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Untitled Linux Show 188: We Don't Talk About ChromeOS
01:11:55
Thunderbird, CEF, and GTK
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- [00:01]
Jonathan Bennett
This week we're talking about GParthead hitting 1.7 OpenSUSE's new installer release what's new with Thunderbird? What's new with the Linux kernel? And the big thing that GTK is dropping. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned.
- [00:15]
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- [01:17]
NerdWallet
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- [02:15]
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- [02:52]
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- [02:57]
Jonathan Bennett
This is Twit. This is the Untitled Linux show, episode 188, recorded Saturday, February 1st. We don't talk about Chrome OS. Hey folks, it's Saturday and you know what that means. It's time to get geeky with Linux and open source. All kinds of fun stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Bennett, and today we have David Ruggles and Ken. Welcome to both of you.
- [03:25]
David Ruggles
Good to be here.
- [03:26]
Ken
Glad I made it.
- [03:27]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, I'm glad you made it too. It's been the Jonathan and David show, which I'm sure would be fun, but it's it's better with three. Well, there's a show title for you, so we're going to let Ken kick us off. And Ken, you know I am a KDE fan. I've always been a KDE fan. One of my guilty pleasures is this application.
- [03:54]
Ken
It's not so guilty for me, but this week we get three views on the latest update to the application. That is Jonathan's guilty pleasure. We're talking about the open source and free partition manager that lets you resize, copy and move partitions without data loss. We're talking about GPARTed this time version 1.7 and the one I use the most is GPARTed Live. I still got to download and set up my inventory for version 1.7. Now we are hearing from Marius Nestor, Michael Larabel and Bobby Borisov. They all talk about the experimental Support for BCache FS and it's being restricted to single device file systems. GParted 1.7 also adds support for recognizing network block devices, preventing the gparted probe from starting LVM volume groups, and bumping its Lib parted dependency requirements. It now requires version 3.2 from EXFADS. Excuse me. GPARTed 1.7 also improves support from the EXFAT partitions by reading file system usage from EXFAT's Progs 1.2.3 or later fixes a hang when searching partitions if Butterfs progs is not installed, updates the continuous integration jobs for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and Rocky Linux 8 and fixes serial number for USB keys showing binary data if you use gparded live. Version 1.7 is based on the Debian Sid, which is going to be Debian 13 Trixie, but we're talking about the repository as of January 31, 2025 and the Linux 6.12 LTS kernel series. Bobby writes that international users will be pleased to learn that translations have been newly introduced or improved for multiple languages, including Belarusian, Czech, Danish, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Georgian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Polish, Portuguese, Brazilian, Port Portuguese. I guess there is a slight difference. Oh yes, Romanian, Russian, Slovenian, Serbian, Swedish, Ukrainian, and simplified Chinese. Since I've only touched on some of the highlights from each article, I do recommend reading each article that I have linked in the show notes to get each Author's view of GPARTed 1.7 Somewhere.
- [07:14]
Jonathan Bennett
Along the way, GPARTed just became the easy button for me for doing things with disks. Whether it was deleting or moving or fixing, it's just a nice cozy interface. It's way easier to use than either Parted or fdisk. And it's just. It works, it's solid, I use it quite a bit.
- [07:33]
David Ruggles
Highly functional, but it's got that nice GUI on top of it so you're not having to dig around for what code matches what in the partition table.
- [07:45]
Jonathan Bennett
It also makes it a little bit harder to accidentally delete partitions and ruin your disks and all of that.
- [07:50]
Ken
Yep, and great combination is gpar, did, Ventory and whatever.
- [07:58]
Jonathan Bennett
Fedora. Of course. Of course that's Fedora. That's the right answer again. Fedora.
- [08:07]
Ken
Along with whatever distro you want to play with.
- [08:10]
David Ruggles
Fedora.
- [08:14]
Ken
That'S your daily driver.
- [08:16]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, it's also my go to for a tool for anything and when I want to go play with something on Linux, guess what? I do that in Fedora too sometimes on my daily driver or that latest.
- [08:28]
Ken
Distro that you want to review. That can't be Fedora every time.
- [08:35]
Jonathan Bennett
I don't. I don't. I don't review distros. I'm not the distro hopper of the group. That's. That's not me. That's not my stick.
- [08:41]
Ken
Oh, that's Rob.
- [08:42]
Jonathan Bennett
That's Rob. Get out of here with that.
- [08:47]
Ken
So how many distros do you have on your Ventoy disc?
- [08:54]
Jonathan Bennett
Maybe two. I'm not sure. It's around here somewhere. Probably on the desk behind me like Fedora and Rocky is about it.
- [09:02]
Ken
Oh, you do have another just.
- [09:05]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, but it's based on Fedora.
- [09:07]
Ken
It's a capture fedora 40 and 41.
- [09:11]
David Ruggles
I was expecting once upon a time.
- [09:13]
Jonathan Bennett
That was the case. Yeah, not much. I think I also have a one of like the all in one distros that's kind of like just to check your check a Memory check, mem test maybe. For a while I was trying to get the ultimate boot cd, but that doesn't play very well with Ventoy. So yeah, it's mostly just Fedora, I think. For a while I had the Windows install ISO on there, but I think I finally ditched that. Didn't use it enough. All right, well, do we want to talk about data centers?
- [09:45]
David Ruggles
Sure. All right, some code.
- [09:48]
Jonathan Bennett
Take it away.
- [09:51]
David Ruggles
So I've got a link to an article over at the register and it's headline is Tiny Linux kernel tweak could cut data center power use by 30% and not bad for 30 lines of code, which is pretty impressive. So what they're talking about is something where the school of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo started digging into why they could see user level networking that was getting significantly more performance compared to kernel level approaches. This was in actually getting data on and off the wire and into applications. And what it boils down to is how you get data in and out of your buffers, basically. Traditionally Linux networking has been interrupt driven, which means the computer is just sitting there doing whatever it's doing. It's running program, it's doing anything else. Then when data shows up from the network, the CPU goes oh no, something has arrived, I must do something. Then it pauses its operation, it handles that interrupt, which is why it's called interrupt, because it interrupted everything and does whatever needs to do for that and then goes back to its normal operation. Now the reason that this was built was because Linux is derived from Unix and Unix was and is a multi user operating system. Linux is too, we just don't normally use it that way. So when you're under a multi user operating system, you wanted to make sure that all your users had equal access to the hardware of the system and nobody was getting too much or being starved for resources or anything like that. So it made a lot of sense to do it that way. However, in modern throughput oriented workloads, think about a reverse proxy or a caching process. Reverse proxy is where you've got one connection coming in from the Internet that you then need to hand off to a bunch of different servers to share your loads. Behind the scenes you can wind up having a single workload that is consuming resources equivalent to to multiple traditional systems. And for these kind of applications it can be much more efficient for the application to go check the network buffer than for the buffer to interrupt the application and say hey, do something with me. And so that is what they did, they actually broke it out. So that in times of heavy load, the network stops generating interrupts and it allows the worker process to pull the buffer so it completes its work. And then when it's caught up, it goes and says, okay, what else is out there? But then on the flip side, when there's nothing out there, the interrupt process gets turned back on, basically so that now if nothing's happening on the system and it's not going to overload it, incoming traffic triggers it. And so you still get the speed of response based on an interrupt system with the efficiency under heavy load of being able to pull a buffer. And while that's really cool on the network side, I think that it's also interesting as a programmer to think about re architecting your own programs. Anytime where you're doing, where you've got a queue or a buffer system, where you've got processes interacting, whether that's multi threading or between applications, sometimes it makes sense to do it one way and sometimes it makes sense to do it the other way. But just like they did here, where something was working just fine, but they went back and took a look at it and said, hang on, we can do this a lot better. It's always good when you're analyzing your own code and handling your own problems to always look at it and go, just because I'm doing it the most efficient way in this method, like synchronous versus asynchronous, it might actually be more beneficial to do both in different situations. The bottom line of this article is that while it may not be obvious just by looking at it, the significance of not interrupting the processor under heavy load has the potential to reduce the thermal load of that processing to the point of actually saving about 30% of the power use in large scale network operations. So it's really cool, and at least I find it really cool, and therefore I'm sharing it with you.
- [14:57]
Jonathan Bennett
No, that's interesting. It kind of suggests that there's probably a bunch of other processes where you could do something similar. I'm thinking of the difference in audio processing. Even this is something that the different audio engines like alsa, Pulse Audio and pipewire, they all take kind of a different approach to this. But it's that same question, do we go out and pull? Do we wait for the interrupts? Do we push or do we pull on the data? Basically, and what the right answer there kind of depends upon what you're doing. And it's, it's really fascinating that it dynamically switches between the two. That is, that is really, really Pretty fascinating.
- [15:37]
Ken
So we need to cut the code equivalent of a push me pull you.
- [15:44]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, something like that.
- [15:47]
David Ruggles
Did somebody's ups just go off?
- [15:51]
Jonathan Bennett
Your hearing aids need their batteries change again? They're whistling at us. No, it stopped.
- [15:58]
NerdWallet
Nerds, listeners, as we go into a new year, we all have a lot on our plates. There are backpacking trips across Europe to plan, personal best to crush in the gym, and capsule wardrobes to create Good thing. Our sponsor, NerdWallet, is here to take one thing off your plate. Finding the best financial products. Introducing NerdWallet's 2025 Best of Awards. List your shortcut to the best credit cards, savings accounts, and more. The nerds have done the work for you, researching and reviewing over 1100 financial products to bring you only the best of the best. Looking for a balanced transfer credit card with 0% APR? They've got a winner for that. Or a bank account with a top rate to hit your savings goals. They've got a winner for that too. Know you're getting the best products for you without doing all the research yourself. So let NerdWallet do the heavy lifting for your finances this year and head over to their 2025 Best of Awards at NerdWallet.com awards to find the best financial products today.
- [16:57]
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- [17:28]
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- [17:47]
Ken
Hola.
- [17:48]
Ford Dealer
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- [17:58]
Jonathan Bennett
All right, I've got the next story we're going to talk about. Gtk. That's the GTK Toolkit. The Gnome Toolkit, the G Toolkit. I don't know what it stands for these days. It's One of the libraries that sits behind a lot of programs that run on, well, Linux and on Windows for that matter. It is what makes GNOME work. It is also, I believe, what makes programs like the GIMP work. And some other things, a lot of things are built on top of GTK. And there is a blog post from today, actually February 1st, the day that we're recording this, and there's not a whole lot of interesting things in here. And they're talking about how they've, they've gotten rid of the GDK display, get default call because of problems with incomplete initialization and blah blah, blah, blah, blah. And then they says, oh, spring cleaning. By the way, they removed the old GL renderer, they've removed the Broadway backend, which if you didn't know, Broadway is GTK in the browser over WebSockets, nobody used it. They're getting rid of that. And oh yeah, they're getting rid of the X11 back in too, as a clear signal that they're going to remove X11 and Broadway in GTK5. And they go on to some other stuff, incremental improvements. And people that I know that are sort of in this space went, wait, what? And there was much popcorn memes being spread because GTK has just said that when GTK 5 comes out now we don't know when that's going to be, but they are deprecating the X11 backend in GTK and when GTK5 comes out, they it's not going to be there at all. So you don't get to make X11 programs with GTK anymore once GTK 5 comes out. And the take that I have on this is it's almost as if they're saying that the old X11 is no longer being maintained and therefore they're going to move off of it. And the truth of the matter is that the old X11 is no longer being maintained, essentially, and it is time to move off of it. I just, I found it very, very fascinating that this bit of news came from an unexpected source. But as Rob likes to say, the Wayland future is here and it's time to get on board. Yeah, super, super interesting stuff, at least to me. Part of the deal with this is the timing with Red Hat too. I didn't know this, but a lot of the X11 work was being done by Red Hat engineers. And when they rolled, which was it? Red hat Enterprise 6 or 7 rolled from like full support to extended support, essentially. That means that they moved a lot of people off of taking care of X11, and at that point it basically became unmaintained. So it's time. All right, Ken, do you want to talk about OpenSUSE?
- [20:57]
Ken
I've been waiting to talk about OpenSUSE. Well, this week Bobby Borisov wrote about OpenSUSE's new, still in development, Aguma Installer version 11. It brings several new features and improvements. This Release also introduces OpenSUSE SlowRole as a newly supported installation operating system. Aguma 11 significantly reorganizes the web interface, making it easier to set up root authentication before getting the all important install button. Better yet, the button visually alerts you with an exclamation mark if any configuration issues are detected, and it points you to the precise section that needs fixing. Bobby also reports Aguma is set to become the official installer for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 16 and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP applications. Since these require user registration to access software repositories, Aguma now automatically detects if registration is needed and offers a straightforward interface to walk you through the process. Users aiming to install SUSE Linux Enterprise Server must comply with a license agreement. Because of this requirement, Oguma 11 introduces the license acceptance step right after you select an enterprise product. The good news? OpenSUSE users can simply skip this new feature and keep moving Forward without interruption. Aguma 11 extends the capabilities of its command line interface. You can now run the tool on one machine while installing another, thanks to the new API parameter. This opens the door to scenarios like remote installations or using scripts that automate tasks across multiple systems. Now, I've only touched on some of the features that Bobby covered in his article, so follow the link in the show notes if you want to hear about even more features.
- [23:17]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, so I just got dinged on on a Mastodon thread and I'm totally distracted. No, the license agreement. That's what it was. That's interesting. There are some other open source projects that have license agreements, and one of the most fun things that I've ever seen is somebody got annoyed by that and went it's open source. Downloaded the source, removed the license agreement, compiled it, and ran that version. I'm not agreeing to your license agreement. This is dumb. One could make the argument that a license agreement may actually not be compatible with the gpl. I know a lot of people don't agree with Apparently Red Hat does not agree with that take. But I would, I would. I could make the argument.
- [24:03]
David Ruggles
Yeah, we don't talk about Red Hat and license agreements. That's. That's old wounds right there.
- [24:11]
Jonathan Bennett
Yelp. Yup, you're running OpenSuse, aren't you, Ken?
- [24:16]
Ken
Tumbleweed. But the license agreement is applied to the SUSE Linux Enterprise servers, not SUSE sles.
- [24:31]
David Ruggles
I used SLES many years ago. Migrated from Novell Netware to SLES when Novell purchased suse.
- [24:41]
Jonathan Bennett
It was definitely an upgrade.
- [24:43]
David Ruggles
Yeah, that was back in the early aughts.
- [24:46]
Ken
I can think back to when Novell Netware was an upgrade from Windows Networking.
- [24:53]
Jonathan Bennett
Linux was a very different place in the early aughts. Yeah, I did some work. It's not that long ago, but I did some work on a SCO UNIX box and I virtualized it actually, which was interesting and its own challenge. But messing with that box really, really made me thankful for all of the creature comforts that we have in Linux. Because that was primitive, like to the point that just like in bash, the fact that you can hit the up button to get your previous history did not exist in that shell. It was sort of painful to use.
- [25:35]
David Ruggles
BASH is the Born Again shell. I think they had the Bourne show on sko, or maybe it was the one before Bourne. Just the basic show.
- [25:44]
Jonathan Bennett
Could be, but it was, it was pretty primitive. You had to recompile the kernel. That's what they called it. It was not quite the same thing as a kernel compiled on Linux, but you recompiled or re linked to the kernel maybe technically is what it was whenever you changed hardware. And that was. It was fun. It was a lot of fun.
- [26:07]
David Ruggles
Of course, that was back when SCO was an actual software company before they became just an ip.
- [26:16]
Jonathan Bennett
I think when I worked on it, they had to become their evil IP self. It was an old install when I got to work on it.
- [26:29]
Ken
Anyway, that was back when GTK meant GIMP Toolkit.
- [26:33]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, I looked into that. Apparently it just means gtk. It doesn't stand for anything now. All right, well, what about ceph? What does CEPH stand for? David?
- [26:44]
David Ruggles
Ah, ceph. Chromium Embedded framework. So I've got a link over to a Pharonix article about CEPH and the fact that the Chromium embedded framework evidently is still working on its Wayland support. So we're dragging some things into the 21st century. Still, embedded frameworks for web browsers are kind of interesting because Chrome itself already supports Wayland, from what I understand. I don't think there's any issues with that at all. And I don't think it's relying on X Wayland, but so you can run.
- [27:27]
Jonathan Bennett
Chrome under Wayland and it has finally gotten to the point to where it mostly works, I think out of the box. It still uses X11 by default.
- [27:35]
David Ruggles
Okay, so it's relying on X Wayland. But the Chromium embedded framework is when you want web browser functionality in another application or you've got a situation where maybe you're writing a web site or web portal web application that you also want to run as a native application on computers without having to rewrite your entire code base so you want to just put a wrapper around it. So that's where an embedded framework like this comes in. This is the Chromium specific one which is using the Chromium backend. They mentioned specifically that Steam, OBS Studio, Spotify and many other software packages CEPH for their in app browser like experience. So I'm sure you're using CEPH without even necessarily realizing it because we all use Steam. Right. But the, the. So in addition to the fact that they're working on Wayland support, I found it very interesting to find out who is working on Wayland support. It is a software developer for Toyota and the reason is because Toyota uses CEPH for their in vehicle infotainment plugins, which they now use Wayland behind. So you may be using Wayland when you're driving around in your Toyota, as long as it's new enough.
- [29:13]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, that's always interesting. The whole car thing. I, I don't know if I've told the story. I owned a Mazda Miata for 24 hours and in those 24 hours I discovered that it was running Linux and found that there were ways to jailbreak it. And so I got all excited about running my own scripts on the little Linux computer in my little Miata sports car. And then the bank called me and said, you're self employed and you don't have enough documentation that you make the amount of money you said you make. So you can't have the car, you need to go take it back. It was for the best. We ended up spending the money on the house instead. So we bought a house and I bought a house instead of a Miata. So it worked out well in the end. But yeah, it was the same thing. It was a little Linux terminal, their infotainment center was running Linux and there was much hacking that could be done there.
- [30:04]
David Ruggles
The house is not as portable. Unless you have a really bad tornado.
- [30:07]
Jonathan Bennett
The house is not as portable. That's true. It's true. But I'd rather live in my house than live in my car.
- [30:12]
David Ruggles
Indeed.
- [30:14]
Jonathan Bennett
And also the old house was only like 41400 square foot and having three kids in that just wasn't going to be any fun. So we got a house upgrade instead of a car upgrade. All right, let's move on then to kde, because we're just going to talk about all of the desktop things today, of course, and the news here is that we are basically a week and a half away from KDE3, and it's all pretty quiet at this point. So we've got a link off to Nate Graham's blog, and his main point is that it feels like a good one. It's coming now. He's got some things teased for 6.4, but we're at the point to where we're doing little improvements to 6.3 to make sure that things work the way that they're supposed to. For example, in the Task Manager, the previews where you have playback controls, it's only going to show it for the window that's playing audio, as opposed to all of them, which that's actually if that starts working, that'll be really nice that. It's something I'm looking forward to. If you have multiple Chrome windows, trying to figure out which one is the one making noise sometimes is a challenge. There's some other things like the ability to right click and empty trash. That context menu is going to be a little bit better. And then over in Plasma 6.4, which that's kind of the next branch, they've got some other things going on there with the keyboard shortcuts and fixing some things on the system settings, region and language page. But the main thing here is just bug fixes. Lots and lots of bug Fixes for Plasma 6.3. Getting rid of K1 crashes, fixing things with color profiles. Lots and lots of fixes here. And like I said, it's about a week and a half until we're going to see 6.3, and I am looking forward to it. I will probably try to go and update to it just about as soon as I can. Which, yes, may mean running Rawhide packages on my main desktop again. I like to live dangerous. What can I say, I take a walk on the wild side when it comes to Linux. The KDE stuff is also interesting. Another story I've been following, I think I mentioned it last week, is there's an HDR patch floating around in Firefox of all places. And yes, it looks like Linux HDR is going to come to Firefox before it comes to Chrome. So long as we don't talk about the Google Chrome os, we don't Talk about Chrome os. But yeah, that is working its way through and we're waiting for another revision of that patch to land from the guy that's running it, who is, interestingly enough, a Red Hat employee. It's a Red Hat employee that's working on the Wayland stuff for Firefox. I was kind of surprised by that. But like that's his job apparently. Apparently that's one of his main jobs there at. At Red Hat is working on Firewall.
- [33:16]
Ken
HDR support so much.
- [33:19]
Jonathan Bennett
I. I don't know, I just. It's what he's. I mean it's kind of. It's kind of the ne. Natural next thing for Firefox when it comes to Wayland support.
- [33:28]
Ken
Got those enterprise users with HDR capable.
- [33:32]
Jonathan Bennett
Monitors that I'm sure a lot of them do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know for sure what all the use case is there, but that's one of the things he is working on and that's coming along too. But the cool thing is that that landed. The part of Wayland that that talks to actually landed in KDE 6.2. So it's already there. And so like in Fedora and all of those places, just as soon as Firefox lands that patch, it's going to fire up and start working in kde. At least.
- [34:02]
Ken
Here's going to be a scary thought for you, Jonathan.
- [34:05]
Jonathan Bennett
What's that?
- [34:06]
Ken
When is Wayland going to give you a good support for HDR capable webcams?
- [34:18]
Jonathan Bennett
That's not really a Wayland thing. That's more of a video for Linux. Either a V4L2 or that might come first via Lib camera. That's kind of the replacement for V4L2 Lib camera with Pipewire. I don't know if Pipewire supports HDR at all or not. That is an interesting. That is actually a really interesting thought. There's quite a bit of that stack that I don't know if it's ready. So like, I know there's a way to do HDR over hdmi, but you would have to have, I think a capture card that was capable of doing that. And then. Yeah, I don't know how much of that is wired up. Probably quite a bit of work left to do there to be able to do live capture of hdr, I would assume.
- [34:59]
Ken
I can tell you for a fact you don't want to see me in hdr.
- [35:06]
Jonathan Bennett
It's bad enough that we've got you in a full def. Full hd. All right, let's see what is up next. Yes, Thunderbird, Thunderbird, which I will get you a quick plug. I don't know who's going to co host for it, but we've got One of the guys from Thunderbird is going to be on Floss Weekly. I think he's going to be on Floss Weekly this Tuesday, but we're not going to release the episode until next Wednesday. We're actually a week ahead there, but Ken wet our appetite for that. What is up with Thunderbird?
- [35:38]
Ken
Well, this appetite winner is coming from Bobby Borisov and Marius Nestor. They both wrote about Mozilla's release of its latest development of Thunderbird 134. Now they both start off by warning you Mozilla Thunderbird 134 is a monthly development release that only should be used for testing purposes. Marius states this release brings one new feature, a notification system for real time desktop alerts. Bobby says with this new feature, Thunderbird can deliver immediate alerts on your desktop whenever new mail arrives, ensuring that important messages never go unnoticed. Mozilla Thunderbird 134 also contains numerous bug fixes that should make Thunderbird more stable and reliable. It fixes a startup crash when using POP3, fixes a hanguin downloading message history headers from a newsgroup, and fixes APOP authentication for POP3 to prompt the corrected password. Performance improvements include smoother message list updates as well as reduced delays in large virtual folders. According to Marius, Mozilla Thunderbird 134 makes it possible to drag embedded images from a mezzo message to a compose window. As always, I recommend reading the articles linked in the Show Notes for more details.
- [37:17]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, you know, I am actually a Thunderbird user. I'm a bit of a Firefox user these days too, and I was pretty much Chrome everywhere. And then we interviewed the Firefox guys and they were telling me that, oh yeah, extensions work on Android now. Like what? Something I was waiting for for the longest time. So they kind of converted me and I've got, I think more tabs open in Firefox on my phone right now than I do on chr. But yeah, I've been using Thunderbird for a long time because it's just, it's just the, the, I mean, it's really the webmail or the, excuse me, the desktop web app. If you don't want to use your webmail, whatever your webmail is. Thunderbird is pretty much the only other game in town that's, that's really particularly good.
- [37:59]
Ken
Now, do you use it to down as a POP for POP3 or do you configure everything for IMAP so it's still in the cloud?
- [38:10]
Jonathan Bennett
I think IMAP, I would have to check. I think I'm primarily IMAP though. But there are reasons that you might want to pop it. You may want to pop and IMAP for that matter.
- [38:22]
Ken
If you've got it set up on a server to have that as the pop and then IMAP for all the other devices that you use to check your email with.
- [38:30]
Jonathan Bennett
Yep, yep. Or if you want to have a. If you want to have a device somewhere that is your kind of your archive, you could just make sure you got Thunderbird running there, running as pop, and it'll suck down all of that email and keep it there forever.
- [38:44]
Ken
And that particular one has a filter or filter set up so that it moves it into archive folders.
- [38:53]
Jonathan Bennett
You could do that. Yep. It is neat to see Thunderbird continuing to make break. You know, for a while there, Thunderbird was the forgotten stepchild of Mozilla. And they have really here in the last, I think about the last year, they've really stepped forward and started working on it again. I understand that apparently they're getting some like, direct donations from the community directly to the Thunderbird project. It actually makes me wonder if there's a potential future where Thunderbird spins out from Mozilla. We'll see. I don't know. I don't know if that's in the cards or not. It's something I can ask about.
- [39:31]
Ken
Does anybody remember the seamonkey project?
- [39:36]
Jonathan Bennett
I know the term. I tried to look into that a few times and never made much progress with it. What exactly was Seabunky?
- [39:44]
Ken
It was a community effort to develop an Internet application suite.
- [39:53]
Jonathan Bennett
So it was like your browser and your. Your email and maybe something to edit the web all at the same time.
- [40:03]
Ken
Yep.
- [40:06]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah. I never actually used seamonkey. I always thought it sounded interesting, but I think by the time that I finally became aware of it, it was already sort of dead. So. All right, let's see what is up next. Aho, David, you're going there, huh?
- [40:25]
David Ruggles
I'm not going very far.
- [40:28]
Jonathan Bennett
Tell us about the OpenAI that isn't.
- [40:31]
David Ruggles
Yes. I mean, we'd love to not talk about AI. And so I've linked to a TechCrunch article and the headline is Sam Altman. OpenAI has been on the wrong side of history concerning Open Source. And this is actually a summary of a Reddit AMA with the OpenAI team. So one of the Interesting. It's the Internet, so you can get some very off the wall questions and some crazy out there stuff, but when you do have especially high profile people doing AMAs, you got people that aren't afraid to ask the hard questions and it's interesting to see what the responses are. So the article goes into a lot of different stuff out of the AMA and I am neither here nor there on OpenAI, so I don't really want to dive into all of that. But I did think that the section about the open source strategy was interesting. Altman specifically is quoted as saying not everyone at OpenAI shares his view that they need to figure out a different meaning more open open source strategy. And he does admit that it's not his current or it's not the OpenAI's current highest priority. But he's saying that as they continue to produce better models, they're going to look at open sourcing some of the previous models as they're no longer making as much money off of them. That was my editorialness, Kevin. Well, the OpenAI's Chief Product Officer also replied to that question thread and said that they're considering open sourcing older models that aren't state of the art anymore. And he said they're definitely going to think about doing more of that. But neither Sam Altman nor Kevin Whale went into greater detail on that. So I mean, it's a company that's got open in the name, so. But that seems to be about as close to open source as they're willing to get. Oh, but it is interesting to see what other activity, what, you know, the market pressures and things like Deep Seek and China's AI development and stuff just there's a lot of tension and it's interesting to see how openness either does or does not play into all of these relationships out there.
- [43:27]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, so the folks at OpenAI are special people. You know that's a non profit company right in by their government filing. At least that's a non profit. Well, part of it is it is a nonprofit. By their government filings they are attempting to take it from a nonprofit to a for profit business. Which is insane to me because that is a complete. No, no, I, I just, I cannot comprehend how any lawyer signed off on them ever attempting to do that. That is not a thing that you do. That's a thing. When people actually do that, that's the thing you go to jail for. Right. Like that's a.
- [44:14]
Ken
Anyway, Treasury Department standing right there waiting, I guess.
- [44:21]
Jonathan Bennett
Well, it's not necessarily The Treasury Department, it's going to be like the IRS and the Federal Trade Commission, places like that. Because that's just not the way. That's not the way business law and nonprofit law works in the United States. It's also, I don't know if you remember, that is the place that had. Back in, I think it was September, they made the news because several people left on their leadership board and come to find out it was like the, I hate to say the good guys, because it's not a black and white issue, but it was the people that were saying, hey, let's be a little bit more careful about this thing. Those are the ones that left.
- [45:02]
David Ruggles
Or got pushed out.
- [45:03]
Jonathan Bennett
Or got pushed out. Right. Which version of the story you read? Yeah, they've got open, right, in the name of OpenAI, and they are not at all one of the actual openings. Open source AI providers, you know, they're talking about spending hundreds of billions of dollars and the Chinese deep seat comes out and like, oh, yeah, we did this on a shoestring $5 million and we got this done. Now, to be fair in the comparison, the thing that they built is equivalent to the thing that OpenAI built for 10 to 20 million dollars. Right. So it's not quite as out of balance as it seems, but it is, it is still hilarious to me. It is still hilarious to me that Deep Seq actually uses the MIT license and is closer to an open source AI than what the nonprofit called OpenAI is willing to push out. It's just. Now, according to osi, I asked Phipps about this because OSI has their definition now of what an open source AI actually is, because it's kind of complicated. And the thing that is missing from what deepseek pushed out is that they do not have enough data. They don't have enough information out there about how they trained the thing. And so that's actually a part of what OSI considers to be an open source AI is you have to also either give people the, the exact training data or give people the details on what that training data was. Because in some cases of AI, your training data is going to be things that you just like, maybe even by law you can't share publicly. Right? So, like, what if your training data has medical information in it? You train your AI because you want to do a medical AI. You train your AI on medical information. Well, that stuff is protected to the moon and back. You cannot share that even if you anonymize it. Well, I mean, you could make the argument that Anonymizing it is training the AI. Right. But the actual data itself, there's just no way to share it legally. So there's kind of a allowance for that in OSI's definition of an OpenAI. That is, if you don't give it, if you don't give the world the actual data, essentially you have to give them enough of the recipe that you could replicate that data. You could, you know, do the same survey over medical data and put the same equivalent stuff into it. And yeah, except for that Deep SEQ is, is open. Right. It's almost what OSI considers an open source AI. And it's literally out under the MIT license. So it's just hilarious to me. It's quite fun.
- [47:45]
David Ruggles
Well, we do live in interesting times.
- [47:47]
Jonathan Bennett
Oh yes, very much so. I guess I'm glad to see Sam Altman come out and say that he realizes that they're on the wrong side of that. But I'm not exactly holding my breath that they're going to actually make meaningful changes. Yeah, they've not necessarily proved themselves to be the best players in that particular space.
- [48:08]
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- [49:10]
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- [50:44]
Jonathan Bennett
All right, I've got a story about the kernel's problem that may or may not be a problem, and this is something that kernel people have been talking about for a while, and that is maintainers and programmers too, but maintainers. Dang it. We have had a couple of kernel maintainers step down recently, and we have also, for geopolitical reasons, had kernel maintainers get dismissed as being maintainers. And we've talked about that where the people that were their email addresses were at Russian corporations that were on the United States Treasury's list of do not work with these companies, right? And so that was fairly straightforward. In actuality, that one was unfortunate that it was not spelled out why they were being removed as maintainers, but what was actually done was pretty straightforward. And so we have an article here that a DRM developer, driver developer, had to orphan his drivers due to health reasons. And then Cale Vallo, who has been a Qualcomm Atheros engineer for the past decade and was apparently the sole maintainer for the Linux wireless drivers, is now also stepping down as maintainer. He is. Jeff, another kernel developer, is going to continue to maintain a handful of drivers from Atheros, but the driver Net wireless tree, the whole thing, does not have a maintainer and as Callie says, there is no replacement at the moment. If anyone is interested, please let us know. But this sort of, this in and of itself is not great. I'm sure someone, I hope someone will step forward to do this because like having working WI FI drivers is sort of important and there's a lot of companies out there that are pretty invested in having working WI FI drivers. So I imagine there are people at Google that are on the. On the staff, right, paid programmers at Google that would do kernel work that could step in and do this. Some of the other places that, that actually do a good job paying their programmers to have people work on the kernel. So it's not this in particular that I'm concerned about, that the Linux leadership team is concerned about, but I know that they do have this concern that the maintainership pool, the people doing maintainer work in Linux, are getting older and grayer and maybe crotchetier, but that's not exactly what we're talking about today. They're going to age out eventually. Just the reality of the situation. People will get old and have to have to stop doing it because of health reasons and other things. And the question is, are there enough young people that are coming up and hacking on the kernel and doing it in such a way that they might become maintainers to continue the work? And this is something that the people at the kernel are particularly interested in pushing for. And they've got some official projects where they're trying to get more people into the kernel and sort of grooming them to be maintainers. And then unofficially there's things like it only takes you three or four patches to the kernel to land a job offer. So if that's the sort of thing that you're interested in, you know, start sending patches in and someone will probably send you an email with, hey, would you like to do this for us? So there are definitely on ramps, there are definitely paths to get in there, but there's just this question like the kernel is so. It's so big, but it's also so important. Do we have that group of people going forwards? And I think so. I think it's going to be a problem that takes care of itself, but I don't know that for sure. And so it's going to be interesting to watch over the next decade or two, probably is when we'll watch this play out what sort of the average age of kernel maintainers tends to be. If that's going to continue going up, we might have a problem.
- [55:03]
Ken
So when's the mentor program going to start?
- [55:05]
Jonathan Bennett
It's already started. There are several of those mentor programs out there.
- [55:09]
David Ruggles
Yeah, I think the challenge is less from like mentor programs and stuff and more from interest. There's just not as much interest as would be ideal.
- [55:21]
Ken
Yeah, you don't get recognized so much for Maintaining as you do for developing new code for or expanding new horizons.
- [55:34]
Jonathan Bennett
Well, I mean, so the maintainer started out, pretty much all of them started out by writing code for the kernel and you eventually you write enough code for a particular part of the kernel that you sort of, you know, you get the email like, hey, why don't you, why don't we make you officially responsible for this, this code that you've written? But yeah, it's just, it's just a question of are there enough people coming on board, new people coming into the project to continue to have a new life and sort of re. Recede that maintainership pool, that leadership pool. And there are people at the Linux foundation, at the Linux kernel that are thinking about this a lot and working on how to, how to take care of it and make sure that it continues.
- [56:18]
David Ruggles
Yes, kind of related to what you started with there, but I actually just dropped a link in the rabbit hole about a story that I had come across. Not really looked into a whole lot, but of course the whole sanction challenge and, you know, who, who's allowed to contribute to who and stuff. The Linux foundation has actually released a comprehensive guide, evidently within the last week or so to help navigate all that mess. But that's something you're having to keep up with as well.
- [56:51]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, fun. All right, let's move into some command line tips then. Is that the gong at the end of the news segment? Unintentionally, unintentional gong.
- [57:07]
Ken
All right, maybe we need to make it intentional.
- [57:11]
Jonathan Bennett
Maybe. I don't know. I don't know that we need any more bits on this show. Let's talk about pipewire.
- [57:21]
Ken
Yes, let's do. I'm going to be going into the command that I'm going to be covering this week is PW V4L2. It may sound familiar because last week I'd covered V4L2 CTL. But for those of y'all listening, I've just brought up a screenshot of that I took of running PW V4L2 Space Dash H. Basically it runs a command using a compatibility litter that maps pipewire video devices to be visible applications using video for Linux. You'll find a link to the screenshots I took in the show notes.
- [58:09]
Jonathan Bennett
You're beeping again, man. Oh, there he goes. We need to get you a buy me a coffee fund so that we can replace your battery back up it.
- [58:20]
David Ruggles
Stop.
- [58:21]
Jonathan Bennett
Now you're good.
- [58:22]
Ken
Okay, but the first screenshot I have here shows what the options are for PW v4 L2 as it the it's only 3 dash h for getting this brief help screen dash R if you need to go do a get into a remote, you put the name then dash V for verbose debug information. Now the second screenshot is displaying the command that I typed in to run. This particular one is where I use PWV4L2 with the dash V so I can debug the output before running V4L2CTL. And then I the rest of it gives the device that I want to adjust the brightness on. I'm sitting it down to zero. And then the third screenshot is what happens after it did. It gave a lot of output that I personally didn't really understand all of it. I could recognize some of what was going on, but it basically did what I asked it to do, adjusted the brightness down to zero. And you can see the result of that because the screenshots got the terminal at the bottom and where I was using Video Ninja for capturing the output of my video camera. And then with the. Let's see, is this the fourth one? And then with the fourth one, the fourth and fifth screenshots, the fourth one showing the command that are typed in for adjusting the brightness to 255. The fifth screenshot that I've got displayed right now is showing that the brightness has been adjusted to 255 again with the debug information. So you can look and see what's going on. And then we've got the sixth screenshot which is where I tried running obs from within PW V4L2 and here's what came up afterwards and it launched obs. Fine. It gave me some screen sharing options where I was able to select whether which screen to share with a console. And then when I tried to start the virtual camera in the obs, I got error message saying starting the output filled. Please check the log for details. Note, if you are using the Nvidia ENC or AMD encoders, make sure your video drivers are up to date and your final screenshot is showing that window with that message so you can read it easier. But PWV4L2 does give you the option of controlling your cameras and any other pipewire video devices from within pipewire.
- [62:28]
Jonathan Bennett
Now I am trying to run that command on my laptop here and I am in the weirdest little issue. I am Getting a command PW v4L2 not found but can be installed with the pipewire bin package. Well, I have the pipewire bin package installed. In fact, I did a reinstall of that package and it still can't find that application. So I will have to play around with that a little bit. Something about the pipewire Bin package in POP OS here apparently doesn't include it.
- [63:03]
David Ruggles
POP os. Well, there's a problem.
- [63:05]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, yeah, I'm sure it's on the. Sure, it's on the Fedora desktop behind me.
- [63:10]
Ken
This is Ubuntu 2410.
- [63:18]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, it works just fine on the desktop behind me.
- [63:26]
Ken
I did find that I could get the virtual camera to launch an obs by making one change, PW v4 L2 space sudo observation. But before you do that, you want to do a sudo V and enter your password so that you. And then run that command. Because it doesn't give you. Let's let you actually.
- [63:59]
Jonathan Bennett
Because it's in the middle of the. Yeah, because it's in the middle of the command stream. Makes sense. All right, David, you've got a command here that is near and dear to my heart as a fellow web dev guy occasionally. I'm not really web dev guy, but I occasionally wear that hat.
- [64:17]
David Ruggles
Yes. So we haven't talked about it before, but there is a command line program called Certbot and this is the website for Certbot. It's not really something that I can demonstrate very easily, but it's something I've been working with quite extensively the last couple of weeks. So that's why it was top of mind. But what it allows you to do is take advantage of what's known as the ACME Protocol and get automated certificates to secure web communication. And why I'm saying web communication, if you look at the website here, and most of the time people talk about this, you're talking about websites, but the certificates are for encrypted communication across the web, TLS and can be used for anything that needs a TLS certificate. So you can use them for mail servers if you're trying to encrypt your mail traffic. And the big advantage of this is using it in concert with the service provided by a company called let's Encrypt, which provides free TLS certificates. They're relatively short lived. I think they're 90 days actually. The interesting thing is Steve Gibson's been talking about that because there was a discussion about them going to six days if you don't watch security. Now he's been talking about that quite a bit over the last couple of weeks. But it's a command line utility and you can come in Here, select what you're using. I always use NGINX what you're running on and you got a choice of Snap or PIP for Linux. And I do PIP because that is the Python installer. And then you get the option of which one you're doing and you just simply walk through the steps and tells you what to install, how to configure it and you run it. And as long as you've got a functioning web server already, you can have Assert working pretty painlessly and then it's. You can set up automated renewals of that and everything and it's just a process to move forward. ACME is not specific to let's Encrypt. ACME is a standard for automated certificate requests and renewals and there are other providers out there that support acme, but let's Encrypt is probably the most well known one of the options out there. So anyway, if it's something that you're doing on the server side, just remember that Certbot is available to encrypt all your web traffic.
- [67:14]
Jonathan Bennett
Do you remember how hard it was or hard or expensive to get a certificate, HTTPs certificate before let's encrypt?
- [67:23]
David Ruggles
Oh, it wasn't super hard, but it was pretty darn expensive.
- [67:31]
Jonathan Bennett
There was like one other provider that would give you free certificates. It was a little bit sketchy and their website looked like it was out of the 90s. I don't remember the name of it.
- [67:42]
David Ruggles
I don't either. I never used them before. Let's Encrypt. I was doing paid ones through the various providers. There are a couple of different ones I used. Network Solutions was the original and they're like the gold standard in the fact that they want your gold to give you a certificate. So I never used them, but it was always paid certificates.
- [68:09]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah. And there for a while the extended validation certificates were a thing. It's like you could pay us $5,000 and we'll make the browser bar extra pretty in the web browser.
- [68:19]
David Ruggles
Yep. The interesting thing about that is you can still get those extended validation certificates, but when the web browser quit making a big deal out of it, everybody was like, well, it doesn't look any different, so why pay the money?
- [68:33]
Jonathan Bennett
Yup. Yup.
- [68:36]
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- [69:35]
Jonathan Bennett
All right, so I've got a command line tip, and this is because I have been. I've been working with getting ROCK M working on Fedora. You should install Fedora. And so my command line tip is rockminfo. It's installable on Fedora, it's installable on POP os. And if you run it, it'll give you a bunch of information. But really what you're looking for is it has agents. So it'll start with Agent one, and that's going to be your processor. And so this is actually a useful command just to quickly list what the processor and GPU is on a system, because it'll tell you exactly what your processor is. So in this case, my laptop here is a Ryzen 75800 or no, that must be on. That's on the desktop behind me. That's on the desktop behind me. That's why that doesn't make any sense. I'll get back to that in a second. You may have to run it with sudo or you may have to add yourself to the render group on the computer that you're working on. So on the laptop, this one makes more sense. Yes. So on this laptop, it is a Ryzen 7 Pro 5850U with Radeon graphics. That's Agent 1. And then I also have an Agent 2, which is Radeon graphics, a GFX90C. And that is the little embedded GPU that's in the laptop CPU and then on the desktop behind me, through the power of ssh, I can run it there. And I see that that has a Ryzen 7 5800X8 core processor as agent one. And agent two is the Radeon RX 6700 XT, which shows up as a GFX 1031. Now, now what that means is I have enough of the ROCM. ROCM is AMD's fancy. Let's do compute on your GPU and your CPU for that matter. But mainly GPU ROCM is their kind of answer to cuda. It is actually open source, which is nice. It's part of HIP or HIP is part of rocm. I forget which way that goes. But anyway, if you get both agents on ROCM info, that means that you've got enough of the ROCM system installed on your machine that it is aware of your gpu. And so this is a good first step to being able to actually do compute on your GPU if that's the thing that you want to do. And of course, there's been some very interesting things in the news recently about why you might be able to and might be interested in doing compute on your gpu. We talked about Deep Seek. I've not gotten Deep Seek to work yet. I've gotten some other things to work. But when you go to run Deep Seek, it's really interesting. You will get different answers doing it locally versus doing it through the Deep SEQ service. Because Deep Seek is a company out of China and so the Chinese Communist Party, there are certain things that they are told. You get to censor this. You don't get to tell people about Tiananmen Square, why Winnie the Pooh is hilarious in regards to China. A huge no, no, they absolutely censor that stuff and you know, some other things like that. And so there is, there is a legitimate reason why you might want to try to run one of these LLMs locally because you can get the uncensored answers out of it, which, you know, in some cases is something you might want to do. So anyway, we are going to, over the next couple of weeks, I think we're going to go down that the Rock M rabbit hole just a little bit. And actually it actually works in Fedora. It took a bit of, a bit of fiddling and playing with conda and pip3 and juggling python prerequisites and all of that. But I finally have it working and doing some interesting things. So that will be the command line tips that I cover for a few weeks here. So it's a show. Anything you guys want to plug? Want to get the last word in before we let folks go? David, did you have something?
- [73:49]
David Ruggles
Oh, oh, no. I didn't know about Winnie the Pooh in China until you mentioned it. So that's the rabbit hole. I'm Going down.
- [73:58]
Jonathan Bennett
Oh, yes, that one's fun. Just, you know, you can Google it. I totally got this show censored in China. If anybody listens there. I'm so sorry.
- [74:07]
David Ruggles
Yeah, yeah, I Googled it. So anyway, that's neither here nor there. I was just like. What? When you mentioned that.
- [74:15]
Jonathan Bennett
Yes. All right, Ken, you've got something in your ending notes. What is your link about, Ken? Is muted. Tsk, tsk.
- [74:28]
David Ruggles
But that also means we're not hearing the ups.
- [74:32]
Jonathan Bennett
It's true.
- [74:35]
Ken
Are you hearing the UPS now?
- [74:38]
Jonathan Bennett
No.
- [74:39]
Ken
Good, because I can't see the light from here to see if it's gone red or not.
- [74:45]
Jonathan Bennett
The package has already arrived.
- [74:47]
Ken
But the I've got a link in the show Notes to article Michael Larabel wrote about the cloud provider Equinox ending support of X.org foundation or free Desktop.org's cloud hosting needs. And this will be effective April 30, 2025. It's a good read. And if anybody's got any suggestions on what they can do to help with finding a new cloud host or raising money for a new cloud horse, maybe put in some suggestions.
- [75:25]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, I have thoughts. Banning the lead developer of one of the more popular alternate desktop environments. Maybe it wasn't a great move. Free Desktop is the home of Wayland and all of that, so it is fairly important. At the same time, if Free Desktop itself goes down, I'm sure that Valve will be happy to step in and maintain Wayland going forward.
- [75:55]
Ken
Portions of them.
- [75:57]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah. Good to know.
- [76:01]
Ken
How many projects does. Actually, does the x order free desktop.org foundation sponsor or maintain?
- [76:11]
Jonathan Bennett
I'm not sure. I know there's several. There's two primary ones right now, and that's Wayland and X Wayland. Those are the two big ones, but I think there are a few others. They do some of the other video stack stuff. Some of the graphics drivers. I don't think Lib camera is part of there. It might be. I could probably find out. Do. Do libcamera.org no, not that I see. I mean, it's possible, but it doesn't look like it. Not with a quick Google. Looks like it is sort of its own thing. Yeah, looks like it's. It's. It's its own thing. Not part of. Not. Not part of X. All right, well, we will. We'll follow that story and if they find somebody else to sort of be their CI sponsor going forwards, we'll definitely let folks know about it. Appreciate both David and Ken being here. Was A lot of fun. I'm sure we will have some of the regular crew back next week, although you guys are definitely welcome. I want. Ken is. Ken is regular crew. David is welcome anytime he wants to jump in, of course. But I appreciate you guys being here.
- [77:22]
David Ruggles
Good to be here.
- [77:23]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah. All right. I do want to quickly plug over at Hackaday. We've got Floss Weekly still and that is we had kind of an interesting week because we have a couple of interesting weeks coming up. I did an interview with Key Jeffries from Session this past Thursday. I'm hanging on to that until next week. And then next week we're doing an interview with one of the guys from Thunderbird and I'm hanging on to that until the week after next because in two or three weeks I'm actually going to the Zero Trust Conference in Orlando, Florida and that's going to take most of that week there around the 21st of February. And I'm actually going as a Twit host, so that, that'll be fun. Getting kind of the VIP treatment as Zero Trust world is, as Zero Trust is one of the sponsors of TWIT these days, so very much looking forward to that. The only other thing I want to plug is of course I've got the security column that goes live also on Hackaday every Friday morning. And we have a lot of fun with that. If you want to keep track, stay on top of what's going on in the security world, you can do that. Do that there. Follow me there. Appreciate everybody watching and listening. Those will get us live and on the download. And we will see you next week on the Untitled Linux Show.
- [78:43]
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- [80:05]
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- [80:30]
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