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Untitled Linux Show 180: Gnome All the Way Down
01:26:20
Gnome OS, Pi CM5, and UEFI Malware
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- [00:01]
Rob Campbell
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 613 kernel. It's a lot of fun, you don't want to miss it, so stay tuned.
- [00:17]
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- [01:05]
David Ruggles
It's better over here.
- [01:08]
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- [02:13]
Rob Campbell
This is twit. This is the Untitled Lending show episode 180 recorded Saturday, November 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 at 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 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.
- [02:53]
David Ruggles
Hello. As I said in the discord, this is a Superstars only, so it's a special Thanksgiving Superstars Only show.
- [03:00]
Rob Campbell
There you go. Oh well. 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, but we'll let Rob kick it off and tell us all about it.
- [03:17]
David Ruggles
So I did kind of hear about this a few weeks ago, but I couldn't really find any good details. 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 Valk shared his own proposal, he posted a blog post a few weeks ago, actually it's a 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 and GNOME OS really isn't so paraphrased from Leon, proven at the register, KDE Neon is more of a technology demonstrator for public use, while GNOME OS is only an internal test bed. So Adrian, he wants to make their testing distro a daily driver, making GNOME OS the flagship distro for the economic desktop environment. This, 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 carbonos it's the test bed of what GNOME OS may become. It's and 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. Robust, so difficult to break and easy to roll back. Immutable. Anybody who listens knows what an immutable desktop atomic is by now. I'm not going to dig into that now go back to other episodes if you don't know Secure. So they want to use UEFI secure boot which I'm going to briefly mention 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 Waylon, we all love that here. Pipewire we love that too. And XDG portals which we don't really talk about much but maybe we should also. They want flexibility adapt to desktops or to have the ability to adapt to desktops, laptops, tablets and phones. And they want it to be opinionated. And this, this gets the core of what some people kind of maybe hate about gnome. You know it's kind of like the, the macOS of, of desktop environments but you know, and what, what they mean is rather than giving in somewhat their words and you know, it's not necessarily wrong but rather than giving 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 macOS way if you like what they do. It's, it's, 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, you know this could be the distro you're waiting for the part. One part I maybe fear the most is you know, 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, it, 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 SP speculation based on what we've seen and, and what 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.
- [08:47]
Rob Campbell
Yeah, it. Boy, it's fascinating to me that both Kitty E and GNOME are looking at this like, let's have our own distro. And I am 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 using Apache build stream. So it's this existing sort of a project where you just take the OS and then you slap an SDK and then flatpaks on top of that. That's about it. And so sort of interesting. It's not really the kind of desktop that I want to run, but I do find it real fascinating. So we'll see. Maybe it'll find a niche. 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 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 go barnstormers and go crazy and everybody will be running it.
- [10:06]
David Ruggles
If they already have one for their internal test bed, why not make it something that everyone can use?
- [10:12]
Rob Campbell
I mean, I guess that's true. I suppose that's true. No harm doing it if you're already doing it.
- [10:18]
David Ruggles
Yeah, I don't know how deep or how customized their internal version is or I mean really how deep they're going to customize this either as far as that goes, but it's just going to be Gnome, you know, GNOME apps, GNOME desktop, Gnome all the way down.
- [10:35]
Rob Campbell
Gnome all the way down. All right.
- [10:38]
David Ruggles
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 Cute or Cutie, which wasn't like necessarily purely open. You know, they have their, their licensing and all that stuff. Whereas Gnome, when they came in, they wanted to not be tied down by these somewhat closed what, whatever they call 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.
- [11:32]
Rob Campbell
Yeah, yeah. I don't know, Katie and qt, it's not really been a problem.
- [11:36]
David Ruggles
So the license, I guess.
- [11:41]
Rob Campbell
I guess. And so Peter and I think that's YouTube says QT is not open at all. 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. They are, they are. They've got a bit of a weird, 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, it's not that bad. It's not like, you know, our least favorite operating system where everything is closed anyway. So let's, let's 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 have 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 could find one available at msrp. That's an instant buy. And that is of course, that 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, 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, you know, other companies have started making things that the CM5 specifically will plug into. Now the PIN out 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 snap together pins, those headers. And so basically anything that you can plug a CM4 into, you can plug the CM5 into because it is, it is basically PIN for PIN compatible. 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, you know, just, I forget what exactly those pins were used for. But there's some actual USB3 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, if you had thoughts of, you know, 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 USB3, which for a lot of things is almost just as good. You can hang a pretty performance network connection off of that, for instance. And so the, it's kind of, it's kind of interesting because a lot of us, like I said, we were hoping for more lanes. So like for example, the Turing PI 2 that I run, 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 have 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, you know, 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. 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 pi4 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 pi5 and the cm5 in the upstream kernel. Not great yet. Although with 612 some things have landed. It'll actually, it'll. It'll boot. I think you can actually get some video output but you know, it doesn't have full acceleration, video acceleration and all that yet. But yeah, it's a cool little device. And I am, I am of course going to, I'm going to buy some and I'm going to stick them into things and have some fun with it.
- [17:09]
David Ruggles
I know all the stuff I think was all there in previous compute modules. 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's on the back channel. Like Years ago, probably 2014, 2015, I gutted an old Nintendo, put a Raspberry PI emulator in there and mirror the ports as much as possible. But it'd be kind of cool if thing was just running off of poe.
- [17:51]
Rob Campbell
Yeah, it is fun actually. I very much enjoy doing POE with Raspberry PIs. I've got some of them around my house. They're like 3B pluses and fours. The first iteration that had the POE support in several places I've got three gang modules, you know, electrical boxes. Three gang wide electrical boxes. So like in 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 you know, the POE hat. And so I've got that in several places and that's how I do like temperature monitoring in different rooms. And stuff like that.
- [18:28]
David Ruggles
So you got sensors on them?
- [18:30]
Rob Campbell
I hang sensors off of them, yes. But you know, you could do. You could use several different things if you wanted to 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. All kinds of, all kinds of fun stuff. Yeah, 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 strap the CM5 in it.
- [18:59]
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- [20:50]
Rob Campbell
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 2. 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 there have been noises about Raspberry PI making another one of those, talking with Jeff Geerling 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. Like that'd be cool.
- [21:30]
David Ruggles
There's so many cool ideas.
- [21:32]
Rob Campbell
Oh yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, the form factor lets you do a lot of different things and I 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 where you even have hardware to run it as a desktop. And so, you know, 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.
- [21:56]
David Ruggles
So for people who are buying it.
- [21:58]
Rob Campbell
Because it's cheap, but does it double the price?
- [22:03]
David Ruggles
Well, the MSRP is $45.
- [22:05]
Rob Campbell
Right. Well, what's the MSRP for the CM4?
- [22:10]
David Ruggles
No, no, I meant doubles the price of the Raspberry PI.
- [22:13]
Rob Campbell
Oh, whatever it is you're buying. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [22:16]
David Ruggles
Give or take.
- [22:17]
Rob Campbell
Yeah. But I mean, so imagine this though. If they're going to make a compute module 6 on the Raspberry PI 6 in another four years, I don't know. And it's the same pin out, may or may not be. Then you don't have to buy the carrier device. You slap a different device in it. So you have the framework effect.
- [22:41]
David Ruggles
Yeah. Which is like my old gutter Nintendo. That's the Raspberry PI one. I really should upgrade that. But I haven't used it in 10 years either.
- [22:51]
Rob Campbell
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. Games and Switch games.
- [23:00]
David Ruggles
Yeah. Right now about. I think the highest it could go is maybe Super Nintendo and Sega, I think. Why, I'm sure it could do that, but I don't think it could handle anything newer than that.
- [23:10]
Rob Campbell
The horsepower difference between a Raspberry PI one and a Raspberry PI five is just unreal.
- [23:17]
David Ruggles
Be doing some Xbox gaming and PlayStation?
- [23:21]
Rob Campbell
Yeah, totally. You certainly can. Oh, all right, let's see. OpenStreetMap. What is up with OpenStreetMap?
- [23:29]
David Ruggles
All right, so Open Street Map, the open source way to get your maps. Who needs Apple or Google Maps when you have Open Street Map? So in the words of Bobby Borisov, who Ken likes to quote all the time, Open Street Map is a free map of the world that anyone can use to help improve its 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 Open Street Maps has been using Ubuntu on its back end 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, 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 main line. But the longer answer can be found digging through an interview a few folks that 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 is one Debian also has excellent coverage of Open Street Map tools and utilities. The Debian package maintainers do an excellent job of maintaining their packages such as OSM2PG, SQL and Osmium or OSM IUM 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 Uber to 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 UMA 2 is going now. Just, just to be clear, nobody open street maps 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. It seems like.
- [27:01]
Rob Campbell
Everybody'S trying to get away from Ubuntu. Yeah, I saw this. I think this is, I think this is really interesting. I don't know, do you think there's going to be kind of a broader move, people moving from Ubuntu back to Debian?
- [27:14]
David Ruggles
You know, I see it all the time. Like in some of the community xam, some, some of the Linux groups, it seems like so many people are saying no, just go to Debian. You know, especially now over the last, what year that they, that they have third party 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 Debian. I, so I see it all the time and I don't know.
- [27:49]
Rob Campbell
Interesting. 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 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.
- [28:10]
David Ruggles
Yeah, and like Peter I think is pointing out, Peter Janssen, he's in YouTube, he's saying clinics, Mint Debian Edition. That's another thing. They used to be always just purely based off of Ubitu and fairly recently, I mean, it's been a while they've had their Linux Mint Debian edition and I always see people saying use the Linux Mint Debian edition instead of the, the Ubuntu, their old original Ubuntu version.
- [28:42]
Rob Campbell
So LMDE has been around for quite a while. It looks like 2010 was when that was first made available. Well, all right, but 14 years, it's not the new kid on the block anymore.
- [28:53]
David Ruggles
People are recommending it a lot more than the Ubuntu version.
- [28:56]
Rob Campbell
Yeah, yeah, I think you're right. I think snaps have really left a bad taste in people's mouth and with.
- [29:02]
David Ruggles
That, I mean, like the Linux Mint Ubuntu version, it doesn't even, 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.
- [29:24]
Rob Campbell
It could be.
- [29:26]
David Ruggles
I don't use either.
- [29:28]
Rob Campbell
I do, at least. I have used OpenStreetMaps quite a bit in the past. I'm glad that project exists and is still around.
- [29:35]
David Ruggles
You know what's really cool about OpenStreetMaps 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 get the time again, you, if you 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.
- [30:06]
Rob Campbell
Well, it also gives you a lot more flexibility over something like 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 rehost your own, you can do that. Just the flexibility you have with OpenStreetMaps a lot more than Google Maps does.
- [30:26]
David Ruggles
OpenStreetMaps have speed limits on them.
- [30:31]
Rob Campbell
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.
- [30:37]
David Ruggles
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 gonna get me in trouble here, guys. I'm sure that, I'm sure the cops are not gonna, not gonna take my phone if I show that to them and say, hey, this says it's old. It says it's, it's 65, not 40, but. And as far as I know, I've, I've never found a way to update that. But if they have it in here, obviously it's open, you could update it.
- [31:15]
Rob Campbell
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 there in OpenStreetMaps. So that data field is supported at least in the format because like I.
- [31:35]
David Ruggles
Said, it just drives me nuts all the time. That I can't do something and say, hey, this is wrong. I can't give my input. I want to fix it, they won't let me.
- [31:47]
Rob Campbell
I want to fix it and they won't let me.
- [31:49]
David Ruggles
I want to be to my part.
- [31:52]
Rob Campbell
All right, 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 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, 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. 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. It's more broadly for quite a while now. I've been running KDE 6 in 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, you know, manage these, in some cases nearly 100 gigabyte files to be able to get, you know, 4K HDR to play. And one of the things that, the thing that has been really tying this up from, you know, say Google actually pushing it into Chrome is the fact that the pull request has been stuck here in Wayland for four years now. But, and so the link I have is actually to a Pharonix article and it essentially says that there's light at the end of the tunnel. And three days ago there was a comment, Xavier Huggle, who is one of the real heroes of Wayland right now, really actually doing stuff we'll Talk more about this in just a second. But Xavier 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 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. 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. There's a certain group of people that have like, ack and knack privileges. And once a certain number of them give their acts, stands for acknowledgement. It goes and it happens. And so he says, we need two more acts. He suggests a couple of people. And then one of those people does chime in and say ack. And he says on behalf of Weston, because that's the project he represents. So. 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. 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 the things in Wayland to actually make it work better? Like you. You're not allowed to knack things unless you're actually on the knack list.
- [35:40]
David Ruggles
And yes, you're. I'm pretty sure you did this on the show.
- [35:43]
Rob Campbell
Yeah. So some of those actually got merged, by the way, and it seems to be making a difference. Things seem to be moving a little bit, a little bit quicker. They. They did actually give a. A temporary ban to one of the people that was really being a pest and getting in the way of things. Temp temporary band. Boy, that's an interesting concept. I wish more places would do that anyway.
- [36:10]
David Ruggles
Yeah, but how long is temporary?
- [36:12]
Rob Campbell
I think it was a month.
- [36:13]
David Ruggles
Okay.
- [36:13]
Rob Campbell
I think it was like you get to cool your heels, I guess, as.
- [36:15]
David Ruggles
Long as that's defined. I mean, temporary until you're gone.
- [36:22]
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- [36:23]
Rob Campbell
What's the big deal? It's just a temporary 100 year ban. What's up, man?
- [36:25]
David Ruggles
Well, I'm paying you then.
- [36:27]
Rob Campbell
Yeah, yeah. No, it wasn't. It wasn't. 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 Wayland 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 Wayland 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. I'd be a real shame if some big company came along and forked it. And yeah, I'm pretty sure there was a, there was a, we're going to make some changes here or we're going to fork your project from, from Valve. And the Wayland 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 Wayland so you could push things into that and it happens more quickly. You've got the changes to the procedural changes to make it easier to get stuff to land. Looks like we're within a couple of days of maybe getting the color management stuff, which should get us over the, either over the line or really close over the line for stuff like HDR to work. And then you have to assume there's going to be an email sent from Valve to somebody at Google saying, all right, fine, we finally, it's, it's there in Wayland. Please go and make, turn HDR on in Chrome so that, you know, people can watch HDR videos on YouTube on the Steam deck. It's, it's, it's got to be happening. It's got to be coming. So finally, finally the right people lit a fire underneath the Wayland developers and things are happening.
- [38:29]
David Ruggles
Yeah, I don't even have any hdr. Well, I don't have any HDR monitors, but I still often promote and tell the HDR benefit of Wayland. And yeah, you got to have things like this obviously to get it to work more places. I can't just work in Wayland and, and not have any tie ins to work anywhere else.
- [38:53]
Rob Campbell
Right, right, right. It 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 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.
- [39:19]
David Ruggles
That's. Yeah, that's kind of, yeah. Dumb. I mean, nobody's using anything before it's made.
- [39:30]
Rob Campbell
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, it really was.
- [39:41]
David Ruggles
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.
- [39:59]
Rob Campbell
I never knew Rob is a Thomas Edison truther. Oh dear. Let's move on.
- [40:09]
David Ruggles
He did Tesla wrong, I think.
- [40:11]
Rob Campbell
But anyway, yeah. Oh, I read just the other day that apparently some of Tesla's works are still 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 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.
- [40:34]
David Ruggles
Well, if you watch a lot of sci fi, people love to put Tesla in things and you know, he's, he's like an alien in some shows and just this, you know, way ahead of the centuries ahead inventor that.
- [40:50]
Rob Campbell
Well, everybody loves an underdog. I think that's a lot to do with that.
- [40:54]
David Ruggles
Maybe that's all it is.
- [40:56]
Rob Campbell
All right, let's see, let's talk. Oh yes, let's talk about the UEFI bootkit malware. I've seen some takes on this.
- [41:06]
David Ruggles
Yeah, hopefully you'll have a take on this too. But after I tell you what I know about it, at least.
- [41:12]
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- [43:02]
David Ruggles
So headlines this week say that researchers discovered the first UEFI bootkit malware targeting Linux, dubbed they're calling it bootkitty. So bootkitty was discovered by eset when a file called Bootkit EFI was uploaded to VirusDotals. That is a great site by the way. I love it all the time. Bootkitty exploits the logo fail and this is a CVE from 202340238 with a score of 5.5. So it exploits that to enable the execution 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 because it's rather buggy and it doesn't seem to work very well. It's for example it uses self signed certificates 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 these types of boot kits have historically targeted Windows. And even though ESET's telemetry finds no signs of this being used in the wild, 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 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, maybe it was at one point. But today most mainstream distros support Secure boot. And today at least, and in using secure Boot, it could block things like this. Even GNOME OS wants to use secure boot as I mentioned earlier today. So although this one targets Ubuntu, they, they all aren't going to focus on Ubuntu. So you know, don't, don't run away from Ubuntu just because of, of this. But Ubuntu, there's a lot of Uma 2 users, so maybe it makes sense to target them. Maybe they're trying to narrow it down. But also what, 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 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 malware or, or whatever you're making better to target more. So, you know, things like Secure boot these days, like I said, most distros supported 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 it is, but sometimes it's like he's trying to install it with two they, they support secure boot. Just, 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.
- [47:54]
Rob Campbell
But 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 UEFI firmware thing. That's where, that's where a whole bunch of vendors used the, essentially the test key, do not use. Oh, that's fine, we'll just use that one. So like the whole thing is pretty badly broken right now anyways, if it really, you know, if somebody really wants to get into it. But where something like this really is a problem is like when you, and this is mainly an enterprise thing, but if you've got an encrypted hard drive and then a TPM where the TPM gives the kernel the hard drive 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 really, it's not going to mess with 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 rare and two, not actually that much more of a problem. Because this thing is, it's not like this is, it's not like this is overwriting 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 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.
- [50:01]
David Ruggles
And then you have to know it's there. Yeah. To know you have something malicious.
- [50:05]
Rob Campbell
That's true. That is true.
- [50:06]
David Ruggles
And most of us aren't running Kaspersky or any other antivirus.
- [50:14]
Rob Campbell
Yeah, that's true. That's true. All right.
- [50:18]
David Ruggles
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, 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 into, but if you're running Windows gets in, it's 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 at once on there too. So I don't know. Just spit balling.
- [51:02]
Rob Campbell
Yeah. And I bet you, honestly, the number of people that dual boot is so low, it's probably not worth it for anybody out there doing like general purpose viruses right now. 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. So.
- [51:23]
David Ruggles
Well, 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 one susceptible, but they may have the least to lose or the least for a malicious actor to come in and say, hey, I want your stuff.
- [51:57]
Rob Campbell
But yep, yep, this is, this is true, this is true. All right, let's talk about, let's talk about 6:13 a little bit. So we are towards the end of the 6.13 merge window and Laravel over at Phoronix has some articles here that I've queued up on the things that are coming, the big updates that have come in. And one of the really interesting ones here is that there's more Rust stuff. So the first article is actually about the CARE MISC pull, which that is sort of the catch all. So the care devices, that's like everything inside Dev, by the way, those are block devices, a lot of which are care devices. Then you have misc. So just, just everything else. So this is, this is sort of just the catch all. And this pull Request came in 4, 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. So again, for those that have not been following, adding the Rust stuff to the Linux kernel has been a lot of kind of busy work, almost like boilerplate code to make it pause. 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 would.
- [53:29]
David Ruggles
Those be hooks or.
- [53:30]
Rob Campbell
Yeah, they're kind of like hooks. It's really, it's like an adapter is more the way to put it. But anyway, Greg says he thinks this is the tipping point. Expect bindings. Bindings is the exact word that he uses 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. 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, you know, 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 yeah, so far it is, it's becoming a thing. There is another interesting story here that is also about 6:13 and that is that Microsoft made a pretty important add to 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. And 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 brain would have exploded. But you know, you go further back than that and say 20 years ago, just pigs, pigs, pigs might as well fly before that happens.
- [55:48]
David Ruggles
They'd be working it all right. They'd be like the, I don't know, the people from the Minnesota college contributing stuff.
- [55:59]
Rob Campbell
Oh yeah, no, at that point. Right, right, right. So this is the extend part of the embrace, extend, extinguish that they're working on. Right? Yeah, but it seems, it seems, yeah.
- [56:11]
David Ruggles
This is, yeah, this is the embrace. They're getting their good code in there, getting their name good. And when they're all good, here comes a bad code. Boom. See, Linux sucks.
- [56:23]
Rob Campbell
Thankfully. Thankfully, no, Microsoft actually has. They now have a business case for making Linux the. And so 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. 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. 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 stage. 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. But what you really. The idea with 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. 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, it's time has passed.
- [57:59]
David Ruggles
Yeah, we got rid of all the old crap. That's why it's just me and you today.
- [58:04]
Rob Campbell
Ouch. Bazinga.
- [58:11]
David Ruggles
See, if you guys, if you guys listen to this, you can, I don't know, see all the things I say about you when you're gone.
- [58:22]
Rob Campbell
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 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. And I'm reminded of Torvalds famously several years back, talking about how the kernel is bloated. You remember that?
- [58:50]
David Ruggles
No, I don't.
- [58:51]
Rob Campbell
Yeah, so he, he was on some. 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.
- [59:01]
David Ruggles
But I do remember back in the day, I'm talking, speaking of being old, 24, 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 I suppose you could always do that and really get the stuff out of.
- [59:37]
Rob Campbell
There are projects and places where people still do that. Open wrt, of course, is one of them. Wasn't very long ago that you could do a full Linux install.
- [59:48]
David Ruggles
Full.
- [59:49]
Rob Campbell
A full working Linux install on 4 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. And Nerves is a stripped down Linux kernel running just Elixir, which is based on Erlang. And that was super interesting. But they, they do this whole system in like 30 megabytes, everything put together. So it's a, it's a fairly stripped.
- [60:19]
David Ruggles
Down kernel and they're doing that for small systems, for embedded systems, 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.
- [60:34]
Rob Campbell
And 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.
- [60:45]
David Ruggles
Oh, so it like detects what you have.
- [60:48]
Rob Campbell
Do a boot, plug all your devices in. So you would, 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.
- [61:10]
David Ruggles
I could be wrong, but I swear 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 besides when I did that, I don't know, it's just following 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 his default or something.
- [61:40]
Rob Campbell
Well, 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.
- [61:50]
David Ruggles
Yeah, I was like make menu config.
- [61:52]
Rob Campbell
And menu config is where you go through and you can turn things on and off.
- [61:57]
David Ruggles
Yeah, I just, I feel like it start. I don't know know, I could be wrong. That was a long time ago.
- [62:06]
Rob Campbell
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 a. It's a fascinating idea. So if you want a smaller kernel, there you go. That's the way to do it.
- [62:31]
David Ruggles
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 minim minimalized and, and I think most of us may, maybe I'm speaking for the old guys here. We just don't have time anymore and it's just, it's, it's not worth it. I think really.
- [62:48]
Rob Campbell
It's like, yeah, indeed.
- [62:49]
David Ruggles
This works just fine. I don't know.
- [62:53]
Rob Campbell
Yeah, so there was, there is one of the. Is it Gen 2 that you end up compiling most of your packages during install?
- [63:00]
David Ruggles
Gen 2 you do too.
- [63:01]
Rob Campbell
Yeah, so that's going to be, that's going to be a similar idea. So if you really want to do that, maybe Gentoo is the way to go.
- [63:07]
David Ruggles
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.
- [63:16]
Rob Campbell
Like, I don't got time for this.
- [63:20]
David Ruggles
Yeah, I mean I knew it was coming but I just, I don't know.
- [63:24]
Rob Campbell
Yeah. Yeah.
- [63:26]
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- [64:14]
David Ruggles
It's better over here Now.
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- [65:16]
Rob Campbell
All right, let's see what is next.
- [65:19]
David Ruggles
LXD LXD62 yes LXD62 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 well started. And my containers which I haven't. I. I haven't moved as many things over to the the Alexey 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, I need to do more of that. But you know my current Manager of choice is Proxmox. And so although I am not an LXD user, some of the technology in LXD 6.2 update that just came out are pretty exciting. 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 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 all in one. It's more comparable to a VCenter VMware VCenter or something like that. Whereas LXD could be. But you install, say Ubuntu is probably the most likely one you're going to install is your host and then you install axed 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, it's somewhat of a different paradigm, but you could just have a bare bone system with lxd. So anyway, let's get on to the biggest features. 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 and GPU Pass through. That's kind of like the, it's like the holy grail of VMs, the containers any virtualized get getting that into your client 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. LXD also manages virtual machines, and this new Release makes importing VM instances from external disk formats such as VMDK, which I think that's the VMware one, and then Qcow2, which is 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 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 gonna sidetrack myself. I've seen a lot of advertisements, I think, from Canonical recently about migrating away from VMware and you know, I know it, I don't think it's. I never clicked onto it, but I think they're talking about LXD probably. Anyway, LXD 6.2 also introduces two new API metrics to improve cluster observability. So you can have clusters and 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 both 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. You know, like I said, I've never tried LXD being a canonical thing. Maybe I don't want to, but. Nah, I want to give it a shot. 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.
- [70:54]
Rob Campbell
Yeah, I imagine LXD uses a lot of the KVM stuff, or at least the QEMU stuff underneath.
- [71:00]
David Ruggles
Yeah, I know for containers I believe it uses lxc, which is the same thing that proxmox uses. Proxmox uses for containers and everything on Linux 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.
- [71:28]
Rob Campbell
Right?
- [71:29]
David Ruggles
You know, 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. Not that I try to use all GPUs, but maybe I could, maybe I'd find some more projects, more things to install on my VMs. You know, for example, when I tried to do POPOs and the problem was I did not have the graphical graphics acceleration for the Cosmic and it liked to crash on me.
- [72:00]
Rob Campbell
Yeah, I remember that, that. 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.
- [72:49]
David Ruggles
Yeah, I don't know how the infrastructure is actually designed for the automobiles, but 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, then if your, your, your media player crashes, it doesn't crash your Autumn automatic driving.
- [73:15]
Rob Campbell
You do not want your media player to be able to crash your car physically. Yeah, that's bad. That's bad when that happens.
- [73:23]
David Ruggles
What caused the crash? My media player had a bug in it and crashed the system.
- [73:28]
Rob Campbell
Yeah.
- [73:29]
David Ruggles
What? What do you mean? Cockroach.
- [73:36]
Rob Campbell
Moth, actually. Oh, all right, let's see. So I've got something just fun here. We all like gaming and there was a gaming leak and we're going to take a look at it. So this is from Valve and it turns out that 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 SteamDB. SteamDB, that's one of those websites that basically just exists to pull information from the Steam Store from the Steam database. So Pavel Jenjik, however you say his last name, I'm sure that is not it. He has a post on Bluesky 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 we get Blender models and sneak previews of all of that stuff. And it's interesting to look at. It appears that the controller itself is going to take more or less the layout from the Steam Deck with the sort of square touchpads and all of that. And it's going to make that just a standalone controller and then the VR controller is going to be sort of similar in that it's gonna have joystick on both sides as well as like four, four directional buttons on each Side that can either be. I'm sure they can be mapped to like up, down, left, right or abxy. So it. But it's just. It's just really interesting to be able to get a look at this and kind of get an idea of what's coming. I personally really still really like the original. The original controller that I've got. The original Steam Controller 1 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 favorite way to play something. Very much enjoy that. So I will definitely have to take a look at the version 2. Hopefully it'll be a little less expensive than a full on Steam deck.
- [76:05]
David Ruggles
It is funny how much it looks like a Steam deck without a screen almost.
- [76:09]
Rob Campbell
It is definitely inspired by touch pads which totally makes sense, right? It totally makes sense that they would want it to be basically the same. They want to have one interface for gamers and for game developers to design against and be able to have it in a couple of different places. So I mean it makes a lot of sense, right?
- [76:29]
David Ruggles
I mean that actually from one of the articles I read, maybe the one you had said that they learned a lot from the Steam deck and 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.
- [76:53]
Rob Campbell
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. It's. It's pretty cool to see but hopefully. I know this is the thing with Valve, right? Like so they. They have probably. It looks like they have unintentionally leaked this. We. 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. It's Valve. They. They work. But they invented Valve time, right?
- [77:24]
David Ruggles
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.
- [77:31]
Rob Campbell
Headless Steam deck.
- [77:31]
David Ruggles
If. If you had all the other computer in there except for the display, it's like a head. The Steam deck actually that. That'd be kind of cool. I mean you probably could fit. Fit all that in there. Just if you had the whole thing in there, you just plugged into a display.
- [77:44]
Rob Campbell
But that would be.
- [77:47]
David Ruggles
Somebody did that. Somebody. Somebody did that before it's been done.
- [77:51]
Rob Campbell
Sure. Yeah. Fun times. Yeah. We'll see if. We'll see anything. If anything ever becomes of that.
- [77:59]
David Ruggles
Was the. I didn't see it. Was the VR controller. Was there a picture in there anywhere or. Or.
- [78:06]
Rob Campbell
Yeah, there's a picture of the VR controller as well.
- [78:09]
David Ruggles
I didn't see it.
- [78:10]
Rob Campbell
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, potentially. It looks like in one of the shots there's like a halo around it for doing maybe more finger or thumb tracking, that sort of thing. So that, you know, that could be.
- [78:29]
David Ruggles
Interesting because I would love to see like, like the Valve Index controller, maybe just for like desktop gaming. I've never even seen the Valve Index controller personally, but I think it's like more. Well, like the Power Glove.
- [78:45]
Rob Campbell
So the index. I've used one. It's actually. They're actually pretty cool. The thing with the Index is that it straps on it. So it's got like a. You crank it and it straps onto your hand and then it's actually got. It's got finger detection and so you can open and close in 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 do the gesture of grabbing and be able to grab.
- [79:12]
David Ruggles
I would like to just. Yeah, that's kind of what I thought it was. I like to have just that controller and be able to take it to any VR 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 controller, the grippy thing, being able to detect all the fingers just seem like the coolest thing.
- [79:35]
Rob Campbell
So you can take. Let me 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 what. How does that go? I'd have to. I'd have to ask. I've got. I've got a buddy that's done it. I'd have to ask again exactly how that goes. But like 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 and then get the Index controllers and have kind of the best of both worlds.
- [80:13]
David Ruggles
The thing is, I don't have a valve VR. I have a Quest 3 maybe. I don't know which one I have. I have a Quest and I want to use those cool controllers with it.
- [80:24]
Rob Campbell
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 Steam installed, can you get into Steam VR with the Quest?
- [80:37]
David Ruggles
I'll be honest, I haven't tried. I have a different computer that I use specifically for VR, though. My understanding is it's possible. But I don't even use the Quest too much with a computer because it has its own computer. But you can link it to a computer.
- [81:00]
Rob Campbell
Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. Never tried it. I borrowed a VR headset and the controllers, actually 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 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 got to do and that thing I got to do. By the time I finally had time to do it, it's like, I'm so tired. I just want to go to sleep.
- [81:27]
David Ruggles
I love my Quest, but I literally have not played it in over a year.
- [81:32]
Rob Campbell
Yeah.
- [81:32]
David Ruggles
Like this summer, what I love doing, because it's wireless, I love taking it out in the backyard and then map out a wide area so then I can actually run around because I can't do the. I can't stand still and then like walk in VR, I get just sick.
- [81:48]
Rob Campbell
Yeah.
- [81:48]
David Ruggles
But if I can actually move and have the space to actually move, that's awesome.
- [81:52]
Rob Campbell
Yep.
- [81:53]
David Ruggles
But. And I was so looking forward. Like, I'm like, okay, when summer comes, I'm gonna go play outside and do this. And I didn't. I didn't. All this year, I'm just.
- [82:05]
Rob Campbell
I know. Yeah. Yeah. All right, let's. Let's talk some command line tips.
- [82:11]
David Ruggles
All right, let's do that then.
- [82:13]
Rob Campbell
All right. What is. What is D stat?
- [82:15]
David Ruggles
Dat. Well, let me just find obs here and switch my screen over here. So D staff for those looking is. It does a lot of things that a lot of other things do. Monitoring systems like modern cpu, MEM disk, IO swap network, you can do it all. So simple command is if you just 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 say D stat now if you ever heard of VM stat. But if you do D stat, 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 you do D stat. Oops. D stat 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 plasma shell. Oh, there's console popped up there. Oh and there's a couple other things that are popping up. You can do the same thing. You could do top, top not mom mem. So it's D stat dash space dash, C space dash dash top dash mem. Or you can do what else you do. You can do a D stat dash A for all the stats. You can do a D stat dash FS for your file system. How much is used how or that just gave me swap. So dash dash swap also a swap dis dash not des. What dash disk. Oh what? Oh two dashes D stat space dash dash disk is going to show read and read writes. You could do dash int to show your interrupts dash net for networks and you know what, if you don't know that D stat dash dash help to just show all the different kinds of things you could do. So you can do the load stats, you could do process stats, enable time slash date output, enable time counter, enable system stats. So a whole bunch of different stats if you want to monitor on your compete machine. Probably a good tool for debugging various things and see what's doing what.
- [85:31]
Rob Campbell
So it describes it as a replacement for VM stat iostat and IF status, which some of those we've talked about before.
- [85:38]
David Ruggles
Yes. So don't worry about those other ones that they've talked about. Just get Destat and it's going to replace them all.
- [85:45]
Rob Campbell
Yep. All right, very cool. So I am going to do actually a two parter a second, a follow up I suppose to something I talked about two or three weeks ago and at that point we talked about what exactly was it. So this week I 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 right, I remember now. So back on the 9th, I talked about SSH jump servers and how that you can specify where it will automatically forward one connect 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 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 local, excuse me, on a remote machine. And I couldn't just, just punch a password in. And I really did not want to permanently put a GitHub SSH key on this, you know, 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. 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. 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. 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.
- [89:14]
David Ruggles
Cool.
- [89:15]
Rob Campbell
Did you know that existed?
- [89:17]
David Ruggles
No, I did not.
- [89:18]
Rob Campbell
I did not either until I had this problem, went googling for it and came to this page.
- [89:22]
David Ruggles
So I use SSH all the time. It's probably my most used Linux tool maybe I'll say that.
- [89:31]
Rob Campbell
Yep, I can believe that. Definitely believe that.
- [89:34]
David Ruggles
I'm pretty basic with it.
- [89:37]
Rob Campbell
It's got so many different knobs and switches that you can flip and all kinds of fun stuff.
- [89:45]
David Ruggles
Oh yeah, it's. It's way more amazing than, than how I use it.
- [89:51]
Rob Campbell
Yeah. All right, so that's our tips. You have anything you want to plug?
- [89:58]
David Ruggles
Well, just my normal, everyday normal plug that I always give and that is come find and connect with me. My website, robertpcampbell.com 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. 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. Since the last time I was on the show, I did have someone donate to me though it looks like he, he donated anonymously because it just says someone in public. 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, me and base 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 thank you, fellow northerner from a nearby state. I, I don't think that, I don't think I'm doxing him too much by saying that much, but thank you, I appreciate it and. Oh, that was you. Cool. Well, if you want me to say your name, I could say your name now. Everyone on YouTube knows it, but I.
- [91:36]
Rob Campbell
Think he doxed himself. 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 T 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. It's a, It's a couple of hours worth of just chitter chatter about all things at 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.
- [92:22]
David Ruggles
I like your narcissist, apparently.
- [92:27]
Rob Campbell
And then the other thing is this just occurred to me today. We talked last week about the drama in the Linux kernel around Bcache FS and Kent Overstreet. Excuse me. 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 Bcache fs. He just needs to submit them to the kernel as CVEs and see how that works out for everybody. I just feel like that would be a fun resolution to this.
- [92:57]
David Ruggles
Okay. And Roger says okay. I believe that means okay. So thank you, Roger, for the coffees.
- [93:03]
Rob Campbell
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. Yeah. Oh, well, maybe. All right, thank you everybody for watching and listening. Those that get us live and those who get us on the download. And we will be back with the Untitled Lennox show next week. We'll see you then.
- [93:36]
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