Untitled Linux Show 180 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 folks, this week Rob joins me and we talk about the Gnome OS that's probably coming, openstreetmap leaving Ubuntu. We talk about LXD, the CM5 from Raspberry Pi and all of the cool stuff in the 6.13 kernel. It's a lot of fun. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned. Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Twit. This is the Untitled Linux Show, episode 180, recorded Saturday, november the 30th Gnome all the way down. Hey folks, it is Saturday and you know what that means. Of course it's time for the Untitled Linux Show, the special Thanksgiving edition. Maybe it is the week at the weekend after Thanksgiving here in the United States and for the rest of the world that translates to just another Saturday for you. But that's okay. We are still overcoming and recovering from Thanksgiving meals and all of that Related to that. It is actually just Mr Rob Campbell and myself for today. Hey Rob, welcome.

01:04 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Hello, as I said in the Discord, this is a Superstars Only, so it's a special Thanksgiving Superstars Only show. There you go.

01:13 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Oh well, let's dive into it. We've got some interesting things to cover this week, and Rob's got the first one. And Rob, it's another one of these distros that I have questions about, about, but we'll let rob kick it off and tell us all about it so I did kind of hear about this a few weeks ago, but I couldn't really find any good details.

01:33 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
And well, speaking of superstars, david ruggles kind of brought this one to my attention, saying, hey, why don't you bring this up? So last time I was on a couple weeks ago, I told you all about the KDE Linux Distro announcement that was talked about at the Academy 2024 conference. Well, gnome isn't about to be left behind. As GNOME project developer Adrian Vovk shared his own proposal shared his own proposal. He posted a blog post a few weeks ago actually it's about a month ago already titled A Desktop for All, where he states he would like to make GNOME OS a daily driver. The quote from his blog went like this quote I would like to turn GNOME OS, gnome's homegrown distro for testing and development of the Gnome desktop, into a daily drivable, general purpose OS. So, unlike the KDE Linux distro that I talked about, gnome OS, it's already a distro, but today it is only used for internal testing. So much actually more like KDE Neon, really, except KDE Neon is for public use. Um and uh. Gnome os really isn't. So paraphrase from lean proven uh at the register kde neon is more of a technology demonstrator for public use, whilenome OS is only an internal testbed. So, adrian, he wants to make their testing distro a daily driver, making Gnome OS the flagship distro for the Gnome desktop environment. This wouldn't be Adrian's first distro, as in 2018, he got started, or he started a small niche distro called Carbon OS, with the single goal to build an OS that makes the Linux desktop usable for non-enthusiasts. But don't go looking for Carbon OS now, as development on that distro has stopped, with hopes to transition that to the new gnome os. So carbon os it's the test bed of what gnome os may become, it's and what.

03:54
What they're looking for is a distro in gnome os. You're looking for a distro with a stock gnome desktop only gnome apps, pre-installed app distribution to rely on flat packs. Uh, robust, so difficult to break and easy to roll back. Immutable anybody listens knows what an immutable desktop atomic is by now. I'm not gonna dig into that now. Go back to other episodes if you don't know. Uh, secure so they want to use uFI secure boot, which I'm going to briefly mentioned in a future story. System D, home D basically for like privacy and encryption of the home drive stuff. And then they also want to be modern, using things like Wayland we all love that here Pipewire we love that too and x DG portals, which we don't really talk about much, but maybe we should Also. They want flexibility, adapt to desktops, to have the ability to adapt to desktops, laptops, tablets and phones, and they want it to be opinionated. And this gets the core of what some people kind of maybe hate about GNOME.

05:08
You know it's kind of like the Mac OS of desktop environments.

05:15
But you know, and what they mean is, rather than giving, and some of their words and you know, it's not necessarily wrong, but rather than giving a whole bunch of confusing options to users, you know, do you want this package manager, that package manager or this or that? You know the decisions are pretty much going to be made for it. It's going to be their desktop, you know, kind of like the Apple Mac OS way. If you like what they do, there's nothing wrong with that. But if you like options, you know KDE is probably more KDE by default is the way to go. Gnome you can definitely customize it, but this being an immutable GNOME desktop, it's going to be a little more difficult. I don't know how much more difficult, but more likely more difficult. So for GNOME users, people who really like it, this could be the distro you're waiting for.

06:11
The part, one part I maybe fear the most is the distro. Another thing I saw is that the distro I don't believe it appears that it's going to be based on anything else. It's not going to be Debian based or Red Hat based or anything like that. I believe, like Carbon OS, from what I saw, it's its own base and that means a lot more work is left for the maintainers of the distro and kind of a lot more likely for people to say this is too much work and abandon it, Not enough time to actually focus on other things. But we'll see some of that speculation based on what we've seen and and we're likely to see, so we'll see what comes out of this. But I like gnome, so I'm I'd like to try it out yeah it boy.

07:00 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It's fascinating to me that both kitty and gnome are looking at this like let's have our own distro, and I'm not convinced of the wisdom of this choice. There are some things here that are particularly interesting, so it sounds like the base of it is actually going to be another project that let's see. I just had that pulled up. No Free Desktop, the Free Desktop SDK. Yeah, using free desktop SDK. Yeah, using Apache build stream. So, like it's this. It's this existing sort of a sort of a project where you just take the OS and then you slap, um, uh, an SDK and then flat packs on top of that. That's, that's like that's about it, and so that's sort of interesting.

07:44
It's not really the kind of desktop that I want to run, but I do find it real fascinating. Um, so we'll see, maybe it'll find a niche. Um, personally, I think maybe the gnome developer resources would be better spent by you know making gnome itself better, rather than you know trying to uh do an os that nobody asked for. But that's just me, we'll see. I could be wrong. I may have the wrong take on this. Maybe it'll. It'll go barnstormers and go crazy and everybody will be running it if they already have one for their internal test bed.

08:20 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Why not make it something that everyone can use?

08:24 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I guess that's true. I suppose that's true. No harm doing it if you're already doing it.

08:30 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I don't know how deep or how customized their internal version is, really, how deep they're going to customize this either. As far as that goes, it's just going to be GNOME apps, gnome desktop. Gnome all the way down, gnome all the way down.

08:46 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
GNOME all the way down.

08:49 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
You know, there's one thing, though when I was reading about this, like history and stuff like that, how GNOME, you know GNOME and KDE, I believe KDE came out first, gnome came out afterwards. And you know, one thing I would think you'd really appreciate is the fact that you know KDE came out and it was based off of Qt or Qt, which wasn't like necessarily purely open. You know they have their licensing and all that stuff not be tied down by these somewhat closed, um that whatever, whatever they're called, uh, packages or libraries and stuff like that. You know they wanted to kind of be more open. So I mean that should be something you should be able to appreciate, at least from their roots yeah, yeah, I don't know.

09:45 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Katie and qt, it's not really been a problem so it's because you're not getting the license, I guess I guess, um, and so, uh, peter and I think that's youtube says qt is not open at all.

09:59
Let's see, I can, I can even show the comment. There we go, we got buttons to press qt is not open at all. Uh, they are, they are. They've got a a bit of a weird um, they've got a bit of a weird model. But, like, once the next version of qt comes out, I'm pretty sure all the source code of the previous one is fully open, and so it's. It's odd, but it's not. Uh, it's not that bad. It's not that bad. It's not like our least favorite operating system where everything is closed, anyway, so let's move to something that I don't know. Maybe you want to run GNOME on, maybe you don't want to run GNOME on, but it's a new piece of hardware that we are finally. We knew, everybody knew it was coming, and it's finally out. Rob was teasing me. He's like oh, I didn't want to bring it up, I would get blamed for making you buy one. I was like no, no, rob, I'm going to buy one of these just as soon as I can find one available at MSRP. That's an instant buy, and that is, of course, that.

10:57
The Raspberry Pi CM5 is now. Well, in theory it's available. Last time I checked it was a little difficult to actually find it in stock anywhere. November 27th is the announce date and, yeah, it's the Raspberry Pi 5 in the CM form factor. There's a couple of interesting things with this. With the release they also have a new carrier board which has some fun tricks to it, and then, of course, there are a couple of other companies have started making things that the CM5 specifically will plug into.

11:42
Now the pinout is almost pin-for-pin compatible with the CM4. It is the same. It is the same pin header. In fact I've got one here. Of course, of course I do. Of course I have a Pi CM4, to be clear, the CM4 here let's see if I can get my camera to focus on it and that is. You know, that is the form factor and it's got those two rows of snapped together pins, those headers, and so basically, anything that you can plug a CM4 into, you can plug the CM5 into, because it is basically pin for pin compatible.

12:17
The difference is that I guess a couple of differences. One, the PCIe slot can be put into PCIe 3 mode, which doubles the bandwidth, which is a really nice upgrade. But the other difference is that they are exposing some USB 3 ports rather than just I forget what exactly those pins were used for but there's some actual USB 3 ports that are exposed, and that is because the Raspberry Pi 5, the SoC on it actually has native USB 3, whereas in the past they had to use PCIe lanes to do that. Now, the downer, the thing that is just a little disappointing for everybody, is that it exposes the same number of PCIe lanes as the CM4. The CM4 and the CM5 expose the same number of PCIe lanes. So if you had thoughts of putting a video card on one set of lanes and an NVMe on the other set of lanes and having like a full-blown desktop out of the CM5. Fortunately it's not quite that easy, but you do have the full-speed USB 3, which for a lot of things is almost just as good. You can hang a pretty performant network connection off of that, for instance, and so it's kind of interesting because a lot of us, like I said, we were hoping for more lanes.

13:50
So, like, for example, the, the, the turing pi 2 that I run uh, I run rk1s in it right now. I would really like to be able to get some cm5s in it. That thing is designed for having multiple pcie lanes and so we're kind of in a position now where we can't support all of those things. And I've put a call in just on Twitter it's not like I have a real good back channel to them but I've put a call into the Turing Pi guys and saying we need a version of the board that, instead of connects the stuff on the top of the Turing Pi to one thing that the lanes would go to, we need to be able to connect it to the other lanes and let's come up with a way to do that. We'll see if that ever actually happens.

14:31
But for the majority of people it's going to be just a straight upgrade Because, like I said, it's pin-for-pin, compatible with almost anything. You can just drop it in, it'll work and it's a significant speed uplift versus the Pi 4 and the CM4. And, of course, raspberry Pi OS is just. It's great and there are some other options that run that same kernel. The upstream support for the Pi 5 and the CM5 in the upstream kernel not great yet, although with 6.12, some things have landed It'll boot. I think you can actually get some video output, but you know it doesn't have have full acceleration, video acceleration and all that yet. Um, but yeah, it's a cool little device and I am, I'm of course gonna, I'm gonna buy some and I'm gonna stick them into things and and, uh, have some fun with it I know, I know all the stuff I think was all there in previous compute modules.

15:24 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I just haven't paid too much attention to the previous ones. But I just like the idea of having the POE and like a NVMe card and having something that's almost somewhat self-contained with nothing more than a ethernet cable dangling off of it. I think I don't know if we talked about on the show or if it was on the back channel, like years ago 20, probably 2014, 2015. I gutted an old Nintendo, put a Raspberry Pi emulator in there and and mirrored the ports as much as possible, but it'd be kind of cool if the thing was just running off of PoE.

16:02 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, it is. It is fun. Actually I very much enjoy doing poe with raspberry pi's. I've got some of them around my house, um, they're like three b pluses and fours. You know the first iteration that had the uh, the poe support I've got. I've got in several places. I've got like three gang modules, um, you know, uh, electrical boxes, three gang wide electrical boxes. My office right here is right up there. I've got one in the ceiling, ethernet cable run to it and then just a Raspberry Pi will fit up there with the PoE hat. I've got that in several places and that's how I do temperature monitoring in different rooms and stuff like that.

16:39 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
So you've got sensors on them.

16:41 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I hang sensors off of them, yes, but you could do several different things if you wanted to. Um, just on that, you know, if I, if I really wanted to like I haven't, but if I wanted to I could you put a projector up there and have a raspberry pi running a display on one of the walls. I mean that'd be cool, um, all kinds of all kinds of fun stuff. Um, yeah, I, uh, I think it's. I think it's gonna be really interesting for people to just take their existing projects that have the CM4 and just drop the CM5 in it. One other thing that I would be remiss if I didn't mention is, you know, I talked last week about the crow view, the note, this thing, and I, even more so, want just let me put a compute module in the bottom of it. Guys make that the version two.

17:28
Um, one of the thing that's interesting is, you may know, the pi 400, that's the raspberry pi 4. That's just in the keyboard by itself. And, uh, I, there have been noises about raspberry pi making another one of those talking with jeff gearling about it and he goes. I have been telling raspberry pi that they just need to make a keyboard and put a compute module, slot in the bottom of it and call that the CM500. That'd be cool. There's so many cool ideas, oh yeah, well, I mean, the form factor lets you do a lot of different things and honestly I wish more people would pick up on using it, and I think maybe now with the cm5 they will, because, like with the cm5, you're actually at the point to read enough hardware to run it as a desktop, um, and so you know I it would not surprise me if you saw more handhelds and laptop sort of things. That'll just take a cm5 it doubles the price.

18:18 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
So for people who are buying it because it's cheap, but, um, it doesn't double the price, you well? The msrp is 45 right.

18:28 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Well, what's the msrp for the, the cm4?

18:32 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
no, no, I meant doubles the price of the raspberry.

18:35 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Oh, whatever, whatever it is, you're buying, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, give or take, yeah, but I mean so. Oh, imagine this, though if they're gonna make Compute Module 6 on the Raspberry Pi 6 in another four years I don't know, and it's the same pinout, may or may not be Then you don't have to buy the carrier device, you just slap a different device in it, so you have the framework effect.

19:03 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, which is like my old gutted nintendo, that's the raspberry pi one.

19:07 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I really should upgrade that, but I haven't like used it in 10 years either how cool would it be, though, to put a raspberry pi 5 in there and like oh yeah, let's play some nintendo and flick it on and be able to emulate gamecube games and switch games.

19:21 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, right now about I think the highest it could go is maybe super nintendo and sega. Now, I think the highest it could go is maybe Super Nintendo and Sega. I think I'm sure it could do that, but I don't think it could handle anything newer than that.

19:33 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
The horsepower difference between a Raspberry Pi 1 and a Raspberry Pi 5 is just unreal, We'd be doing some Xbox gaming and PlayStation yeah totally, you certainly can. Oh, all right, let's see OpenStreetMap. What is up with OpenStreetMap? All right?

19:53 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
So OpenStreetMap, the open source way to get your maps. Who needs Apple or Google Maps when you have OpenStreetMap? So in the words of Bobby Borsov, who Ken likes to quote all the time, openstreetmap is a free map of the world that anyone can use to help improve. It's created by people worldwide who add and update information about roads, parks, buildings and more. Think of it as the Wikipedia of maps. So for the past 18 years OpenStreetMaps has been using Ubuntu on its backend servers to supply the world with a map of the world. Well, it seems the world is getting too big for Ubuntu to handle. They've decided it's time to upgrade their servers and they are moving to Debian 12 Bookworm. So the short answer to why they did this is to improve performance, performance stability and for community collaboration. Another driving factor that was mentioned was they had some io performance issues and the way they it was with the kernel the current kernel in the ubuntu server, the way they fixed it is they had to move to a newer mainline kernel and they figured that just kind of led them naturally to Debian being more upstream, closer to the mainline. But the longer answer can be found digging through an interview a few folks at Debian had with Grant Slater, the senior site reliability engineer for the OpenStreetMap Foundation, and a few quotes in that interview. I'll just spit off a few. That kind of helps to explain the reasoning.

21:56
Is one Debian also has excellent coverage of OpenStreetMap tools and utilities. The Debian package maintainers do an excellent job of maintaining their packages, such as OSM2PG, sql and OSMium or OSMium-tool, etc. So Debian does a good job maintaining the osm, the open street map packages, and just to get closer to the maintainers of the packages that we, or we as an open street map, depend on. So and also you know, although it wasn't said in any interviews or stories that I found on on this move, I think we all know the real reason. They decided to move away from Ubitu, right, snaps? Of course snaps are great, they have their place, but nobody wants to run them for everything all the time and that's that's kind of the future. Ubuntu's gone now. Just just to be clear. Nobody open street map said this, at least not that I found documented, and nobody anywhere said this. I mean, I'm just reading the tea leaves. Everyone's trying to get away from ubuntu one way or another.

23:20 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It seems like everybody's trying to get away from ubuntu. Yeah, I saw this. I think this is. I think this is really interesting. Um, I I don't know, do you think there's going to be kind of a broader move, people moving from Ubuntu back to Debian?

23:36 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
you know I see it all the time, like in some of the communities and some that some of the Linux groups, it seems like so many people are saying no, just go to debbie. And you know, especially now over the last what year, that they, that they have uh third party, uh drivers and stuff supported. You know they were, they were very purist before, but now that they support that so many people out there I see just saying just just go straight to debbie and um, so I see it all the time and I don't know interesting.

24:13 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Um, I I know some stuff I'm doing. People are trying to use ubuntu on the well, the raspberry pi os is actually where it's at and we have to tell them all we don't, we don't support Ubuntu. Go, use the actual Raspberry Pi OS based on Debian. No, not Buster. You want the latest one, you want Bookworm. Please don't try to use the old one.

24:33 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, and like Peter, I think, is pointing out Peter Jansen, he's in YouTube. He's saying you know, see Linux Mint Debian Edition. That's another thing. You know, they used to be always just purely based off of Ubuntu. Fairly recently. It's been a while they've had their Linux Mint Debian Edition and I always see people saying use Linux Mint Debian Edition instead of the Ubuntu their old original Ubuntu version Lmde has been around for quite a while.

25:08 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Uh, it looks like 2010 was when that was first made available. Well, all right, but 14 years.

25:14 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
It's not. It's not the new kid on the block anymore. People are recommending a lot more than the ubin2 version yeah, I, yeah, I think you're right. I think snaps have really left a bad taste in people's mouth and with that I mean, like the lin, like the Linux Ubuntu version, it doesn't push snaps on you. So it's not like snaps alone is the reason. Maybe it's just principle that people say to use the Debian edition or there's other things, or maybe they're worried snaps are coming. I don't know it could be uh, I don't use either.

25:50 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I do. I at least, I have used open street maps quite a bit in the past.

25:54 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I am I'm glad that project exists and is still around you know, what's really really cool about open street maps is is the fact that it's well obviously that it's open. But the fact that it's open, it means that other developers like me, if I ever you know get the time again. You, if we want to make an app that has needs some kind of mapping capabilities or whatever, you can just use that. And you know there's no Apple licensing or whatever any any of that. I mean there's licensing, but well.

26:30 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It also gives you a lot more flexibility over something like uh, even say, google maps, you can. You could do things like download and have these available offline if you want to. If you really want to re-host your own, you, you can do that. Just the flexibility you have with OpenStreetMaps a lot more than Google Maps Does.

26:48 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
OpenStreetMaps have speed limits on them.

26:53 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I don't know if they do or not. Honestly, that is not the sort of thing that I use it for, that I ever used it for.

27:00 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I've never used it. The only reason I ask and maybe they should add it is because one of my biggest beefs with Apple or Google Maps is the speed limits wrong. So often it's like you're going to get me in trouble here, guys. I'm sure the cops are not going to take my phone if I show that to them and say hey this says it's old.

27:24
It says it's it's 65, not 40, but uh, and as far as I know I've never found a way to update that. But if they have it in here, obviously it's open.

27:36 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
You could update it, but I don't know you can see the speed limit if you inspect an individual road that you have identified in the data overlay, provided that a speed limit has been entered at all. So yeah, potentially it is in there in OpenStreetMaps. So it is. It is that data. That data field is supported, at least in the format.

27:56 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Because, like I said, it just drives me nuts all the time that I can't, you know, do something and say, hey, this is wrong, I can't like get my input. Yep, yep, I want to fix it.

28:09 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I won't let me. I want to fix it.

28:10 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
They won't let me I want to be to my part all right.

28:15 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Well, there is a fix that is coming. Actually, it's sort of a new feature that has not been in linux for a long time. Uh, and to wayland, and that is color management is just about to land, and you may say color management, what's up with that? Well, that's things like being able to, um, to actually set like real colors. So if you, if you really wanted to, you could get like the sensor to be able to do a color detection to see what colors your monitor is actually putting out, and then apply the corrections to that. That's part of color management.

28:50
One of the other big things, though, is that color management is tied up with high dynamic range HDR, which has been something I have been looking forward to landing more broadly for quite a while now. I've been running KDE 6 and Wayland for several months now, because, again, big TV behind me does support HDR, and there is the frog protocol in KDE, where they it's funny, some of the KDE devs sort of said we're tired of waiting on Wayland, we're just going to go and fix it ourselves, and so we got HDR, but the downside is that you've got to do, essentially, you have to down so like a video on youtube, let's say, that has hdr. To be able to actually watch it with hdr on linux, you've got to go download the video with something like yt-dlp and then play it through something like mplayer to actually get the hdr working. And it's nice that it can actually work. But it's kind of a pain to have to manage these in some cases nearly 100 gigabyte files to be able to get 4K HDR to play. Google actually pushing it into Chrome is the fact that the, the, the pull request, has been stuck here in Wayland for four years now. But and so the. The link I have is actually to a pharonics article and it it essentially says that there's light at the end of the tunnel. And three days ago there was a comment Xavier Xavier Huggle, who is one of the real heroes of Weyland right now really doing, actually doing stuff We'll talk more about this in a second, but Xaver is one of the guys that's actually doing stuff and not just arguing about all of it and he says that basically they're happy with it.

30:45
Now they think it's ready to go and in fact, support for this has landed in some places. There's a merge request, for example, in KDE that is completely ready to go to swap out the frog protocol stuff for the actual Wayland protocol, and his comment was we need two more acts because this is the way Wayland development works. There's a certain group of people that have like ACC and NAC privileges and once a certain number of them give their ACCs, which stands for acknowledgement, it goes and it happens. And so he says we need two more ACCs. He suggests a couple of people and then one of those people does chime in and say ACC and he says on behalf of Weston, because that's the project he represents, and then I can update the description next week. So things are happening this next week, starting, you know, maybe tomorrow, maybe by the time you hear this episode. So finally, things are moving in the color management protocol realm of Wayland.

31:42
But this is an interesting place to talk a little bit about some of the other things that are happening in Wayland. And I think we talked about it, rob. Do you remember? Did we talk about those proposals that got made for how to change things in Wayland to actually make it work better? Like you're not allowed to knack things unless you're actually on the knack list?

32:02
Yes, I'm pretty sure you did this on the show yeah, so some of those actually got merged, by the way. Um, and it seems to be making a difference. Things seem to be moving a little bit, a little bit quicker. Um, they, they did actually give a, uh, a temporary ban to one of the people that was really being a pest and getting in the way of things. Um, temporary ban, boy, that's an interesting concept. I wish more places would do that anyway. Um, yeah, but how long is temporary?

32:34
I think it was a month, okay, I think it was like you get to cool your heels, I guess, as long as that's defined, I mean temporary, until you're gone.

32:41 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
What's the big deal? It's just a temporary hundred year ban, what's up?

32:43 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
man. Well, I'm paying you then until you're gone. What's the big deal? She's a temporary, 100-year ban.

32:47 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
What's up, man? Well, I'm paying you then.

32:49 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, yeah, no, it wasn't crazy like that, but things seem to be moving along a little bit in Wayland and I have this theory. My theory basically goes that so one of the groups of people doing a lot of work on whalen right now are valve engineers because of proton, because of the steam deck, because of the things that valve is trying to do with the steam deck trying to use whalen for that. Obviously, of course like of course they are, they want to they built the hdr steam deck and so they're trying to make all that work as well as possible. I have this theory that Valve engineers went to some Wayland people and said it's a really nice project you have there. It'd be a real shame if some big company came along and forked it. And yeah, I'm pretty sure there was a.

33:43
We're going to make some changes here. We're going to fork your project from Valve and the Weyland guys sort of got their act together after that. We've now got the what do they call it? Frog staging something like that as a part of Weyland, so you could push things into that and it happens more quickly. You've got the changes to the, the procedural changes to make it easier to get stuff to land and, you know, with the looks like we're within a couple of days of maybe getting the, the, the color management stuff, which should, you know, get us over the, either over the line or really close to the over the line for stuff like HDR to work.

34:30
And then you have to assume there's going to be an email sent from Valve to somebody at Google saying all right, finally it's there in Wayland, please go and turn HDR on in Chrome so that people can watch HDR videos on YouTube on the Steam Deck. It's got to be happening, it's got to be coming. It's it's. It's got to be happening, it's got to be coming. Um, so, finally, finally, we, we, the right people lit a fire underneath the, the wayland developers and things are happening.

34:52 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, I, uh, I don't even have any hdr, well, I don't have any hdr monitors, but I I still often promote and tell the uh hdr benefit of wayland and yeah, you gotta have things like this obviously to to get it to work more places. I can't just work in wayland and not have any tie-ins to work anywhere else right, right, right.

35:16 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I was kind of a chicken and egg problem too. Like well, chrome is not going to support it, firefox is not going to support it until the until the protocol is done, and the protocol is done and the protocol is like well, there's nobody out there that's using it yet. Because you haven't finished it yet. Yeah, that's actually a real argument that the Wayland guys were making. Sometimes, this protocol that you've recommended, there's nobody out there using it, so we don't really feel like we need to add it.

35:41 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
That's yeah. That's kind of yeah dumb, I mean nobody's using anything before it's made.

35:51 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah it's not quite as bad as it sounds because of the way wayland works, the desktops can add stuff, but it was still. It was still almost as dumb as it sounds. It really was.

36:04 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
It's like Thomas Edison said well, everyone's using candles, why should I invent this light bulb? Let's not get into the controversy whether or not he really deserves the credit for the light bulb. It's just an example, guys.

36:22 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I never knew. Rob is a Thomasomas edison truther. Oh dear, let's move on he did tesla wrong, I think, but anyway yeah oh, I read just the other day that apparently some of tesla's works are still um sealed by the government. I don't know if that's true or not. You hear weird things on the internet sometimes, but somebody was claiming and it seemed to be making a reasonable claim that there were some things that Tesla was worked on that are still sealed by the government, that nobody's been able to look into.

36:57 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Well, if you watch a lot of sci-fi. People love to put Tesla in things. Lot of sci-fi people love to put tesla in things and you know he's, he's like an alien and some shows and just this. You know, you know, way ahead of the centuries ahead, inventor, that well everybody loves an underdog.

37:14 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I think that's a lot to do with that yeah, maybe that's all it is all right, uh, let's see, let's talk. Oh yes, let's talk about the, the UEFI boot with bootkit malware.

37:26 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I've seen some takes on this yeah, hopefully you'll have a take on this too, but after I tell you what I know about it at least. So headlines this week say that researchers discovered the first uefi bootkit malware targeted targeting linux dubbed. They're calling it boot kitty. So boot kitty was discovered, uh, by eset when a file called bootkitefi was uploaded to virus totals. That is a great site, by the way. I love it. You still have time? Bootkitty exploits the logo fail.

38:06
And this is a CVE from 2023-40238 with a score of 5.5. Of malicious shellcode through tampered BMP files in UEFI firmware to infect the Linux kernel at boot time. So the code itself it appears to be early stages of development, from what they gather, because it's rather buggy and it doesn't seem to work very well. It's, for example, it uses a self-signed certificate, so it won't boot on machines with secure boot enabled. Hard-coded offsets and simplistic byte pattern matching make it only usable on specific GRUB and kernel versions. And hey, here's one, not to scare anyone, but it only targets specific versions of Ubuntu. It contains many unused functions and handles kernel version compatibility poorly, often leading to system crashes. So you know, these types of bootkits have historically targeted Windows and even though ESET's telemetry finds no signs of this being used in the wild.

39:38
There are maybe a few things Linux users should be concerned about or think about. So you know, with its growing popularity, linux, that is, is becoming, it's becoming, more of a target. No matter how secure Linux is, there's well ways to get into the system before that security of Linux kicks in. You know, if they can get at the, they can get the hardware. Or you know, in the supply chain, or if they can get that, you know somewhere in the bootloader, before the bootloader. You know, and as much as Linux users have been trained to hate secure boot and believe it's Microsoft's way of blocking Linux, this just isn't true, at least who knows, maybe it was at one point. But today most mainstream distros support Secure Boot, and today at least. And in using Secure Boot, it can block things like this. You know, even GNOME OS wants to use Secure Boot, as I mentioned earlier today.

40:49
So although this one targets Ubuntu, they all aren't going to focus on Ubuntu. So you know, don't run away from Ubuntu just because of this. But Ubuntu, there's a lot of Ubuntu users, so maybe it makes sense to target them. Maybe they're trying to narrow it down, but also what they're saying is, you know, because of all this, you know they're considering this to be a proof of concept. They think that the developer was creating a proof of concept to see how will this work. Will this work, which you know? The purpose of a proof of concept, I guess, unless you're a security uh engineer trying to show people how to fix your stuff. The other reason of a proof of concept is to kind of test the grounds and before you make your, your malware or whatever you're making, better to target more.

41:45
So you know things like secure boot these days, like I said, most distros support mainstream ones. So you know I'd probably try to avoid the advice. You know, often advice, I see, when people can't get something boot, it's like, well, turn off your security boot. Sometimes that is, but sometimes Probably, try to avoid the advice. You know, often advice I see, when people can't get something to boot, it's like, well, turn off your secure boot. Sometimes that is, but sometimes it's like he's trying to install it with two. They support secure boot, just leave that on. But you know, sometimes it's legacy boots versus UEFI boot. There's different reasons. Try to figure out what you're doing before you disable all the security on your system just to get Linux working.

42:29 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, so this one is. This is interesting. I think it's less, maybe less important because we also have PK fail, which is like a much worse exposure of the secure boot UAFI firmware thing. That's where a whole bunch of vendors used essentially the test key do not use oh, that's fine, we'll just use that one. So the whole thing is pretty badly broken right now anyways, if somebody really wants to get into it. But where something like this really is a problem is like when you and this is this is mainly an enterprise thing but like if you've got an encrypted hard drive and then a TPM, where the TPM gives the kernel of the hard drive key to decrypt it during boot, key to decrypt it during boot and that actually relies pretty heavily on secure boot to keep the whole thing secure so that you can't just go in and pop a shell immediately afterwards and so something like logo fail and this actually using it.

43:35
Really it's not going to mess with individual users of Linux, it's more something that the enterprise folks have to worry about. Individual users of Linux. It's more something that the enterprise folks have to worry about the possibility of let's see, how shall I put this? If you get malware on your Linux install. You have a problem Getting malware on your Linux install that tries to go after UEFI. Is one going to be really, really rare and two, not actually that much more of a problem? Um, because this thing is it's not like this is uh, it's not like this is is overriding your system firmware. That's not what we're talking about. This is not like malicious firmware. This is just get the malicious software in earlier in the boot flow, and I would either way say, if you have something really bad and malicious on your Linux system, you just need to back some stuff up and then wipe it all the way down to a blank hard drive and then you know Well, you have to know it's there.

44:37 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
You have to know you have something malicious. That's true, that is true, and most of us aren't running.

44:47 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Kaspersky or any other antivirus. Yeah, that's true. That's true, all right.

44:52 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I wonder, you know, even though you know Linux, anyone can be tricked into installing something bad. Linux users, Windows users, whatever. Generally speaking, linux has some good security in place. But I wonder, if in theory, somebody say dual booting windows and linux, I wonder if there's there's. I mean, if you're dual booting there's probably a way to many other ways to get in too. But if you're running windows, get stands like, hey, they got linux, let's throw this into the boot line or whatever to infect linux. But then again, if it has access to the drive, it probably could mount it and just put anything it wants on there too.

45:33 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So I don't know, just spit balling yeah, and I I bet you honestly the the number of people that dual boot is. So it's probably not worth it for anybody out there doing like general purpose viruses right Now, like if the NSA has a target that they know dual boots well, that's an entirely different ballgame. But that's not you or me.

45:56 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
So Well, you know, I mean, what is the market of dual booters? One maybe developers, but maybe not so much anymore. Maybe they just use things like virtual machines on Linux or WSL on Windows. So, really, it's probably a lot of new people who want to experiment with Linux, which they also may be the ones susceptible, but they may have the least to lose or the least for a malicious actor to come in and say I want your stuff.

46:31 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
But you know, this is, this is true, this is true. All right, let's talk about, let's talk about 613 a little bit. So we are towards the end of the 6.13 merge window and uh, larabelle over at pharonix has some articles here that I've queued up on the things that are coming, uh, the big updates that have come in, and uh, one of the one of the really interesting ones here is that, uh, there's more, there's more rust. So the first article is actually about the care slash misc poll, which that is sort of the catch all. So the care devices, that's like everything inside slash dev, by the way, those are block devices, a lot of which are care devices. Then you have slash misc, so just everything else. So this is sort of just the catch-all.

47:26
And this pull request came in for 6.13 during the merge window and Greg Carl Hartman had this to say about it. He says rust, misc driver bindings and other rust changes to make MISC drivers actually possible, possible. So again for those in the following, adding the rust stuff to the linux kernel has been a lot of uh kind of busy work, almost like boilerplate code. To make it positive you have to go into each of the different kind of drivers and write. It's almost like a harness to put the two of them together, an adapter sort of thing. Some like some rust adapter code to be able to write rust drivers to talk to the c version of the kernel. But those are the hooks, or yeah, they're kind of like hooks, it's, it's really, it's like an adapter. Is is more the way to put it, but um, anyway, greg says he thinks this is the tipping point expected bindings bindings is the exact word that he uses here expect to see more rust drivers go forward now that these bindings are present. And then he says the next merge window. Hopefully we will have pci and platform drivers working too, which will fully enable almost all driver subsystems to start accepting, or at least getting, rust drivers. This is the end result of a lot of work from a lot of people. Congrats to all of them for getting this far.

48:39
You've proved many of us wrong in the best way possible with working code, and I like that a lot. But that's really interesting. So we talked about this in the past. There is like active Rust code in the kernel. It is more than just the bindings. There are real Rust drivers, but now that we're getting further and further along into more and more things supporting it, more bindings being written. You're going to see more companies start writing writing rust drivers, so the kernel will actually get rustier and rustier, which is, you know, there's been some pushback from that because, like now, your maintainers have to be able to read C code and rust code and some of them have not been happy about that extra burden put on them. So you know, there's been some, there's been some conflict tied up with that, but uh, yeah, so far it it is. Uh, it's becoming a thing.

49:32
Um, there is another interesting story here that is also about 613 and that is that, uh, microsoft made a pretty important uh, add the kernel again to 6.13. And this is a memory management poll and it's a Microsoft engineer and it's caching of kernel modules into huge pages which should give a bit of a speed up for the different kernel modules doing their thing, some performance optimizations and the like doing their thing. Uh, some performance optimizations and the like. And uh, this one fascinates me a lot because it's microsoft working on the linux kernel. And you know, if you even say 10 years ago, if you were to told me that were the thing, my, my brain would have exploded. But you know, you go further back than that and say 20 years ago just would you pigs, pigs, pigs might as well fly, before that happens they'd be working it all right.

50:23 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
They'd be like the uh yeah, I don't know the uh the people from the minnesota college contributing uh stuff oh yeah, no, at that point, that right, right, right.

50:35 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So this is the uh, this is the extend part of the embrace, extend extinguish that they're working on.

50:40 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Right, yeah, but it seems it's yeah, yeah, this is yeah. This is the embrace. They're getting their good code in there again. They're named good and when they're all good, here comes a bad code. Boom.

50:52 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
See, linux sucks uh, thankfully, thankfully no, microsoft actually has they. They now have a business case for making Linux decent, and so that helps. That helps a lot. And then the last article that I've got here is about staging, which in the Linux kernel. That's that area where the kind of experimental code goes. And the interesting thing here is that they have cleaned house in staging. They have dropped about 100,000 lines of code.

51:23
Some things that are gone here is the field bus code. I'm not exactly sure what that is. I know it has to do with industrial systems and control of those. But there's also things that have been sort of stuck in staging and the people that were trying to push them have sort of gone off to other things. You have different.

51:46
There's a Realtek device in there, there's a couple of other things that you know that just have hung and nobody's continuing to push it, and so 107,000 lines of code got dropped from staging. Now 42,000 new lines got added as well. So you know there's a lot of churn in there and lots of stuff coming and going, uh, but what you really the idea was staging is that it's where you can land these things that are still more experimental, and then you hope that it gets pushed across the line to get out of staging into you know regular kernel code area, uh. But every once in a while somebody's got to go in and kind of put their foot down and say, no, no, all this, all this old cruft, we're going to get rid of it. It's time it's it's it's.

52:28 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
It's time has passed yeah, we got rid of all the old cruft. That's why it's just Ouch.

52:42 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Bazinga.

52:45 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
See, if you guys listen to this, you can I don't know see all the things it says about you when you're gone.

52:57 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So here's an interesting thought that goes along with that. A lot that's probably too long to put on screen, but Peter says question shouldn't the Linux kernel get trimmed? Sometimes, since I use my current cpu, which is a 3700x like that's not a terrible old cpu I noticed the boot time increasing with multiple seconds. Hardware doesn't get faster as quickly anymore. Um, and I'm reminded of torvalds, famously several years back, talking about how the kernel is bloated. You remember that? No, I don't. Yeah, so he, he was on. I don't remember where he was talking, but he, he said something about how he was annoyed by how bloated the colonel was, and you know everybody jumped on that at the time.

53:35 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
But I do remember, back in the day I'm talking, speaking of being old, 24, 25, 25 years ago, when you know, I'd compile my own kernels just to get them as minimal as possible, just to have only the drivers, just what I need, just to be as fast, as minimal as possible. And I mean today that's not something you hear about much, but you know, I suppose you could always do that and really get a whole bunch of stuff out of there there are.

54:12 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
There are time. There are projects and places where people still do that. Um open wrt, of course, is one of them. Uh wasn't very long ago that you could do a full Linux install, a full working Linux install, on four megabytes of hard drive space. So like that was a pretty minimal kernel You've got. Well, I talked to just this past week on Floss Weekly. We talked about the Elixir Nerves project. Nerves is a stripped down Linux kernel running just Elixir which is based on um uh erlang, and that was super interesting. But they they do this whole system in like 30 megabytes everything put together. So it's a.

54:52 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
It's a fairly stripped down kernels and they're doing that for small systems, for embedded basically embedded, yeah, embedded systems, but you know, I don't think you hear of people doing it for their own computers, just to get an extra, you know, four seconds out of their boot time.

55:08 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, you know, what would be actually really interesting is a way to sort of automate the process. Boy, I wonder what all this would take. This would be really interesting to do, though. Oh, so, like the text, would you have, do a boot, plug all your devices in, so you would, essentially you'd start profiling, be like, okay, this is the boot where I want to profile my hardware, and you would like plug all of your devices in that you're ever going to use, and so it would just then, you know, record it. And then you say, okay, build that kernel for me. And then it does a custom kernel build that has everything that you need built right into it, but nothing else compiled I could be wrong, but I swear I.

55:46 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I feel like I mean, it's been 20 years since I've compiled a kernel. Oh, that's not true. I did compile it when I did linux from scratch, but uh, besides, when I did that, I don't know it's just falling directions. I wasn't paying attention to what I was really doing, but I swear there was some step in the process that basically detected what you had and had that checked as default or something like well, you could.

56:14 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
You could do old config. You can do old config where that is. Take the config of the kernel that I currently have running and use that to build the new one. Hmm, yeah, I was like make menu config and then you can face where you go through and you can turn things on and off. Yeah, I just I feel like it it's.

56:33 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I don't know, I could be wrong. That was a long time ago.

56:39 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Um, I'm seeing an, as someone here says, make local mod config, and Um, I'm seeing someone here says make local mod config, and I am not very familiar with that. So there are, there are some. There are some make flags that are similar to that, or at least there were at this point. You know that's, that's a little bit more than most people want to get into, but it is. It's a fascinating idea. So if you want a smaller kernel, there you go.

57:03 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
that's the way to do it, yeah peter asks why don't we do that yet? And I think he's talking about why don't we compile our own kernels all the time to get it minimized? And and I think most of us maybe I'm speaking for the old guys here we just don't have time anymore and it's just, it's not worth it. I think really it's like yeah, indeed, this works just fine I don't know.

57:27 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, so there there was. There is one of the. Is it, gen 2, that you end up compiling most of your packages during?

57:33 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
install. Yeah, so that's going to be.

57:35 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's going to be a similar idea. So if you really want to do that, maybe gen 2 is the way to go.

57:41 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, I think I still have a partially installed one VM somewhere of Gen 2 that I never finished. I got to the compile part. I'm like I don't got time for this. I mean, I knew it was coming, but I just I don't know, yeah, all right, let's see what is next.

58:04 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Lxd lxd62 yes, lxd62.

58:10 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
So, as I think listeners know, I kind of love my virtual machines. I talk about them all the time heck. I just mentioned having a gen 2 virtual machine. Uh, well, started, started and my containers, which I haven't moved as many things over to the LXC container in Proxmox. That's what I'm using these days. I haven't used, I haven't moved as many things over as I feel like I should. I need to do more of that. But you know, my current manager of choice is Proxmox and so, although I'm not an LXD user, some of the technologies in LXD 6.2 update that just came out are pretty exciting.

59:02
So, for those who don't know, lxd is a system container manager developed by Canonical, and maybe that's the part that's going to turn people off. But you know comparison it sounds like Proxmox is still a more feature rich and Proxmox is really it's a Debian base, but you install the whole appliance on one. It's more comparable to a vCenter, vmware, vcenter or something like that, whereas LXD could be. But you install, your install say, ubuntu is probably the most likely one you're going to install as your host and then you install LXD on top of it. So really you could have that on your Ubuntu desktop. You could also have LXD on top of it. So really, you could have that on your Ubuntu desktop. You could also have LXD on there with containers. So it's somewhat of a different paradigm, but you could just have a bare-bones system with LXD. So, anyway, let's get on to the biggest features.

01:00:04
The most exciting feature of LXD 6.2 is, without a doubt, is that they've added support for the NVIDIA GPU container device interface. So this feature enables the pass-through of GPUs that don't use the traditional PCI addressing, such as the NVIDIA Tegra GPUs that don't use the traditional PCI addressing, such as the NVIDIA Tegra GPUs, and GPU pass-throughing. That's kind of like the holy grail of VMs the containers, any virtualized, getting that into your client or guest operating system that you're running or guest operating system that you're running, because it's kind of one of the hardest things to do. You could do it various ways, various GPUs, but it's not easy. So using this new standard sounds like it could make things easier. So this enhancement it offers a flexible way to manage GPU resources in containers and aligns LXD with the evolving CDI standard, that's container device interface that I mentioned.

01:01:18
Lxd also manages virtual machines and this new release makes importing VM instances from external disk formats such as VMmdk, which I think that's the vmware one, and then qcow2, which is, uh, like kvm, qemu. It makes it easier just using their simple lxd-migrate tool. So if I want to migrate away and give lxd a shot, I have a good tool. Or if I want to migrate away and give LXD a shot, I have a good tool. Or if you want to get away from VMware their vSphere, vcenter, their ridiculous new subscription pricing this is another option which you know. Strangely enough I'm going to sidetrack myself I've seen a lot of advertisements, I think from Canonical recently, about migrating away from VMware and you know, I don't think it's that I never clicked onto it, but I think they're talking about LXD, probably.

01:02:21
Anyway, lxd 6.2 also introduces two new API metrics to improve cluster observability. So you can have clusters and you know it'll monitor those better. So what it has is total completed requests and number of ongoing requests. So that's kind of the heartbeat there making sure they're online. Custom storage block volumes are now protected from concurrent use by default, preventing accidental data corruption. And finally, the LXD-UI, or the user interface, has also received a significant update with 350 new improvement commits to the code. So this is going to make it more robust and user-friendly.

01:03:21
You know, like I said, I've never tried, lxd being a canonical thing. Maybe I don't want to want to, but nah, I want to give it a shot. Uh, some someday maybe I'll install and give it a shot and give you a real world of how it really compares to proxmox, or even to kvm, qemu or whatever yeah, I imagine lxd uses a lot of the kvm stuff, or at least the qemu stuff underneath yeah, I know, for containers, I believe it uses LXC, which is the same thing that Proxmox uses for containers and everything on Linux.

01:03:54
It's native and not like VMware. Well, even VMware is going to be using KVM, so everything on Linux is working towards using KVM. So I'm sure it does. I'm sure the underpinnings are the same. The real question is the mostly is the user interface. I think the VMs are going to be the same in the end, whereas if this has some nice, easier ways to pass through a GPU, not that I try to use all GPUs, but maybe I could find some more uh projects, more things to install on my vms.

01:04:33
You know, for example, when I tried to do uh pop os and the problem was I did not have the graphical graphics acceleration for the cosmic and and it liked to crash on me. Yeah, I remember that.

01:04:47 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So the other thing that really fascinates me here is the CDI that the graphics pass through. They specifically call out things like Tegra. Well, nvidia Tegra that is, their ARM SoCs. That's really interesting. That is something that people really care about, and I will tell you, a place that those get used is actually an automotive, and so I wonder whether maybe there's somebody thinking let's run some fancy automotive thing inside a container for security on these vehicles. I don't know, maybe Tesla or somebody like that is thinking about doing this and using LXD for it. I don't know, maybe maybe tesla or somebody like that is uh is thinking about doing this and and using uh, using lxd for it I don't know.

01:05:34 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, I don't know how the infrastructure is actually designed for for the automobiles, but uh, I'm guessing, I don't know. Maybe it's, maybe it's not containerized, maybe it is. It probably would be a good idea to have different systems containerized, you know yeah then if your, your, your uh media player crashes, it doesn't uh crash, your uh, your automatic driving you.

01:06:00 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
You do not want your media player to be able to crash your car physically. That's bad.

01:06:07 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
That's bad when that happens? What caused the crash? My media player had a bug in it and crashed the system. Yeah, what? What do you mean?

01:06:17 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
like a cockroach moth actually. Oh, all right, let's see. Um, so I've, I've got, I've got something just fun here. We all like gaming and uh, there was a gaming leak and we're gonna take a look at it. So this is from valve and, uh, it turns out that, uh, when you, uh, when you set things to being public, accidentally, sometimes people actually find them and download them. It's a link off to Gaming on Linux, which contains a link to a Steam DB. Steam DB that's one of those websites that basically just exists to pull information from the Steam store, from the Steam database.

01:07:08
So, pavel Jendrik however you say his last name, I'm sure that is not it he has a post on Blue Sky about the IBEX, which is the Steam Controller 2. We're getting a Steam Controller 2, or well, there's a possibility that we're getting a Steam Controller 2, I should say and Roy, which is apparently steam's next version of vr controller, and uh, we get, uh, we get blender models and sneak previews of all of that stuff, and it's it's interesting to look at it. It appears that the controller itself is going to take more or less the layout from the steam deck, you know, with the sort of square touch pads and all of that, and it's going to make that just a standalone controller. And then the, the vr controller, is going to be sort of similar in that um, it's going to have joystick on both sides as well as like four, four directional buttons on each side. That can either be.

01:08:10
I'm sure they can even have to like up, down, left, right or abxy um, so but it's just, it's just really interesting to be able to get a look at this and, uh, kind of get an idea of what's coming. Um, I personally really still really like the original um, the original controller that I've got, uh, the original steam steam controller one. I do not get a whole lot of chance to use it these days, but it is still other than keyboard and mouse. It is about my, uh, my favorite way to play something. Um, very much enjoy that. So I will definitely have to take a look at the version two.

01:08:47 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Hopefully it'll be a little less expensive than a full-on steam deck it is funny how much it looks like a steam deck without a screen. Almost it is definitely inspired by.

01:08:56 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It's got the touchpads, which totally makes sense, right, it totally makes sense that they would want it to be basically the same it is. They want to have one, you know, one interface for for gamers and for game developers to design against and, uh, be able to have it in a couple different places.

01:09:12 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
So I mean, it makes a lot of sense right, I mean that actually from one of the articles I write maybe the one you had said that they learned a lot from the steam deck and what what they like. I mean, sure, that's part of it, but even more, like you said, it's kind of good to have them just be the same, even if it's not necessarily the best, which I think it seems like a pretty good design, but still just being the same, yeah.

01:09:38 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It's interesting too to see how similar it is to the original Steam Deck controller and the things that are different, like the way they iterated on it, the things that worked really well they kept and then some other things they changed. It's pretty cool to see, but hopefully I know this is the thing with Valve, right, so they have probably. It looks like they have unintentionally leaked this. It may never actually see the light of day or it may be coming in a couple of months. It's hard to say it's Valve, they work.

01:10:10 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
They invented to say it's, it's valve, they, they work, but they invented valve time right, yeah, quippy in the discord. He said it should be as he put it as a show title, but I think it's kind of funny headless steam deck headless steam deck if you had all the other computer in there except for the display. It's like a headless steam deck actually that that'd be kind of cool. I mean you probably could fit up, fit all that in there. Just if you had the whole thing in there, you just plugged into display.

01:10:30 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
But that would be interesting.

01:10:33 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Somebody did that before, I think that's been done.

01:10:36 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Sure, yeah, uh, fun times. Yeah, we'll see if, uh, we'll see anything, if anything ever becomes of that was the?

01:10:45 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I didn't see it was the vr controller. Was there a picture in there anywhere, or, or?

01:10:51 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
uh, yeah, there's a picture of the vr controller as well. Um, I didn't see it, but yeah, and people are talking about that. It looks similar to what we, the current generation ones just a few more buttons on all of them. Um, potentially it looks like in in one of the shots. Uh, the there's like a halo around it for doing maybe more finger or thumb tracking, that sort of thing.

01:11:12 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Um, so that you know, that could be interesting because I would love to see like the valve index uh uh controller, maybe just for like desktop game. I've never even seen the valve index controller, um, personally, but I think it's like more well like the power glove it so.

01:11:30 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So the index I've used one. It's actually, they're actually pretty cool. Um, the thing with the index is that it straps on it, so it's got a, like a you can you crank it and it straps onto your hand and then it's actually got uh, it's got finger detection and so you can like open and close and the in the, the game, the virtual world can see that and so you can do some interesting things there with like, rather than just clicking to grab something you can like, do the gesture of grabbing and be able to.

01:11:57 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I would like to just yeah, that's kind of what I thought it was. I'd like to have just that controller and be able to take it to you know any vr, you know my, my quest, or whatever, and just have because. Because when I saw the valve index years ago now I guess, when it came out that control or the grippy thing being able to detect all the fingers just seemed like the coolest thing so you can take.

01:12:22 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Oh, let's see if I can remember how this goes. You can take the previous iteration of the Valve hardware and just buy the upgrade to the Index controllers. So how does that go, I'd have to ask. I've got a buddy that's done it. I'd have to ask again exactly how that goes. But the actual lighthouses are compatible between the two. So you can have the old valve headset and get a couple of new lighthouses and just use that well, and then get the index controllers and have kind of the best of both worlds the thing is I don't have a valve vr.

01:13:00 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I have a quest, uh, three maybe. I don't know which one I have. I have a quest and I want to use those cool controllers with it. Yeah, I don't know if one.

01:13:09 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I have. I have a Quest and I want to use those cool controllers with it. Yeah, I don't know if you can do that or not. Can you even use your Quest with a Linux machine, like if you have?

01:13:21 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Steam installed. Can you get into SteamVR with the Quest? I'll be honest, I haven't tried. I have a different computer that I use specifically for vr um, though my understanding is it's possible, but I don't even use the the quest too much with a computer because it's it has its own um computer, but you can link it to a computer yeah, I, I don't, uh, I don't know, I don't know, never tried it.

01:13:51 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Um, I I borrowed a vr headset and the controllers actually the, the index controllers and I had them here for like six or eight months, never took it out of the bag, just never had time to really dig into it I I enjoy it. I do the vr thing from time to time, but like that whole time I had it, it's like man, I've got this thing I gotta do and that thing I gotta do. By the time I finally had time to do, it's like I'm so tired.

01:14:11 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I just want to go sleep I love my quest, but I literally have not played it in over a year. Yeah, like this summer. What I love doing because it's wireless, uh-huh I love taking it out in the backyard and then map out a wide area so that I can actually run, run around, because I can't do the, I can't stand still and then like walk in VR.

01:14:32
I get just sick. But if I can actually move and have the space to actually move, that's awesome and I was so looking forward. I'm like, okay, when summer comes I'm going to go play outside and do this. And I didn't. I didn't talk at all this year.

01:14:48 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Oh, regret no I'm just I know yeah, all right, let's, let's talk some good bandline tips all right, let's do that then.

01:14:58 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
All right, what is what is d stat, d stat? Well, let me just find obs here and switch my screen over here. D-stat, for those looking it, does a lot of things, that a lot of other things do, monitoring systems like monitoring CPU, mem, disk, io, swap, network. You can do it all. Simple command is if you just do D do d stat, it's going to just kind of do a monitor of I don't all whatever's going on there on your system right now. This is a vm, it's not the actual one I'm on, so you're not going to see a whole lot going on. But if you do, uh, say d stat now, if you ever heard of vm stat, but if you do d stat, dash, dash, vm stat, it's going to basically do the vm stats which gives some other information. Now with that, as I said, there's all kinds of things. So if, if you do DSTAT oops, dstat, dash, c, dash, dash, well, space dash, dash, top, dash, cpu, it could show your top CPU. Pretty much the only thing that's top here right now is LAS, michelle. Oh, there's console popped up there. Oh, and there's a couple of things are popping up. You can do the same thing you could do Top, not mom Mem, so it's D stat dash space dash C space, dash dash top dash mem.

01:16:48
Or you can do what else you do. You could do a DSTAT dash A for all the stats. You could do a DSTAT dash FS for your file system. How much is used? That just gave me swap. So dash dash swap also is swap Disk dash, not disk. What did dash disk? Oh, what? Oh, two dashes, dstat space dash dash disk is going to show read and read writes. Uh, you could do dash int to show your interrupts, dash net for networks. And you know what, if you don't know that the d stat dash dash help to just show all the different kinds of things you can do. So you can do the load stats. You can do process stats, enable time, slash, date output, enable time encounter, enable system stats. So a whole bunch of different stats. If you want to monitor on your computer machine Probably a good tool for debugging various things and see what's doing what.

01:18:16 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So it describes it as a replacement for VM stat, IO stat and IF stat, which some of those we've talked about before yes, so don't worry about those other ones that they've talked about.

01:18:27 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Just get DSTAT and it's going to replace them all yep, all right, very cool.

01:18:32 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So I am going to do actually a two-parter, a second, a follow-up, I suppose, to something I talked about, uh, two or three weeks ago and, uh, at that point we talked about, um, what exactly was it? So this this week, I know, know, we're going to be looking at SSH agent forwarding. Let's see what was it exactly. Hold on, I'm pulling up the document. It's coming. Let's see what was it. Mine was SSH jump, that's's right I remember now. So, uh, back on the ninth, I talked about ssh jump servers and how that you can specify where it will automatically forward one connection through another service so that your local machine can talk directly to another machine that you wouldn't be able to normally talk to, so it it jumps through another SSH connection. Well, the reason I needed that was because there was another SSH feature that needed to be able to talk directly to make it happen, and that was SSH agent forwarding. And I've got a GitHub how-to here, because SSH agent forwarding is something you might need when working with GitHub, and the reason is that GitHub now wants you to use SSH keys rather than SSH passwords for accessing anything on GitHub. In my particular case, I had a website that I was managing as a private GitHub repository and wanted to be able to get in and push and pull, and on a remote machine and I couldn't just punch a password in it and I really did not want to permanently put a GitHub SSH key on this remote machine. So did a little bit of looking and SSH agent forwarding is the way to do it and essentially to use it. There is some setup here that you have to do. You have to do some configuration on your local machine and you have to make sure I think also there is a service that has to be running. But once you get those done it's actually pretty simple to actually use it and once you get it set up you can just SSH into something and your key will be there and then you can from that remote machine SSH, for example, into GitHub, so you could do pushes and pulls from GitHub repositories over SSH and it'll just work.

01:21:10
So, like I say, it does take a little bit of fiddling, a little bit of work to get all of this done. There's about three or four steps to get the authentication, to get the socket working. But this is a really, really good how-to from get the socket working. But this is a really really good how-to, uh from um. It's a really good how-to from github and they've got really good links as well to getting it working and when you need it, when you need to be able to get to a github repository or do anything with an ssh key on a remote machine that you don't want to permanently have an SSH key on, boy, it's the way to do it. So really cool trick, really worth looking into. It's unfortunate that it is a little fiddly, but once you get it working it is really great Cool. Did you know that existed? No, I did not. I did not either, until I had this problem and went Googling for it and came to this page.

01:22:10 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I use SS, so I had this problem with googling for it and came to this page. So I I use ssh all the time.

01:22:15 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It's probably my most used linux uh tool maybe I'll say that, yep, I can believe that, definitely believe that I'm pretty basic with it it's got. It's got so many different, different knobs and switches you can flip and all kinds of fun stuff.

01:22:30 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Oh, yeah, it's. It's way more amazing than uh, than how I use it yeah, all right, so that's our tips.

01:22:41 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Uh, you have anything you want to plug?

01:22:43 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
well, just my normal, everyday, normal plug that I always give, and that is come, find and connect with me. My website, robertpcampbellcom on there is my linkedin, my twitter, my mastodon. I really should add my blue sky to this, because and maybe start using that more, since somebody did ask about that fairly recently um, and if you really like the work that I do, you can come here and click on that little coffee cup there. Donate a cup of coffee. Uh, since the last time I was on the show, I did have someone donate to me, though it looks like he donated anonymously Because it just says someone in public.

01:23:38
I could see the name, but you guys can't, so I'm not going to call him out, but he is a Northerner like me, and his, his comment to me was we northerners gotta, gotta support each other, and I'll keep the rest off, since it's it was posted anonymously. But, uh, thank you. Uh, fellow northerner from a nearby state, I, I don't think I don't think I'm doxing him too much by saying that much. Thank you, I appreciate it. And oh, that was you. Well, if you want me to say your name, I can say your name. Now, everyone on YouTube knows it, I think he doxed himself.

01:24:25 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
All right, very cool. So I do want to plug a couple of things real quick. And the first one is that I was on a YouTube interview with Brody and I've got a link to that. It's at the Tech Over Tea site and that actually went live for us listening, for us recording live. That went live today If you want to go check that out.

01:24:45
It's a couple of hours worth of just chitter-chatter about all things Linux and open source and it was a lot of fun. And I actually went back and listened to the entire thing and actually found it really entertaining, which I don't know what that says about myself that I found listening to my own interview that entertaining. Maybe that just means that I did a really good job on the interview, or maybe that says something else about me. I don't know, I did a really good job on the interview or maybe that says something else about me, I'm not sure. And then the other thing is this just occurred to me today we talked last week about the drama in the Linux kernel around BcacheFS and Kent Overstreet, and it just occurs to me that what Kent needs to do is all of the bugs that he's not allowed to fix in bcash fs. He just needs to submit them to the colonel as cves and see how that works out for everybody. I just feel like that would be a fun resolution to this okay and and roger says okay.

01:25:44 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I believe that means okay. So thank you, roger, for the coffees. Yep, roger h, we appreciate all the support.

01:25:49 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Okay, so thank you, roger, for the coffees. Yep, roger H, we appreciate all the support from everybody. Thank you, rob for being here. Man, I appreciate it. I didn't have to do a monologue, that would have been fun. Yeah, oh well, maybe All right. Thank you everybody for watching and listening those that get us live and those that get us on the download and we will be back with the untitled leg show next week. We'll see you then.