeks ago. That wine has now a whalen back, so not everything is running on X Wayland. Yeah, through X Wayland, because Wine goes to X. Well, now, in 9.22, it is the Wayland backend by default, and I think that's going to be really interesting. I think there's going to be some bugs that get fixed, maybe some performance improvements as a result of that, and there are other changes in there, of course. Course, there's the always popular various bug fixes, but there's also, like, some display mode virtualization, which is really important for certain old games, uh, the locale data they have updated, uh, more support for network sessions in direct play, and then, of course, wayland by default, and there's there's more than that. Of course, we've got the link to the uh, the actual wine release, and there's just, you know, pages and pages and pages of changes, like there always is with wine. Um, most people these days, I suspect, use wine through proton, and it will. It'll take a little bit for this wine version to end up in Proton, like several months.

15:28
If you want to get to it sooner and this is what I'm going to do, there is the Proton. Ge is usually what I use and that's Glorious Egg Roll. You might think what kind of name is that? And you might think what kind of name is that? Glorious Egg Roll is the nickname of the developer. Honestly, I forget what his real name is.

15:52
He's become a little more public here recently, but there is so GE Proton 9-20, which I think that is based on Wine 9.20. That came out two weeks ago and so you know, give it another two weeks and we will probably see the 9.22 release. And what he does is he takes like the set of patches that make Proton what it is and rebases those to the more up-to-date wine. I think he'll also pull some stuff in from wine staging, which is, you know, yet another source of wine goodness. And so you know, if you really want to try some of this stuff out sooner, glorious Egg Roll and GE Proton is the place to go look at, and there are tools. We've been talking in the past about tools, about how to manage all that with your Proton install and you know lots of tools around this.

16:40 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I was going to mention ProtonUp-QT is what I use to install Glorious Egg Roll. So it'll just give you a list and you can just add and subtract out of Steam and it just a couple of button clicks and it takes care of it for you.

16:54 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, and it's also available on platforms like Lutris and Play on Linux. I don't know if Play on Linux even exists anymore, but like Lutris, I know it's there and so you can go in and say, list all the different wine versions, and the glorious egg roll is going to be one of the options. So there are plenty of places to be able to find that and get it.

17:11 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I was going to look here they don't start saying anything about red wine or white wine in the future I mean, we've got wine.

17:19 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
There was a uh, there was sedega for the longest time, which is is a type of wine, and that was another. You know, I think that was built on top of wine. Yeah, people, it's the funniest thing about open source developers. We like our puns. It's like we're all about the dad jokes.

17:36 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
And just side note, if you did want to install Glorious Egg Roll on Steam ProtonUp-QT, we talked about that on episode 166, august 24th of this year. There you go. But if you search it, it's pretty self-explanatory. You run it and it's like oh, do you want this? Yes, click install the install.

17:57 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yep yep, pretty easy stuff. Yep, all right. Uh, jeff and I both found this to be a really interesting story and I'm going to let Jeff have it because I've got something else I can talk about. What is FreeCAD and what's new with it?

18:25 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
very much is CAD software, computer-aided drafting, but today we're going to change that and we're going to talk about FreeCAD with their 1.0 release. Now, FreeCAD is an open source CAD and 3D modeling programmer that builds off the OpenCascade code coin 3D library and uses a QT toolkit so it can work across multiple platforms. Freecad has been around for quite a long time, with its first 0.11 release in March of 2011. It's only now, in 2024, that we have the 1.0 release. Now it has a lot of differences, different uses, and, as such, it can be used by those wanting to be architects. It has a panoramic environment, meaning the shape of your item can be based off, or, sorry, it has a parametric environment, meaning the shape of your items can be based off the properties, such as numeric values, text on off buttons or even other objects, and all shape changes are recalculated on demand. So you could have 2D or 3D drawings both for 3D printing and CNC machining if you so desire, and it's basically it's an all around, very good, all around CAD program.

19:34
Now, freecad used to have a whole bunch of topological man. It is a rough day today, I got to tell you, and this is the kind of sausage making topological. Yes, this is the kind of sausage making you get here on the untitled linux show we're in. There's no second takes. You know, this is, this is all real, this is. This is authentic here. Um, so there was naming issues that are mostly gone now. So if you're, if you reference geometry in a part and then delete that geometry, your model shouldn't break anymore. Now FreeCAD now also has an integrated assembly workbench written by the OnCell team, and it currently supports bottom-up design approach. Now there's also a new material system as well, which should help the appearance of the materials in your model in your design, and added support for using vector functions from the vector API in expressions. Introducing the app colon, colon varset property container is a core feature to allow users to define properties that can now be used in models and renames the attachment property to attachment support, which may affect the opening of format of older FreeCAD versions.

20:52
Freecad does have this to say about the file format, so this is from them and I'm quoting. Although precautions have been taken to guarantee that files created with the new 1.0 version can still be opened in older versions of FreeCAD, some new features introduced in 1.0 cannot be understood by earlier versions and can cause models saved with 1.0 to break or present problems when opened in an earlier version of FreeCAD. So they have tried to keep backwards compatibility. But there are certain limits. You can't add things and have it work for things that didn't exist in the older versions of the program. Now there are many more improvements and I've just touched on a few of them. So take a look at the show notes and you'll find. Well, I said two, but should be three articles talking about the release, and in those articles you can find the GitHub page so you can get the source code if you so desire. There's a flat hub and an app image version for those that don't want to compile, and but many distributions have it in their repositories or soon will as the new version propagates through. You know I looked at my kubuntu repositories and version 1.0 is already there, so you most likely already have it or if not, soon. But you can always get the other ways too if you so desire.

22:09
One note I do want to add is, while the comments were mostly positive, some people did say that the software was confusing or they had issues. I personally have engineers who work for me and use SolidWorks and AutoCAD among other professional programs. And just I can't tell you, you know, cad software, especially high level software, can be kind of hard to use and complex and you also have to have good design practices, processes in place. So I always say, think of CAD software like programming language. It isn't hard to jump in, but to get the most out of it there's going to be a learning curve and good practices that need to be used.

22:47
So if you don't find yourself so you don't find yourself in a corner, you know you, just the way you can program yourself in a corner, you could design yourself in a corner. So I don't want to scare anyone. You know this is something you could easily get going on. But keep in mind that you know a few tutorials can go a long way. You know this is a CAD software, can be very complex, but it doesn't have to be. So I still recommend people give it a shot and, you know, play around with it. So happy designing yeah.

23:18 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So a couple of thoughts with that. First off, they have tutorials, and there's a bunch of them on YouTube as well. There's places you can just jump in and get started, and I would. If somebody really wants to learn this the computer aided design I would say get yourself a reasonably priced 3D printer to go along with this. If you want to make an investment to it, go with FreeCAD and a 3D printer. That way you can design something on cad and then actually make the physical object that you can put your hands on, and that's going to go a long ways towards helping you actually learn how things work.

23:51
And uh, yeah, I've done, after just a little bit, um, the. The cad work that I've done is actually through. It's not free cad, it's one of the open source other open source cads, but it's one of the ones that is um, a scripting language, and I can't tell you at the moment what it is there's a couple of them that are scripting languages yeah, there's one in particular that's pretty um, it's pretty common well, and the reason I brought up some of that stuff is because in the comments there are certain people that said, well, I tried to do this and things broke.

24:27 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
And there was other people that, hey, I'm a cad designer and that'll happen with anything.

24:32 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
You have to kind of redesign how you're doing things and I would actually well, the one I'm thinking of is is open scat or open s cad. That is the one that is a scripting language, so that is another option to look at and the S stands for scripting CAD. I think so. Well, maybe it's either scripting or solid.

24:51 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
While you're looking, I do want to bring up something that Jeff didn't mention about this version of FreeCAD. This particular release is to one of the former FreeCAD developers who passed away a few weeks before the release came out.

25:07 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Dedicated to him. Yep, I did see that.

25:10 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
And I would add on to what Jonathan said about 3D printer I would even get an existing model that you can load into the CAD software and just play with it. So you're not just saying, man, okay, I got a block I'm playing with, or a circle, or you have a more complex model and go, oh, what if I did this? What if I did that? Oh, I totally messed it up. Well, I'll just reload it and play again, and it gives you a little more framework to play with sometimes. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

25:43 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
All right, Ken, do we want to talk about the head janitor of open source?

25:49 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I think he's proud of it too. According to Stephen Von Nichols.

25:53 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That was my title.

25:56 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
But Stephen Von Nichols wrote about a key leader who helped to find why some people love the Linux Foundation and others hate it. Some folks see the organization as leading open source projects into the future, while others resent it because of its corporate connections. Everyone agrees that by overseeing more than 1,000 open source projects, the Foundation's influence can't be ignored. That presence is in large part because of executive director Jim Zimlin's outstanding leadership. Now, stephen first met Jim Zimlin when Zimlin was the head of the Free Standards Group, or FSG. The FSG's main project was the Linux standard base. I'm going to say LSB for that in the future, but that was the project. The LSB's goal was to get everybody on the Linux desktop world to agree on standards to ensure compatibility among distributions and their applications, and that's a goal I think we are still struggling a little bit to achieve, though we are getting closer. Another group, the Open Source Development Labs or OSDL, was working on standardizing enterprise Linux. The two nonprofits had the same goal of making Linux more usable and popular, so they agreed to merge. Zimlin was picked to head this new group, called, as we all know it, the Linux Foundation. At the time Zimlin told Stephen and here I'm quoting the combination of the two groups really enables the Linux platform and all the members of the Linux Foundation to work really effectively. I clearly understand what the organization's charter needs to be. We need to provide services that are useful to the community and industry, services that are useful to the community and industry, as well as protect, promote and continue to standardize the platform. End quote. Stephen believes this has been achieved and I kind of agree with him. I think it has been too.

28:24
Now, around 2010, the foundation's scope expanded. Its initial focus was on Linux. Until then, the organization had hosted about a dozen projects related to the Linux operating system. However, as Linux gained dominance in various sectors, including high performance computing, including high-performance computing, automotive, embedded systems, mobile devices and cloud computing, the Linux Foundation started to broaden its horizons. At the recent Linux Foundation Members Summit, zimlin recalled how the Foundation became a foundation of foundations 20 years ago, supporting developers and communities that wanted to leverage open source. Now I think I've been talking about Stephen's article for three minutes, so I'm going to wrap it up here, but I do recommend reading Stephen's article to find out why the Linux Foundation's and Zimlin's work isn't done yet. I found it to be an interesting read.

29:29 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, we're going to talk about Linux and the foundation and all that here in a little bit with, in my opinion, not quite as flattering news. So it is good to see this side of it and we do appreciate all the work that they do. It has been in the balance. It has definitely been a good thing for Linux.

29:48 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
And for Torvald as well.

29:50 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yes, I think the foundation now pays both Torvald's and Greg Hartman's salaries, so definitely a big part of the ecosystem.

29:58 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
And I believe Zimlin's their boss, though I don't think they really notice that.

30:04 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I mean, I don't know that anybody is torvald's boss. I think he could, you know, pretty much write his job at any of about 15 major companies anywhere. And okay, mr torvalds, we'll do whatever you say, mr torvalds 15.

30:18 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Uh, that's, that's just on tuesday.

30:21 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah well, I'm thinking, I'm thinking big big companies, like big companies.

30:26 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Oh, he could go too yeah, I think all of them is the answer um, I couldn't see tour of oz at oracle.

30:36 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Just put it that way uh personality conflicts something like that.

30:41
Yeah, it's just culture clash, right. But a lot of other places I could see him walking in and just, okay, sure you could, yeah, we'll pay your salary. How much did you want? Okay, it would help them out a lot, it might all right, uh. So let's talk about well, one of those places that came to mind actually is ibm, because Red Hat let's talk about Red Hat showing up in an unusual place and that is on Windows.

31:09
So you may not realize it, but WSL, the Windows subsystem for Linux, is a bit of a pain in some ways, or at least it has been until now. And you may also have realized, if you're like me and you like Fedora and Red Hat, that there wasn't an easy way to get either of those distros on WSL. And that is now changing because Red Hat and Microsoft have teamed up to basically figure out what Red Hat on WSL should even look like. And the simple answer is it looks like a tar file rather than a. Was it an app X bundle? So this was the deal. The article here says that previously, the developers had to package tar files into an app X bundle and write Windows specific code to set up users and distribute via the Microsoft Store and now it's just a tar file with aconf file added in there in slash UTC and that's it. That's all you have to do. So that makes things like Fedora and Red Hat possible.

32:19
The actual news here is that there is, there is be, and they've announced official support for running Red Hat Enterprise Linux on WSL. I've not seen whether this was going to be free or if you have to pay for it. I know there are some ways to get Red Hat for free for developers, but if this is going to be inside the Microsoft Store, is it going to be a free product there? Is it going to be a paid product? I don't know.

32:46
I do hope that this paves the way for Fedora to show up. I would personally appreciate that a lot, or at least I would, I guess, if I actually ran Windows on any of my platforms. I don't really have a machine to put this on, but, that said, it would be handy from time to time to be able to get Fedora on Windows. But also, in thinking about this, the fact that it is now just a tar file with a conf added to it, that lowers the bar for a bunch of other distributions showing up and maybe even doing some homebrew distros and running those under WSL. You know, just make your own distro or repackage your own distro, take a, take an install and turn it into a tar file to be able to have all of your stuff reconfigured on there. So WSL getting better and better and that's pretty cool. I like that.

33:39 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I still wonder how long before we go and have a LSW Linux subsystem for Windows.

33:45 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I'm pretty sure that's called Wine.

33:47 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Well and I've said this before and this is still my long-term prediction it's like a lot of that Wine code that they've got too many decades in there to untangle. You start running Linux and then you have little Windows virtual machines that you can isolate and have security on. It's tying in more and more.

34:11 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
And then you need some way for them to communicate with each other, right?

34:16 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So you see a future in which the official Windows hypervisor is the Linux kernel.

34:21 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, and then you can run, because that's a good way that you could, if nothing else, they could break backwards compatibility kind of with Windows as far as the coding and say, okay, we're going to take Windows wherever they stop here. This will run all your previous versions of stuff. Now we've got a new version going forward and we don't have to untangle when you know you hear steve gibson, some of those people talk about some of that code's been in there for oh yeah, 20 plus years, 30 years, and how do you get it out of there without breaking everything? And you say, well, here's our clean break. It's now just running on a little.

35:00 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
You know hypervisor and I will say that they did that. They actually did that already with windows xp. You may not remember this, but there was a windows xp mode. It got built into windows seven oh, yeah, this or seven, I think it was seven and so and I I ran it for at least one customer they had something that would not run on windows 7 and so I had the, the windows xp mode, and that was literally a windows XP virtual machine. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, the problem with that is that they pulled support for it so quick. That support for that did not last very long, but it was out there for a while and that's exactly what it was. It was just an official virtual machine. Okay, you need your old program to work here. It works here.

35:45
Be glad you don't have to support anything that was designed in windows version, one that was a long time ago, that's basically called dos. I have actually helped people with, uh, windows 3.11 software and somebody else had a windows either 95 or 98 machine that they needed the software on to continue to run, and in both of those cases we actually did it in DOSBox. Okay, yeah, yeah, the Windows 3.11 just runs as an application. The program that they had runs as an application in DOSBox, and then the Windows again, it was either 95 or 98, and I cannot remember which. You can load the entire disk image in and DOSBox will boot it like a virtual machine, which is just great. I think it was 95. It's just crazy that DOSBox could do that.

36:34
And then of course, you go and you find the right flavor of it that has printing support, because of course everybody needs printing support for their old computer programs.

36:44 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Because that's why they're running the old computer program to print out from yep yeah, I was gonna say I, I want to.

36:51 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Now I'm not all up on windows, but isn't me and back. You know everything pre-xp? Basically just a graphical interface on top of dosOS no no.

37:06 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
No, 95 was where they went to a real mode. That was not just DOS, I believe, but in 95 and I think 98 as well, there was a button there to reboot into DOS mode. Windows 3 was just an application on top of DOS.

37:25 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Oh, okay, yeah, and the applications that you ran in it were designed to use its window management for painting the screen with the graphics that it wanted to use to display, like with corel draw. Um cc mel.

37:50 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
There's an old one now, what windows xp did bring is that was the first of the home editions, right, windows 2000, that was a, that was their. That was professional windows. Um, that was built on top of the windows nt kernel, and windows xp is where they merge those two streams, and everything since xp has been based on the nt kernel. So that's why. That's why 95 and 98 were so odd and backwards compared to xp until maybe windows 12, when it's based on the.

38:21
Linux kernel. Hey, maybe, maybe. Oh, just to get an idea of how weird things are in the Windows world, you realize we skipped Windows 9. Do you know? Why we skipped Windows 9? No idea, Ken. Do you know why Microsoft skipped Windows 9?

38:43 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I don't remember. I heard that.

38:46 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Because so many programs were just doing a string compare and they would go Windows 9 asterisk essentially. And if it matched, sorry, you can't run this on Windows 95 or Windows 98. And apparently Microsoft actually had problems in the testing room running a thing called Windows 9, because so many programs would bail out early, thinking it was on 95 or 98. All right, is that why you guys put it in a little box and seal it away? Yeah, all right, let's move on and let's talk about what's next.

39:24 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Server corner Jeff take it away. Tell us what. What's next in the server corner?

39:26 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
jeff take it away tell us what's going on in the server world.

39:28 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
We're going to the opposite end of the technology here. We're gonna, we're gonna hit some latest greatest here. So, um, e-wraps is is uh, turned on, is going to be turned on. So amd such as the ryzen 9000 series and Ryzen AI 300 series or the Epic 9500 Touring launch, get more performance. Good news, right?

39:52
I'm sure some of you, we like more performance. Yeah, I'm sure some of you just said, though, said, wait, what E-R-A-P-S, e-raps? What is that? Well, it stands for Enhanced Return Address Prediction Security. So the short version, it's something that its goal is to help recover some of the performance that security mitigations introduced following Spectre over the past several years. Spectre over the past several years. So ERAPs is a new defense for mitigation of certain classes of speculative attacks such as return stack buffer poisoning.

40:34
Now AMD included this note with the patch. Remove explicit RET stuffing, slash filing on VME exits and contact switches on AMD CPUs with eRAPs feature Zen 5. So with enhanced return address prediction security feature, any hardware TLB flush results in flushing of the RSP, aka RAP in the AMD spec. This guarantees an RSP flush across contact switches. Wrap in the AMD spec. This guarantees an RSP flush across contact switches. This feature also explicitly tags hosts and guests' addresses, eliminating the need for explicit flushing of the RSP on VME exit. So the BTC underscore no feature in AMD CPUs ensures RET predictions do not speculate from outside the RSB. Together, the BTC underscore no and eRAPs feature ensure no flushing or stuffing of the RSB is necessary anymore.

41:37
Well, what does that mean if you don't really know a lot of that. It just means you're supposed to go faster and it's supposed to be safer. It's state, it's it's uh, re-evaluating the security changes and I won't go into all that. But you know what happens when michael larable over at phronix hears about this. Well, he actually runs a bunch of bets, benchmarking tests on this feature to find out does it really improve things? Well, he used the 612 kernel and then he would. He would run it stock and then he would add the patch. Now it was originally in the branch to land in 613, the, the eraps, but has since been removed. So they just pulled it here really recently, right before the show. So it's probably the speculation. It's going to show up in 6-14, which that'll be next year. We're not expecting 6-13 to be out until January.

42:31
Well, michael ran a bunch of benchmarks and found that there was an improvement, but the amount depended on how much IO was involved and if there was a lot of context switching. So if neither of those happened, then the results were the same. So you didn't lose any performance, it just didn't help. But when it did help it actually had a nice little improvement. Now it's not going to be earth shattering, it's just a few percentage points, but kind of like we talked in the past, that's where we get to speed up is. You just kind of get a few percentage here and a couple percentage there and pretty soon it's like, wow, things are really moving. So currently it looks like in 6.14, unless you're going to take the code and apply it yourself, there should be a nice speed up coming our way.

43:18
Now I have a second story in here which has to do with the number of memory channels with an AMD EPYC motherboard, specifically 8 versus 12 channels. Again, michael Larable ran a lot of benchmarks, in this case nearly 200. And, similar to the last story, if there's a lot of IO, then there was a nice improvement. If the workload was mostly computational, then the results were pretty flat. So it didn't hurt, it just didn't increase. So, for example, blender didn't see an improvement. It's chugging away inside the cores, it's not hammering the memory hard, while things like TensorFlow, which is machine learning software, and OpenVINO, which is an AI toolkit, had rather large improvements. Well, they're hammering the memory because they're going over their data sets.

44:04
In this case, michael Erible said he felt much better about his decision to buy a 12-channel motherboard rather than save a little money on the 8-channel motherboard. So he liked the speed up. But he thought the speed up improvement was worth it. And I would say, if you can always, when in doubt, get more channels, fill more channels. That's why, side note, when you have a motherboard, they tell you, and even though consumer motherboards are two channel, don't just put a module into one channel, populate them both. It will speed things up a little bit. Take a look at the article in the show notes and find out how your workloads can be approved, and happy computing.

44:45 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, with the, with the E-Wraps, one of the things that interests me is every benchmark he ran shows an improvement. Now, some of them are very small, but they all show the improvement, and what will happen with some of these changes is most everything will be an improvement and then some things will actually run slower. Or when things like the 12 channel on Epic here there are some of them that are a dead heat and so you're within the statistical noise and so you'll actually see the wrong one will be ever so slightly faster. But with the ERAPs change, everything improved, and so that's kind of a a strong indicator that this really is a good, a good change that everybody's going to benefit from yeah I.

45:26 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I considered some of them kind of in the realm of noise, so maybe they weren't I. You know I I just kind of had a rounding error, I guess. Well, they were yeah, yeah it never hurt, right, right, that's.

45:38 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's essentially what I mean. It never hurt. So it never got far enough into the realm of just noise that it looked like it hurt. Um, the uh, yeah it.

45:49
The whole speculation thing with, with Spectre and all of those has changed so many assumptions about computing. Uh it, it used to be that you know that you could do all of this stuff. The CPU didn't have to care about the way the operating system thought, right, because all of this stuff the operating system took care of it, and then the CPU could take all these shortcuts and you know you would unwind it afterwards and then everything would get presented to the operating system and it would take care of the rest and nobody would care. And then Spectre and Meltdown came along and suddenly there was all of these extra data sources that nobody realized were there, that individual applications could pull from. You know they could detect differences in cache timing, they could detect whether something had been loaded into cache or not, and it just changed the game and it. You know we see stuff like this and we are just now coming out on the other side of the.

46:50
The shake-up that was specter and meltdown and it. That's been a long time ago. It's been, uh, yeah, it's getting on to be a decade now. Uh, when did specter meltdown first come out?

47:02 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I thought it was more like five years ago.

47:04 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Six years ago. I'm saying five, six years ago.

47:12 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
If it was, that would be kind of in the realm of the silicon pipeline. By the time you say, okay, we're going to design with this in mind, simulate it, build it, you know so on, it takes a few years for that to go through.

47:27 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Six years ago is when the YouTube videos were posted. So yeah, about then, not quite a decade. So I guess when we get to the point of being a decade, it will be pretty much taken care of. We'll be completely on the other side of it, right, and we're just now seeing where CPUs are coming out, like you said, where this has been part of the entire pipeline.

47:48 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, it definitely takes a while.

47:51 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yes, yes, you know, everybody's got to get on board.

47:53 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
The first mitigation was back in October of 2018.

47:57 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, yeah, but that was all software. That was doing things in software. That that, you know, people never thought you would have to do, because who cares it's a little faster, who cares well turns out, that's a problem yeah, it's just garbage data.

48:13 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
What's who's? Who's going to worry about the garbage data? Uh oh, it's not garbage spies, yeahies.

48:19 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yeah, yeah, all right, he's always digging through the garbage, right.

48:24 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Well, let's talk about GNU's Linux Libre Ken, what's up?

48:34 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
with GNU. What is GNU up to these days? Nestor, since he wrote about the GNU Linux Libre project releasing the GNU Linux Libre 6.12 kernel, Now I'm going to start off by asking do you seek 100% freedom for your GNU Linux library or computer? If you do, then this kernel is for you. The GNU Linux Libre kernel targets software freedom lovers and Linux purists who want to build a 100% free GNU Linux computer without any proprietary drivers or code. It isn't based on the just-released Linux 6.12 kernel series, so that's why we're calling it the GNU Linux Libre 6.12 kernel, which cleans up CPM, slash, QE, QMC, SOC support and that's a long alphabet there.

49:36
Basically, that's about some audio drivers. Then there's also Realtek's 8852BE-VT Wi-Fi driver, AM logic BT protocol support. Another is the AMCC QT2025 PHY driver. Then there's AW96103 or the AW96105 proximity sensor and Texas Instruments TLV320AIC31XX codecs. Now the GNU Linux Libre 6.12 kernel also cleans up the Renesas XHCI controllers and the Intel ISH or Integrated Sensor Hub. These are human interface device drivers and it updates blob names to clean up MHI PCI host, Adreno 620 or 621s, R8169, the RTW8852C and RTW8922A drivers and cleans up blob names in Texas Instruments' PRU-AM642 and Qualcomm's ARM64 device tree source files, or DSTs as they're sometimes called. Now, since the KS7010 and Intel Skylake audio drivers have been removed from the upstream kernel, this release we'll also drop cleaning them Now. Gnu Linux 6.12 kernel also cleans up a newly added sourceless GPL'd program that was disguised as a sequence of hex numbers. Mario's article contains links to the official website, as well as to the Frieze Project and RPM Freedom websites. Who uses the GNU Linux kernel now?

52:00 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
The de-blobbed kernel? Very few, very, very few people. So we actually back on Floss Weekly episode I just found it, where was it? 425, which was a very long time ago. You get to see a much younger Jonathan Bennett in his previous location, which is not nearly as luxurious as this set is, we shall say so.

52:28
We had John Sullivan from the Free Software Foundation and we talked about their de-blobbed kernel a bit, and I don't love it, and that's because I understand some things. I don't love it, and that's because I understand some things. What they do is they refuse to ship firmware blobs. So you have to remember, you have to understand when you plug a device in this is true of a lot of devices or when it's on your motherboard, it doesn't have any firmware on it, and so when your driver first initializes it, one of the initialization steps is to stream the firmware blob over to that device, which then boots on the device, and then they begin communicating back and forth. So of course, let's be clear For those of us that are fans of free software, of open source, in in an ideal world we would have access to the code that makes up those firmware blobs, like I. That is ideally true, I will agree with that. That is a point that fsf makes that I fully agree with. In an ideal world we would like to have access to the code that is in those blobs. We would like to have the ability to fix things, to write, to compile it ourselves, to fix things and send it upstream to Logitech or whoever to be able to make things better. So I fully agree with that point.

53:52
Here's the thing with the Free Software Foundation. When they de-blob those, they are of the opinion that if that firmware blob lives on that device it's fine, we don't care. We pretend that it's not there. It respects your freedom. If we have to upload the firmware blob from the CPU to that as part of initialization, then it has to be open source for it to be able to meet their you know their criteria and that argument just doesn't work for me. It just doesn't.

54:30
I care like. So I care more about whether I can see into the firmware on a device. I care much more about that than am I. Does my computer have to handle that firmware to be able to initialize? Particularly if that firmware is available under a license that allows someone like the kernel, to redistribute it? So you do get into this weird problem and this is true of some devices where here's the firmware code out there, it's on the Internet, it's on the web page, it's on the webpage, but it would be a copyright violation to include that inside the kernel sources and therefore you can't use it Like, okay, that's obviously that's a problem.

55:10
But most companies have gotten past that and they realize that that's a terrible idea. So for most of these pieces of firmware, it's out there, it's redistributable, it's just not open source. And so the Free Software Foundation says it's not open source, therefore we can't touch it. So Linux and even Red Hat and Fedora they have come to this point of it's unfortunate. It's not open source, but we know the firmware has to be there one way or the other. So as long as we have the legal ability to redistribute it, fine, we'll make it part of the kernel, we'll ship it out with the kernel firmware.

55:51 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
That's what's going on here and that's why I'm not running the de-blobbed as they put it free software foundations kernel. It's easier if you've got open hardware to run it on right.

55:55 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Open hardware would be amazing. It's just extremely difficult to make money from open hardware. I've actually run into this a little bit recently. I like open hardware like I do. It just does not make the same kind of economic sense that open source software does, because with open hardware it used to right but it has become so inexpensive to get things fabricated Now, not necessarily silicon, but like PCBs. It has become so inexpensive you can send, you know, 100 bucks. You can send off and get 20 PCBs and you know if the person that made did the design, if he wants to sell them for $50 a piece and you can buy them from China for $15 a piece, which is actually about how that works out. For most of the time. It's really hard at that point to make something open hardware and make any money off of it at all. But that's an entire rabbit trail.

57:00 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
That's not what we were talking about at all. Well, and if you really and it's the basic software and hardware, right, okay, I write a little program, I can give it to the a billion people and it doesn't really cost me anything if I get it on github or whatever. So I'm not paying the server fees or whatever hardware that can be a little tougher. And then even just making it, you know, okay, I give the plans out. Well, who's going to make it? Well, now, you, you got to have material costs and you, I mean it little little tougher yeah, and so you know.

57:32 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
You could look at one side of this like well, it's, let's see it's, it's free to give it away, and so you can sell your open source software, and that's easy to do when it comes to open source hardware. The other side of this is there is a financial cost involved in being able to sell it. There's not a financial cost involved, really, in being able to sell open source software. You can set up a website for next to nothing and take payments on PayPal. Okay, pay me $15 on PayPal or Patreon, buy me a coffee. You can say buy me a coffee. Hey, if you want to use this program, buy me a coffee.

58:10
And so now you're selling your open source program, which is great. There's no problem with selling open source. But the barrier to entry for selling open source software is basically zero. But to sell open source hardware, you have to put the money up front to be able to make the hardware, and then if someone else can you know? Undercut you by having a Chinese fab do it for next to nothing, well then it becomes really difficult to even get your money back on doing it.

58:38 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
So it's and they're're, and even if they undercut you, they're probably not going to say look, it's open source and we have this.

58:44 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It could be, and you'll never know yeah, keith, keith is telling me to plug it. That is actually not the one that I've been using, but, uh, yes, yes, there is one of those fabs that uh sponsors a lot of people on youtube, people that we enjoy listening to on youtube. Some friends of ours on YouTube get sponsored by that particular company, but they're not sponsoring us, so I'm not going to name them.

59:08 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Well, and there's printers you can set up to print PCBs, basically some basic circuitry, yeah.

59:16 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yes, I've seen people get CNC machines set up. In fact, this is very tempting to me. I'm thinking about trying to invest in one of these at some point. You can get a copper-cladded board, a double-sided copper-cladded board, so it's the green fiberglass board. Basically is what they're made out of, and then they chemically put a layer of copper on the top and the bottom. And then they chemically put a layer of copper on the top and the bottom. You put that into like even just a 2D CNC machine. It doesn't have to be the whole four axis CNC thing, it could just be not much more than a milling machine. Really, so long as it can do it.

59:50 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
It's what they look like. I've actually seen them in use, and we used to use them a long time ago.

01:00:03 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
But for doing prototyping it's kind of like the equivalent of a 3d printer. It's actually. It's very, very, very much like the equivalent of a 3d printer, except for pcbs. And so what you do is you, you program it in and your machine will go on and it'll mill out all the copper that's not supposed to be there and at the end of it you you get a pcb that you know you made in like 30 minutes I'll say it's it's of not a 3D printer, it's a 3D eraser.

01:00:22 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yes, yes, that's exactly what it is. Yeah, like I said, we used it for prototyping a long, long, long time ago. It won't handle anything we do now. No, yeah, it's you just, like you said, plated, and then you just etch away what you don't want, and here's your circuit.

01:00:43 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
The way you go, yep so you're saying, basically you just prototype it.

01:00:49 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Once you've got the design to where you want it for as hope and hardware, then you just release the plans and let everybody pay for all the hardware and the manufacturing I mean you can do it that way, and so if you don't, if you don't particularly want to make any money off of it, then that makes a whole lot of sense. You can do it as open source hardware that way but you still had to prototype it.

01:01:10 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
You might have, you might have had to go through five or six boards before you got it right and the bits and the everything else that yeah, so before you, there's still a decent chance.

01:01:20 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
you're a couple hundred dollars in, depending upon what you're doing.

01:01:25 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Sort of like setting up for podcasting.

01:01:28 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, yeah, I suppose. So All right, so let's talk about the code of conduct in the Linux kernel.

01:01:38 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I was going to say did you want to go to that or did you want to go mine first and then, if case yours, there's a discussion to go with that.

01:01:47 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Do you want to talk about? Yeah, we can do that. Let's let Jeff go. First he's going to tell us about Digicam and then we're going to talk about code of conduct.

01:01:55 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
That's probably going to take a bit. So I'm just going to throw in here that Digicam 8.5 is released and you know we haven't talked about that in a while. So a little refresher of what is Digicam. The developers you know this is from them. They say it's an advanced open source digital photo management application that runs on Linux and some other platforms. The application provides a comprehensive set of tools for importing, managing, editing and sharing photos and raw files. Basically, it's a tool to enhance and organize all your photos.

01:02:26
Personally, I use Digicam and I look forward to the new version. Now I say right up front I'm not a power user, I'm a very basic user. But I really like the program user. But I do and I really like the program. One of the big improvements that they did add to this version is to the face management feature, where they've integrated deep learning models to the face pipeline for faster and more accurate face detection and recognition. You know think automatic tagging of photos. So every photo of your aunt Becky is now can easily be found Now. This first appeared in version 8.3. So this is a further refinement of the tool. This is not just the out of the gate. They have changed the default facial recognition model to the UNET, capital Y-U, capital N-E-T and they found it outperformed and was more accurate than the two previous models they used and has more configuration options to enhance the overhaul accuracy and that you can fine-tune facial detection for specific scenarios such as large group photos and portrait photography. There's also an improvement in the color label usability for identifying important items using color labels by implementing a narrow linear gradient color bar around the image thumbnail. In the previous release the color label feature drew a bright border frame around the thumbnail which was deemed a bit intrusive in the user interface, especially when multiple labels were used in an album.

01:03:53
In addition to the refinements and new features, more than 160 bugs have been fixed since the last release and Digicamp does call out they spent a lot of time working with users to validate the fixes they put into the release. So they really try to make sure that when they fix a bug they really fix it and it's not only one instance of it, it's completely squashed. Several internal components have been upgraded, such as the internal raw decoder library. There's several others that they've revved up as the libraries have had more refinements themselves. So if you just take a look at the article linked in the show notes for a full release details where they go into all the changes that have happened, and a link into the Digicam release webpage.

01:04:35
If you have a lot of photos that you want to organize and maybe have some that need a little touch up, I do. I highly recommend Digicam If you want to know even more ways to use the program. They also raise money by selling a recipe book which can help you get the most out of the program and it can be purchased for $9.99 USD US dollars and it's a DRM free book and it will work on any reader or software that supports the EPUB standard, e-p-u-b. And if you get one of the books, like say, today you go out and say I want it, you buy it. Any future editions you'll get for free. So it's not required, but it's just something if you want to support them and get a little more out of the program. You know I recommend that. So happy organizing.

01:05:27 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Digicam is cool. It does have some real power features in it. One of the ones I like about Digicam is like it's got stuff like lens correction in there, so you can say here's the camera I use, here's the lens I use, apply the correction model, and so it'll.

01:05:39
It'll like rewarp the image to try to get rid of any lens artifacting that's in there. Um, it can do. Uh, it can. It can reprocess bracketed images. That's where you, uh, you take three pictures very, very quickly in a row One of them underexposed, one of them overexposed and then one of them exposed right on. That way you get like a broader dynamic range and it's had that feature for a long time now where it can pull those together and calculate them. It's got some cool stuff in there. It's really powerful.

01:06:08 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, from basic, you know, I just want to remove some red eyes out of a picture to stuff like Jonathan's talking about. Like I said, I find it useful and I'm not a power user. I am not, you know, I'm not. I'm not Ken level wizard with this program, you know. Yep.

01:06:30 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
All right, let's okay. Now let's talk about code of contacts. Oh, so, I became aware of this about not quite a week ago, several days ago. The first story and I've got linked a story on Pharonix and that's got links, of course, and then I've got linked also to a couple of posts from Kent Overstreet. Now Kent is the BcashFS guy and part of this is very ironic. You may remember that Torvalds had something of a rant about BcashFS in the past couple of months and how that Kent either needed to believe is what Mr Linus Torvald said, which is very, very interesting context to keep in mind as we talk about what's going on here.

01:07:33
When his changes for the 6.13, linus Torvalds responded by saying that no changes from Kent were being requested or were being accepted at the moment because of an open issue with the COC board, the Code of Conduct board, and so there's multiple facets to this. One of the first ones is that there is a new patch, in fact a very new patch. Let's see when was this? November 14th of this year, so you know, basically a week, a week and a half old. And this adds an enforcement for unacceptable behavior, the enforcement for a code of conduct violation, and one of the things that it does is it denies patch contributions and poll requests. It adds the ability for the Code of Conduct Committee to ban a violator from participating in the kernel development process for a period of up to a full kernel development cycle, and the Code of Conduct Committee could require public apology as a condition for lifting the ban.

01:09:05
And the first poor SAP that this got used against was Kent and Kent Overstreet, and so he has got a couple of blog posts about this, and he starts out by saying, yes, there's some problems. And he also does say yes, I messed up, I was a little too overzealous, and I'm not quoting him exactly. I am, of course, using my own words to restate what he stated, but he did say yes, he was a little overzealous in the point that he made in one of the Curl mailing list messages that he sent. He used some profanity and told someone that he did not think that they were Well. It basically said that the actions you've taken and the way you've approached this does not give me a whole lot of confidence that you really know what you're talking about and you need to either shape up or get out, which again sounds a lot like something Torvalds told to Kent not very long ago, uh, so that it got reported to the Linux code of conduct committee and the code of conduct committee has come back with their um, with their ruling, and and they are disallowing any changes from Kent for the 6.13 pull cycle. And Kent, of course, has responded to this and he has not publicly apologized and he makes the case that the thing that he did, the way that he put it, he's not going to apologize for what he said, although he has how shall we say it? He has expressed disappointment in himself, I believe we shall say, but is not going to apologize in the way that they are asked for. He says my response was to say no to a public apology. I'm reading from his blog now for a variety of reasons because this was the result of an ongoing situation that had now impacted two different teams and projects, and I think that issue needs attention and I think there's a broad issue at stake here regarding the COC board. But mostly because he says this kind of thing feels like it ought to be kept personal. So we have, for the first time now in the Linux kernel, action on the code Because of the code of conduct and the code of conduct committee, we are keeping code bug fixes out of the kernel.

01:11:46
This is not okay. You can keep people away from conventions if you want to like, that's fine. Keeping bug fixes out of the kernel because of code of conduct violations is not okay. And the reason I say this and the reason I'm going to stick to my guns on this basically forever, is because the Linux kernel is in so many places and it's so important in so many places. You literally have people's lives depending upon the Linux kernel. In some of these instances, very big, very important things happen because of the kernel. There are cars that run with the Linux kernel. In some of these instances, very big, very important things happen because of the kernel. There are cars that run with the Linux kernel. There are airplanes that run with the Linux kernel and not shipping a bug fix with the Linux kernel because you got butt hurt over something somebody said is not okay.

01:12:39
Um, that's pretty much my take on this, and if I keep going it's going to turn into a a rant and I'm going to say some things that I will regret later. But that is, that is my take on this. It is, it is not okay and this is not the place that we want to be at. Um, mr uh. Mr mr kent, here is much, mr overstreet here is much nicer about it than I am, but I am livid over this. It's not okay and not everybody will agree with that, and that's all right. You can have a different opinion on this than I do, and that's fine. We can still be friends. But oh, I do not like this at all.

01:13:20 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, Well, one. It was funny Linus kind of saying what he said because he was for those that are newer to linux. Years ago he used to have some really uh uh sentence enhancing he had some very diatribe adjectives yes, otherwise known as sentence enhancers that made your lips tingle.

01:13:49
That he would. I mean, his keyboard would flame when he. You know some of his, his rants and diatribes, it's like holy smokes. Um, yeah, I, you know, I get what they're trying to do, but it it for me it's kind of where, where's the line at how much is like just don't, don't be so sensitive versus okay, you're kind of being abusive and really, you know, I, I understand it. I just I sometimes worry about the over use of it or the strictness of it can maybe be too far sometimes, because, because you could, you could argue earlier in the colonel days, they had some really pretty brutal bare knuckle knock down, drag out. You know it's like, ok, we got to take it down probably a level here because it would scare some people away. But you also have to like there's a lot of like, kind of like there's a lot of cultures, a lot of people, a lot of you just can't take everything. Sometimes you just need to hear what the person's saying and not necessarily how they're saying it.

01:15:07 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
And so I want to. I do. I want to make something clear. Like those of you listening, if you're going to get into kernel development, if you're going to do development, if you're going to work on a team anywhere, you should just, as a rule, not write anything while you're angry. You should just, as a rule, not use any profanity or vulgarity in your emails or communication with your team. Right, like that's just, that's just, it's a good idea and it's part of being professional. So, like I have no problem with saying, look, that's the, this is the way that we're going to do this. But again, this, this use of the code of conduct like this, and the fact that there is a code of conduct committee that can demand an apology from someone and we're going to block your work unless you apologize no, no, I'm not okay with that.

01:15:56 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
That to me is going too far. That is, you know I'm kind of okay with, with hey, take the sentence enhancers out of it, don't use the profanity. And and part of this too is I've I've had personal experience with this. I've had, I've been on the receiving end, or some of my team, with um written communication, which already is kind of a poor medium. You can't see how the person's intent, you can't see the inflection of their sentence or hear the inflection of their sentences.

01:16:27 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
You know their body language, all that.

01:16:29 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah right, where you'd get something. And it sounds really offensive and some of my team would be I can't believe they're saying this to me, I can't. And I said well, look, first of all, you know, I knew the person was like the english is not their first language. And I said read this as if you were asking a question, not as a statement. And so then they would reply that way and come to find out the person's like yeah, I, because I really don't understand this. I was. So they were asking a question about something, not saying you did this wrong. They're saying is this how this works? And it was all just a miscommunication. Even though it had the same words, it didn't have the oh is you know?

01:17:16
punctuation can make a difference yeah, and especially if not only is maybe English your second or third language. People that have English as their first language don't always have good punctuation and sentence structure and aren't as careful in articulating their written word. I always try to tell people, assume best intent and just really read what they're trying to tell you, not how maybe it's coming off, because there's I've got a ton of examples where it wasn't meant maliciously, it wasn't meant mean, it was just phrased poorly and was actually a question. Or help me understand. Or you know it wasn't. Jonathan doesn't know what he's talking about. He's like does jonathan know this? I don't understand, help me, you know.

01:18:09 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Kind of question I was in a private discussion just last week, um, where we had both guys have become friends of mine one is not a native english speaker and the other. So we're talking about something with business and the other guy says, man, I feel like we're just kind of twiddling our thumbs here because something was taking longer than we wanted it to take. And he says I feel like we're just kind of twiddling our thumbs here. We really ought to go after it, Go for the kill on this. Essentially I don't think that's exact words. He did exactly say we're twiddling our thumbs and the other guy that was part conversation just exploded Like what do you mean? I'm twiddling my thumbs, I'm the one working hard here and it's like whoa dude. I'm pretty sure he did not mean that as a personal attack. I think you took that like way the wrong way as opposed to how he meant it. So that is very much a thing and text is very hard because of that.

01:19:01
In fact that particular group. We've had that same problem a couple more times. We had one guy that tried to. He made a statement and so I was out running errands. And so I'm walking out of one store and I text the first couple words of response and hit enter and stopped at a stoplight and text the next couple words and hit enter and so he reads partway through that and he's like, oh, that, that's fine, nobody's listening to me, I'm gonna resign. And I came back later after I had more time. I'm like, dude, I was trying to ask you this and that was, that was. And he later we explained what was going. He's like I'm sorry for being overdramatic.

01:19:38 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Well, it happens you know, and wizard wizardling in the chat makes a good point. He said this is what emotes are for, even if you dislike them. I'm not a big you know emoji person, but a lot of times when I'm typing I'll make sure that I put one in there so people can see. You know, even with people I know, like in the back chat, sometimes I'll make fun, you know, I'll poke at rob or jonathan or can or somebody, but I make sure to put like a a little smiley face or the tongue sticking out face so they know it's just I'm just teasing and making fun. I'm, you know I'm not criticizing or, you know, upset or anything like that, I'm just being goofy or whatever.

01:20:15 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
And yeah, and so like, obviously we're talking about one thing where people can be misunderstood. There is like an entirely different realm of this conversation where and I think this is probably more what happened in the kernel people were genuinely frustrated with each other and people were genuinely like I don't think a winking emoji, one would have been appropriate, or two, because I've gone- and looked at the actual message that the code of conduct committee uh, complained about here.

01:20:46
And you go and you look at the message and you said my perspective when I went and looked at it first. Off I would not have written this message. Those are not word, those are intentionally words that I keep out of my vocabulary. It's one, two, I think we're, and so like those are words that we should not blush at when we read. That's just not really realistic in the world that we live in. It would have been best for him to have not exactly said this the way that he said it. But four, I'm pretty sure Torvald said something really similar just a few weeks ago. And so you know there's these things you put together like this is not just a black and white issue. It is appropriate to go to somebody like Kent and say, hey, that was a little across the line, maybe let's not do that in the future, and I think that would be appropriate. And I think it's inappropriate to not pull bug fixes into the kernel because of it.

01:21:40 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
So yeah, and, and I think another uh facet of this we haven't talked about is that you know, a lot of times people have put a lot of work into whatever they're working on. You know, okay, this is my big project. I've spent hundreds, if not thousands, of hours on I've. You know this is means so much to me and somebody comes in and pokes a hole in oh you screwed up here. Oh, my God. You know, it can feel almost like a personal attack because this project is your baby, almost. And you know, you, you have kind of almost, you have an emotional attachment to it and you know, sometimes you got to step back and say, wait a minute. They said you found a bug, okay, let's not. Or there's an issue, whatever it is, you know, and not kind of, like you said, don't emotionally write.

01:22:33
Yeah you know it's interesting.

01:22:35 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It's interesting when, when Torvalds was asked years ago so we should, but I think people that listen to the show know about this We've talked about this in the past Torvalds used to and you mentioned it Torvalds used to be very profane, very out there, and he has. Recently they finally went to him and they said look, we would appreciate it if you tried not to use profanity on the mailing list. This is really the conversation that happened a couple of years back. We would appreciate it if you didn't use profanity on the mailing list. He's like oh okay, I'll try to do that. And so he now, I think, actually has like a filter in his outgoing email.

01:23:11 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
That'll ding at him if he puts profanity in an email, it's something like that. Um, he had a class too, uh, sensitivity training or communication class. He, he, he was gone for, like he took some time off.

01:23:23 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, I don't know if he actually went to one of those classes or not I just watched the movie I yeah I don't, I don't know I don't know um anyway.

01:23:32
So yeah, he, he chilled out on some of that um. But back years ago, before this happened, people would ask him about that and his his story was always that very early on in the kernel development process, like the early kernel versions, there were a couple times where people had written stuff and he didn't approve of it and he tried to be nice about it and they continued working on it and then they finally got to the point to where it was like a completed patch set ready to go in and he finally said I'm not going to pull this like the whole idea is a bad idea. I'm not going to pull this Like the whole idea is a bad idea. We're not going to pull this into the kernel and to hear Torvalds tell about it. There were at least one person that got just about suicidal over that, and so that's what Torvalds made the decision of if I don't like something, I'm going to just blatantly tell people that, and that was for the longest time.

01:24:21
That was his approach, um, you know that was his approach to this is if there's a problem, I need to blatantly tell someone about it, because it's going to cause much bigger problems If I tried to, you know, tiptoe around the issue. Um, that's one of the other things that you know. If done improperly, code of conducts can can be a problem with. Um, I'm not going to say that a code of conduct is always a bad thing and that it's used badly in every project. I have read some code of conducts that I do not like and I've read some that are actually pretty decent. So you know, I mean, use your brain. Everybody's going to come at this from a little different perspective.

01:24:57 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
And my personal feeling is there needs to be just a checks and balances something to you know, if you get somebody on the code of conduct team or a couple of people that really get wild, there's got to be some way to go. You know what you guys are just getting out of hand. Let's, let's tone it back, let's you know.

01:25:16 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I. I personally think it's probably a bad idea to have a code of conduct team. I think you just need to have some people that are in charge of the project, like so your leads of the project. They need to be your code of conduct team. That that is. That is my opinion.

01:25:31
Um, because when you have a separate, like siloed entity, a siloed group that may have um other goals other than the good of the project as a whole, that's going to be when you get into problems. So in thinking about this, one of the other things I thought of, like okay, so you think about, like the linux foundation and linux as a whole, what is the purpose and the purpose of linux? The purpose of the foundation, like the group doing it should be, and for years now has been, to create the best linux kernel release, have the fewest has been to create the best Linux kernel release, have the fewest bugs in it, to make the best release, to get the code as complete and as good as possible. And now you have the Code of Conduct Committee. That that is not their goal. They have a different goal, obviously based on what they've done and based on this patch, where you know we're going to keep people from adding things to the kernel.

01:26:24
That is not the goal of the code of conduct committee and you have a, you have a literal conflict of interest there where their goal is something else. And you know to hear certain people talk about it, they, they do not make themselves necessarily um, uh, how do I want to put this? They are not under that same law themselves. We shall say, based on some anecdotes that that have gone around, um, again, those are anecdotes. We don't know that for sure, so I'm not going to to name names or anything like that, that they go by.

01:26:54 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
They do as I say, not as I do. Rule, are you?

01:26:58 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
uh, I mean, that's the problem. Just about any time you put somebody in power is that there is that temptation.

01:27:04 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Well, here's a devil's advocate. Thought what if this was kind of an example, just to show that they have some power, so that the next time they can say, hey, just knock this off, and then it'll carry more weight? And they're not just a who? Is this group? Whatever, I don't know. Ignore them, and they actually have some teeth that's probably what happened.

01:27:27 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I would agree that's probably what happened.

01:27:29 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I think this is a really bad instance to use to make the example of now I I will say I am really excited to see where this uh file system goes, because it sounds like it might be the file system of the future, if you know it. Development continues and all that you know, all the features get added and it's I mean, it's still very early stages, but so I did not want to see this. I'm yeah, yep all right.

01:27:59 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So I I think I think we can, uh, we can just kind of summarize all of this. The actionable items sound like I'm a manager now. The actionable items for our listeners. Be kind when you write your emails and try to understand everything in the best possible light, and you will just do better in life.

01:28:20 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Don't assume negative intent Exactly.

01:28:23 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
And get somebody to proofread that email before you send it that's a good idea.

01:28:27 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So like if you, if you are hot over something and you you feel like you need to send an email out, you know some, get somebody you trust and say, hey, this is what I want to say, is this stupid? And hopefully you can find somebody that'll let you know that'll be honest, yeah yeah, just make sure there's not a code of conduct over that conversation, or else they'll be afraid to be honest with you. Yeah, all right.

01:28:52 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I've had some scathing emails that I've had to write that I've fed through AI to help please make this business professional, and it's done a rather good job. Yeah, yeah.

01:29:03 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
There you go. All right, let's move on to some command line tips, something a little bit more fun to talk about. We're going to let Ken go first and he is continuing to do. We're going to do quite a bit. We're going to do Python 2, pipewire things essentially today. But, ken, what is your pipewire related command line tip?

01:29:22 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Well, this week's pipewire command is pw-container. It simulates the behavior of Flatpak or other containers by creating a new temporary Unix socket. It uses the security context extension API to create a server with the given properties. Clients created from this server will have the security properties attached. I'm going to go ahead and bring up the first screenshot I took of running this on Tumbleweed. And of course I start off with pwcontainer-help and it just displays the help screen where you will see the options, such as the dash dash help, dash dash version, dash dash remote and dash dash properties. These, of course, show the help, show your version. The dash dash remote will show the will either show or let you enter the remote daemon name and the dash dash properties let you set context properties and even gives a example of doing a default context properties for pipe wire. Now the second example I've got is using dash dash version. Again, my tumbleweed system is using libpipewire version 1.2.6.

01:30:52
Now on the next screenshot, I'm going to show what happens when you just run PWContainer without any options behind it. It just creates a new socket. This particular one is called slash temp slash pipe wire dash g8xwur, and the screenshots two through five will demonstrate starting a PW container and one turner and then running PW top, which I've covered previously in batch mode, if y'all remember from when I'd covered it before. The dash B is batch dash in says to just do it once, and then I'm setting up the remote I want to go into for that same socket that I just read out and when you hit enter on that you get an output from it and it's showing the displaying the what top would give you for the container that I created in the first terminal. I actually had to set up two terminals for playing with us. Then we go on to screenshot 5 and it shows where I used ctrl C to actually cancel out. And then, after I cancelled out that remote terminal out of that remote terminal session, I tried running the command again and it came back saying host is down. So it did show that I was looking at a remote host. So that's how you create a remote host and how you can access it.

01:32:51
Now in screen slot shit 6, I am using PW container to start audacious playing a Kansas song, carry On Wayward Son, and then, if anybody remembers what the single ampersand does, it just basically moves that into the background so that you can immediately run the next command, which in this case is PW Top. So when I hit Enter on that I had Audacious come up. It's playing the song and you'll see where PWTop is showing the data rate that I had captured in the screen capture. For those of you all that skin on the far left it shows that it's running, then it has the ID of 58 for the ALSA output to the, basically to my headset, and then it shows a ID 90 for the Audacious applications output.

01:34:07
Then it's got its quantum rate, the weight state, busy, and weight over quantum and busy over quantum, and then it shows the format. Which is interesting is the line for the Audacious showing floating point 32, while the output to the headset is showing that it was just a sample static 16-bit rate. Cool stuff, right, but cool stuff. And then you go to the last one and it shows what happened when I closed audacious. It just everything just gets zeroed out in the top and I'll let y'all go back to the when I covered pw top to find out how to get out of that.

01:35:03 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
There you go. Yeah, interesting stuff Be able to keep your applications separate in Pipewire terms. Yep, all right.

01:35:12 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
May come in handy for some of the things you do, Jonathan.

01:35:15 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Maybe you know. I wonder if that would give me better performance and get rid of some popping. Maybe I have to look into that. All right, something else that I do is I use a program called Carla. That is, it was originally written for Jack, although you know we're now in the Pipewire world and so they have some bug fixes for Pipewire and such. Carla lets you do fun things. Not only can you do all the connections you can like with Jack, so your QPW graph and all of that.

01:35:45
Carla also works as a plug-in host, and so you can have your VST plug-ins, so you can do things like have an equalizer or a compressor, and so those are a couple of things that I do on the machine behind me. So I've got a nice speaker system back there, but I also have a subwoofer, and I found that a lot of people editing their YouTube videos do not edit them with a subwoofer, and so you will get videos where there's all kinds of low frequencies that are very loud, and it's just because on little laptop speakers you don't hear it. And then I've also found things like where people will have the music turned up way too loud and then it'll get quiet when people talk, and so just some YouTube videos need a little bit of help, and so I'm just in the in the habit now of I run Carla all the time with a with that compressor on there, and then I can go in and add an EQ if I need to for a particular video. Well, carla is great. Carla has a missing feature, and that is you can't minimize it to the dock. You can only minimize it as a window, but it seems like for the longest time. That would be really great to be able to. You know, close it, but it still show up. You know, up in the, I guess, on your screen it's going to be up here in the little corner on the top right, or on KDE, in KDE world. You know it's down here on the bottom right where your docked applications are, and I run on Wayland. I don't run X11 anymore, I run on Wayland, and so you know I hadn't found a solution to make this happen.

01:37:21
Well, I took a look again at one of them that I had looked at earlier, and that is KDocker. Now you may think, oh, KDocker, that's only for KDE. No, no, no, it runs with basically all of your major desktops. It runs with GNOME, it runs with all of them. And if you go to the KDocker site which first off it's funny because if you just search for KDocker, you will first land at the 1.x site and it will say this is no longer the valid site. Click here for the 4.x version. And you go there and there's a link there that says this is no longer the site. Click here for the modern version. So you have to click through a couple of times to actually get to the current website.

01:37:58
I always thought that was funny. But when you get there and you finally land on the GitHub page, it will tell you KDocker does not work on Wayland. And so last time I looked at it I saw that and went oh well, I'm running on Wayland, I guess it won't work for me. That's not actually true anymore. It is possible to run KDocker and it will work on Wayland. However, kdocker the way KDocker is intended to work is you run it from your command line and it will say click on the window you want to dock and then it's supposed to detect which window you click on. That does not work under Wayland.

01:38:33
So the solution, all of that to say this the solution is you run KDocker and I had actually downloaded and compiled KDocker myself. It was not available in Fedora. I think it is available in some distros, but I downloaded it and compiled it. The solution is you add an environment variable before you run it. It's qt qpa platform equals xcb. And then you run KDocker and then you run the command that you want it to dock.

01:39:02
You can't do the click on a thing, but it will work if you give it the command you want it to run, and so in my case it's the environment variable, kdocker, carla and then the carxp, the config file, essentially the saved session that I want Carla to load. So I have that set up. Now, whenever my computer boots and it logs into KDE for the first time, that string gets run as an automatic auto start program and that launches Carla, makes all of the audio connections and then minimizes it down to the system tray and it is not visible any longer as one of my open windows. And it's a silly thing, but that makes me so happy to not have to see it as an open window anymore. I was so thrilled when I discovered that I could make this work and I figured there's some of you out there that get annoyed by such things, just the same way that I do.

01:39:57 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I liked it. That makes you so happy it does.

01:40:00 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It's the little things. It's the little things that make it the little little things. Y'all all right, jeff, you've got something here that also really intrigues me. You talk about it.

01:40:10 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I'm going to get a piece of hardware and show you why it intrigues me, okay so all right for those, those that don't know, this is going to be kind of part two from last week's. So last week's we talked about ng spice, which is a program used to simulate mixed signal circuits If you remember mixed signals, where there's both analog and digital components in the same circuit. It's very powerful, but it runs off a file which contains the language of sorts, which is how the model simulates a circuit, not directly a language, but I won't go into all the details of it. Most people just don't go in and just write the file to generate what they need. I mean, you can, you can do it by hand, but most don't. I mean it's almost like HTML where sometimes you might look at the code and say, hey, why isn't this working? Quite right, but you're not actually hammering it all out yourself. And I said not to worry about it because I have something that will help for writing that file. Now, this week we have the tip and I don't even know how you pronounce this Q-U-C-S-S, which stands for Quite, universal Circuit Simulator, with SPICE. Now it allows you to create a circuit using a graphical interface.

01:41:27
Cucs-s isn't a circuit simulator and that's why it says with SPICE, now there is a program without the dash S, that is a simulator package in all one, but it looks like the think it was like seven years ago or something like that. I think it's been been quite a while but. But this one is still actively developed. So you draw the circuit with the components you want. In this program you kind of like a circuitry CAD program, and you can set up places to monitor the circuit, such as voltage or current or other signal processing. You know, you pick points on your circuit where you say what's the voltage here and you can monitor it. There's some frequency things you can do. There's a bunch of signal analysis that can be done and then once it's done, once you have that all laid out, then you generate the SPICE file which then you feed it into ngSPICE and you'll get the results of that. So the two programs together will kind of form a complete package. So you have your graphical assembly of the circuit and then you have your actual computation results simulation part of the circuit. So, like I said, unlike some other programs out there you got to look because there's quite a few out there but this one is actively being developed along with NG Spice. The latest release of QUCS-S is 24.4.0, which was released October 31st.

01:43:00
Now I'm not going to go into how you use the program as it's outside of the time we have, but just know that you know it can go from very simple circuits to it's been used for several documented research projects, basically meaning it has very powerful capabilities. You can do professional level stuff on this, but you can also do basic circuit playing around. You know, if you want to kind of work with the kids and teach them how, like a little basic, you know here's a battery with a light bulb equivalent type circuit. So you can get the program from a lot for a lot of different distribution repositories and it also can. It comes in app image format if it happens to be that your distribution of choice doesn't have it in its repositories. So if you take a look at the link in the show notes you it's a link to the main site and it goes. It's got all the details to get you started on your circuit simulation adventure so the thing that I have is here, here we go.

01:44:05 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It is a modular synthesizer, it is a DIY kit from a company called the FACO, and I've got it all put together and it makes noise.

01:44:12
It just doesn't quite make the noise that it's supposed to make and, uh, I'm trying to figure out why. Still, and you know, I've got some tools to troubleshoot it with, but I don't necessarily know what it's supposed to do when it's working correctly. So it strikes me that plugging in this circuit I mean, it's two parts, there's a decent, there's a decent bit of components on here, right, but it's not too terrible plugging in what this circuit is supposed to look like, into something like this and saying, okay, here's my test point, what voltage should I be reading? And then go to the real thing and read voltage might be useful for figuring out where either I messed up or I've got a dead component, or maybe there's a problem with the components that was shipped to me. Um, yeah, because I've spent a couple of hours now staring at this thing going. I don't see any bridge solder joints. You know, that's that's me in here way too late at night with, you know, a magnifying glass. I don't see any problems.

01:45:09 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
So yeah, no, no, blackened components or no?

01:45:12 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
no, no, definitely do not let the magic smoke out it. It sounds almost right. It's just. You know that one of the things is supposed to be. You know how long does the sound last for? And it's like no matter where I put the knob, it's just a momentary sound.

01:45:27 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, it just makes one big pop sound, but it only does it once.

01:45:32 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
See, mine will pop continually.

01:45:33 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
No magic smell.

01:45:34 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
No magic smell left out.

01:45:35 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Pop. Yeah, pretty much. That's about what it sounds like.

01:45:40 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
And that's where you could get in there and even maybe look and say no, from what I'm getting, it looks like maybe this resistor or this cap or this that's whatever capacitor to me yeah, it might be, that's what I

01:45:54
figure well, it could be off. Maybe maybe the design it is wrong, or it could be that the variance in your components is off. You know, and yeah it definitely this set of programs that do it. You know, you design it out and simulate it and or maybe you got a chinese-made capacitor uh, I mean that's possible.

01:46:18 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It probably wouldn't be the capacitor, and so in this case it. It would actually be very possible that you would have a sort of a bogus ic, because this has like five or six different integrated circuits on it I was going to ask if it had lcr circuits in it or if it actually had digital components in it um, I think most of them are are lcr, I don't know, I don't know. This one has any digital and maybe all analog.

01:46:40 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
You know you get, you get into like the hardcore synth stuff and people don't like digital in there to some extent so for those who don't know, lcr is uh impedance l is an inductor, c is a capacitor and r is a resistor, and with those three components you can set up an oscillation by changing the, uh, the value of the components. So you can set up oscillations, I guess.

01:47:08 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, I can even send you. So they've got Bifaco, by the way, is really cool. They've got a lot of their stuff out as sort of open source hardware and so I can shoot you the. You can even get the schematic if you want to look at it and I can describe to you what it's doing.

01:47:25 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Get some free tech support from the buddy jeff. Here I surface, mounted it all.

01:47:29 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Here you go with uh, I'm gonna say cooks s. Would you be able to scan a schematic in uh using a scanner and just put it straight in that way, or do you have to actually enter everything in?

01:47:48 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
you can scan a schematic. If okay, are you talking? If you're talking on the circuit board, you can scan them. But it has to be a single layer, because modern circuit boards can be multiple layers deep. I mean you can have 16, 20 layers in there and you're not going to be able to unless you've got special x-ray machines. And I mean at that point it's easier to probably rebuild it yourself than go through the reverse engineering on it. But if it's a digital version, yeah, you can also scan it in and, depending on the program, some of them will allow you to read the, depending on the images they use. So like, if you the symbol for a capacitor or transistor, if it's industry standard and they didn't kind of make up their own or have a funky, weird one, it can read it in. But there's always a manual tweak involved too. It doesn't.

01:48:45 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
It's not always perfect like we're doing a tech text recognition that's really interesting.

01:48:51 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I didn't I. I mean, I figured there were programs out there that would do that, um, but I've never played with one. That's really cool that they're that that common and usable well, they're not really that common.

01:49:02 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I don't. I don't know if they're that common I'm I'm in a realm where I have access to things I suppose that's true, you know? Oh, it's a $10,000 program yeah, this is you know. But uh, when I, when I say scan in the circuit too, it's not like you really can't have the components on there, because then it's blocking where you can see all the traces and all that. So if you've got a whole bunch of stuff on top of it, it's not really going to.

01:49:27 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Or there's going to be a lot of manual fixing. Manual that's got schematics in it that you'd be able to scan that in. Yeah, assuming it's using standard diagrams.

01:49:42 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, and I'll be honest, sometimes it's just easier and faster if you just draw it yourself. You just look at it and go, okay, I put this here and I put the transistor here. And you know, because a lot of these um programs you can get pretty pretty fast with I've probably the one I've got the most experience with is uh, I've used a bunch of some of these. One I've got the most experience with is uh, I've used a bunch of some of these before. Uh, like pea spice and you know some of those they're a little more commercial variant but uh, they're. It doesn't take long. Oh, I want this and and.

01:50:16
And the thing is too, with these programs you can either go, okay, I'm just going to put a transistor here, or you, you say I need a I don't know. You know motorola 3176 transistor, that's gonna, and it it will model the exact characteristics of that transistor, because they put it on curve tracers, things like that and they're all a little unique. And yeah, you can, you can kind of model the uniqueness and find out of, oh, if I use this intel transistor versus a motorola, oh, I get a little different result and what's, what's the variation in it. And I mean you can really get in the weeds there.

01:50:57 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
But and, and sometimes it matters- does.

01:51:03 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
There are certain things where you can have close tolerance components, but I know one application I can think of, like for transistors. They have to actually measure them every time to get the exact value they need. Because it is so exact, it's got to be perfect, and having the tight tolerance isn't enough. It's not tight enough, so you have to get. So they'll just bend them out and they just measure nope, no, good, nope, nope, oh, yep, this one will work. Okay, keep that one then. Yep, yep, yep cool, all right.

01:51:37 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Well, that's our tips, that's our news. Let's see if the guys have anything they want to plug or get to. I know Ken does, but we'll let Jeff go first. Maybe some poetry again this week.

01:51:48 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
We do have a little bit of poetry, as always. I'm on Mastodon, Jeff, underscore Massey. I don't really post much, so you can follow me and I'm not going to clog up your in-feed.

01:52:00
I'm going to have to actually post something one of these days, just so people know. But yeah, I I do have quite a few followers anymore. They people keep following in and trickling in. So hey, thank you appreciate it. You know, little little thumbs up support, I figured for the show. But uh, time for a little poetry. And in case you missed, last week we're we're opening the spectrum of what we call poetry. So this week week it's give thanks to coworkers. You know tech savvy and smart it pros. If this hardworking bunch fixed your laptop at lunch, buy them a beer and let the gratitude show. Thank you everybody. Have a great week. It's great, all right.

01:52:38 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
And Ken well, yes, what I want to point out is how you can participate in how debian 13 will look. I've got a link in the show notes that basically points to where you can help shape debian 13 by casting your vote for trixie's desktop artwork. And yes, I voted did?

01:53:04 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
they give you a sticker no, they didn't print out what I'd.

01:53:10 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
My submissions were. There you go what?

01:53:14 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
just out of curiosity. Real quick, what was your top pick?

01:53:17 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
yeah, I'd have to see the list. Oh, my mind was desert moonrise. That was my favorite. They're all pretty decent actually, oh.

01:53:21 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I'd have to see the list again. Oh, mine was Desert Moonrise. That was my favorite. They're all pretty decent actually. Oh yeah, there's not a bad one in there. Yeah, that was my favorite.

01:53:32 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, cool, all right, thank you guys both for being here. I do want to plug mainly Hackaday and Floss Weekly. So of course we appreciate Hackaday and so if you want to follow, if you want to follow me and more stuff that I do, there is the security column goes live on Hackaday every Friday morning and then we record Foss Weekly over there on Tuesdays and that goes live on Wednesdays and make sure to check that out. Want to also let you know that if you're not a part of Club Twits, if you're listening to this or watching us live on the various places where we're live, we would love for you to come and join the club. It's about the price of a cup of coffee per month and it is definitely worth it.

01:54:10
You get ad-free access to all of the shows, you get the video version of this show on demand and you get to support the Twit Network. And boy, that's sure worth it. Get it for yourself, give it away as a Christmas gift. It would be a great Christmas gift to give to the other techies in your life. And yeah, don't forget about that. All right, we will see you next week on. I think it's getting to be close to the holiday season, so my plan is to be back next week, unless somebody tells me otherwise. Anyway, we will see you all next time on the Untitled Linux Show.