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Untitled Linux Show 196: Running With Safety Scissors
01:14:13
Ubuntu 25.04, Linus Rants, and Pi POE News
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- [00:00]
Jonathan
This week we're talking about the upcoming Ubuntu 25.04 release and the big XZ release. You may not know why it's a big deal, but it is, I promise. Then we sort of scratch our heads over EU os. We talk about the new Torvalds, rant of note in the Linux kernel mailing list, and a whole lot more. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned.
- [00:21]
Ryan Seacrest
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- [01:28]
Jonathan
This is the Untitled Linux Show. Episode 196. Recorded Saturday, March 29th. Running with safety scissors. Hey folks, it is Saturday and you know what that means. It is time for some Untitled Linux Show. I almost announced the wrong show there. I've been doing this for a long time and every once in a while it still sneaks up on me. It's like, oh, are you doing something else? Anyway, we are doing the Untitled Linux Show. It is the three of us today. I've got Ken and I've got Jeff with me and we're going to have a lot of fun. It's maybe, maybe a lighter news week than normal. I'm not sure. It kind of seemed nothing, nothing earth shattering this week. At least that I'm aware of.
- [02:09]
Ken
No, I'd agree. It was calmer, calmer sailing. But you know, calm is good.
- [02:15]
Jonathan
Every once in a while you need some calm. Calm is good.
- [02:17]
Ken
Yeah, yeah.
- [02:19]
Jonathan
There is something sort of big in Ken's world over in Ubuntu land. And I'm going to jump over to Jeff, who, who also is going to talk about Ubuntu. But something nice. So we'll just do these two stories out of order. We'll let Jeff go first, we'll have Ken disconnect and reconnect, and then we will jump back in with Ken's story.
- [02:37]
Ken
Yeah so as you're soon to learn, Ubuntu 25.04 beta has been released and its full release is less than a month away. It's time to drive into whether there are any notable regressions or improvements in performance. Michael Errible from Phoronix has done extensive benchmarking to analyze the performance of the updated code, and he tested Ubuntu 24.10 alongside 25.04 beta using an AMD Ryzen 9 7900X3D which the 12 core processor or sorry, that should have been dyslexia there. 9700X3D 12 sorry, 9900 because I specifically remember it was kind of weird that he used the brand new 12 core system that he we did the benchmarking on last week, but sorry, 9900x3D12 core processor, 24 threads. His setup included two 16 gigabyte DDR5 sticks at 6000 mega transfers per second and he used an AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX GPU. Now, if you check the link provided in the show notes, you'll find a detailed list of version changes between the two. For Java, Python security updates, compiler flags, you know all the nuances between the two operating systems. Michael noted that these benchmarks focus on desktop usage, not server or high performance computing workloads. Those tests are likely to follow later using enterprise or server grade hardware. While the AMD graphics hardware used here slightly older, it's far from obsolete. You know, importantly though, there's or even impressively, there's still some gains for coming for rdna3 graphics cards, especially when it comes to Vulcan, which saw a notable uplift in performance. RDNA 4 of course is still an involving driver state and getting better all the time, but Michael picked rdna3 because it not only shows what more people would have, but rDNA 4 wasn't out even wasn't even available when 24.10 was released, so wouldn't really be a fair comparison to compare an operating system for hardware that didn't exist yet. And because the changes in the driver, he was picking something a little more stable, hardware wise and driver wise to see what subtle improvements came in. For gaming benchmarks, the improvements were evident, but generally minor and not always Noticeable in real world gameplay. Still, you know, faster is faster. And overall most benchmarks were closely matched, but the 2504 snagged a few small victories. Out of 129 tests, 2504 beta claimed 91 first place finishes compared to 2410's 38. However, when you look at the geometric mean and the rankings, the wins for the 2410 were narrow. And while 2504 excelled in areas like compression and Python performance with significant improvements, most results were neck and neck. One of the key takeaways is that Ubuntu 25.04 is, you know, it has a clear, pretty clear improvement, you know, but I mean, realistically we can't say Ubuntu as much as we can say, you know, thanks in no small part to the kernel maintainers and, you know, the, all the people that are involved in the graphics drivers and everything else that goes into making the core of Linux, you know, solid. Not that Ubuntu doesn't have a part to play as well, but we should give love to everybody in the community because it's a large community project, not just canonical. So basically, with the updated graphics, newer kernel, newer software versions, Linux performance is steadily advancing. For the detailed results and benchmarks, check out the article linked in the show notes. But in summary, there are no major regressions and overall the Outlook's very promising.
- [06:45]
Jonathan
Yeah, so something to keep in mind is that this is the up to date Ubuntu and we've got Kinbak. This is Ubuntu 24.10 that has been fully updated and then compared with 2504. So I bet it would be a different story if it were based on the stock like 2410 off of the original ISO. It's going to be a different conversation altogether.
- [07:12]
Ken
Yeah, because Ubuntu now is more leaning into, I won't say cutting edge, but they're a lot closer to the edge than they were. So they're really being more aggressive about updating their packages using newer kernels. Not holding back quite so much.
- [07:32]
Jonathan
Yeah, absolutely. Interesting stuff.
- [07:36]
Jeff
How do I sound?
- [07:37]
Jonathan
You're good. Ken, why don't we talk about Ubuntu Studio? What's new there?
- [07:41]
Jeff
Well, we're going to be talking about both Ubuntu and Ubuntu Studio and maybe even touching on Kubuntu. Marius Nestor was writing about Ubuntu Studio or Ubuntu 25.04. Plucky puffing puffin entering public data, vetted testing public beta testing Gotta love Live the Ubuntu Studio team also announced the better release of Ubuntu Studio 25.04. Now Marius reports that the recently released Linux 6.14 kernel will be powering Ubuntu 25.04 featuring the GNOME 48 desktop environment. Ubuntu 25.04 promises many goodies like the triple buffering feature from Ubuntu Papers as the default document viewer, replacing events I'm going to miss. I'm still going to use my ocular though, I think and beacondb Dash powered Geolocation Services Dual Boot Excuse me, Dual boot users will see improvements with a focus on BitLocker Protected Windows systems. Users can now install Ubuntu alongside existing bitlocker partitions if enough unallocated space and dual boot support are available for encrypted installations and other advanced scenarios. The Ubuntu Desktop installer even received a new option to replace an existing Ubuntu installation, so that should make it easier for some of you all. If you're already running Ubuntu and don't want to wait to download it, but sharing some of the same desktop features as Kubuntu, Ubuntu Studio will also ship with the latest Qt 6 based Plasma 6.3 KDE desktop Firefox 136 snap as the default browser, and LibreOffice 25.2 is provided as the default office suite in the full installation. Of course, Ubuntu Studio's most notable change is that the default panel icons are back and that default is dynamic based on which one of the applications you have installed. For audio applications we'll see Pipewire upgraded to 1.2.7, Audacity upgraded to 3.7.3, Ardor upgraded to 8.12.0. On the graphic side, we're going to have digicam upgraded to 8.5.0. Of course GIMP is going to be upgraded to 3.0, Krita will be upgraded to 5.2.9. On the blender video applications, we'll have blender upgraded to 4.3.2, not 4.4 yet. Hopefully by 25. 10, KDNLive will be upgraded to 24.3 and free share will be upgraded to 1.3.9. Now in our show notes, I have linked to the Ubuntu Studio blog about this release as well as Marius's article. The Ubuntu Studio blog includes a list of multimedia package versions. If you want to see everything that will be current in that one. I also want to remind you this is a better release. It should be finalized sometime later in April, but we could see changes before that final release in April. And Jeff, thank you for showing us how the performance will compare with the 2014.
- [11:38]
Jonathan
I'm currently running hopefully a tiny bit better in a lot of cases.
- [11:46]
Ken
Yeah. But the biggest thing is no regressions. But there were some compression in Python that really took a jump forward.
- [11:55]
Jonathan
Yeah.
- [11:56]
Jeff
Maybe Chrome will be able to support 9,600 sample rate. That's what was causing it earlier.
- [12:06]
Jonathan
Maybe that might be exactly what it was. Yeah. So it looks like the. The upcoming Ubuntu release is going to be. Is going to be pretty solid. I'm rather excited now. 2504, that is not one of their LTS releases.
- [12:20]
Jeff
No, it's only supported for nine months.
- [12:22]
Jonathan
Yeah. Is 2510 going to be an LTS or we wait till 26?
- [12:27]
Jeff
26, 2604.
- [12:29]
Jonathan
Okay, that's what I was thinking. So this is where they get to do all the crazy stuff, right? They get to try everything, try all the nutty things. Although I don't know there's anything too crazy coming in in 2504 Wayland, you know. Okay. I suppose that's true.
- [12:47]
Jeff
We've been talking about Katie More playing around with Pipewire.
- [12:50]
Jonathan
Yeah. Yeah, that's true.
- [12:51]
Jeff
I'm looking. I'm waiting for them to catch up with OpenSUSE. Tumbleweed. It's running 1.4.1 already.
- [13:03]
Jonathan
I kind of think Ubuntu is never going to quite catch up with Tumbleweed or Fedora, because those are just. They are the bleeding edge distros. Right?
- [13:12]
Ken
Yeah, they're not going to. They're kind of back from the edge. They're the safety scissors of distribution, you know. Now you have some of the Debian and some of those that. They're in Red Hat Enterprise. Now those are the full bubble wrap. You know, they're the encased in foam and all protected. But.
- [13:36]
Jonathan
I wondered where you were going to go from safety scissors. Yeah, no, that's pretty accurate.
- [13:42]
Ken
Or they just say. You just say they just fully take the scissors away. They didn't even let you have the safe ones.
- [13:49]
Jonathan
I don't know about that. I've broken some rel installs pretty badly.
- [13:52]
Ken
Over the years, but in general they run in pretty old stuff because it's tested, it's known, it's, you know.
- [14:01]
Jonathan
Yeah.
- [14:02]
Jeff
Even with Ubuntu Studio, I've done some damage.
- [14:07]
Jonathan
It's true.
- [14:08]
Ken
Danielle, you can. You can always do Damage. But if you're running straight rel or you're, you know, Debian stable, you're pretty solid.
- [14:20]
Jonathan
Yeah, yeah, that's fair. All right. So speaking of distros and interesting, unique things, there is a bit of news on the gaming front. I came across this article that apparently HP, Hewlett Packard is looking at making a Linux based gaming handheld. And that really surprised me. So we know that Lenovo is working on their Legion GO s and it's going to be steamos based. There are some other companies that are sort of looking into doing this. We might see something from ASUS and msi, but one of the executives from over at HP said that they are, they're looking at. Let's see how exactly these say it. Thanks to Valve adding the beginnings of support for non Steam deck handhelds. So Steam OS running on decks that are not the Steam deck, it is now possible to make a gaming handheld, an HP gaming handheld running SteamOS. And then he said something really interesting here. It says that they struggle with the experience of Windows and that sort of caught me off guard. Although I am reminded of another story in the news this week and that is that in Microsoft's latest beta of Windows 11, the next Windows 11 release. So like the Developer Preview I think they call it, they've removed the script that you can run at your first install to say, I really don't want to do a Microsoft account. Thank you. It's like bypass NRO I think is what it's called. And they've removed that. And so now Microsoft is trying even harder to make everyone get Microsoft accounts, which, you know, is something that most of us really don't want. We have to do a Windows install, we don't want to do a Microsoft account. So all of that is interesting. I have to wonder if that's the sort of thing that HP is talking about. Because you know, HP is going to want to be able to give their gamers their own, you know, first run experience. And on Linux that's easy. On Windows that's much less easy. So yeah, it'll be fascinating to see to have yet another player in this space and we'll see if HP makes something that's worth playing on.
- [16:50]
Ken
Oh, I bet they will. And I kind of wonder if the Steam deck was less of Valve wanting to get into hardware and more of a proof of concept to show it can be done.
- [17:01]
Jonathan
Sure.
- [17:02]
Ken
And then why make another one if you can have the hps, Lenovo's, the other hardware manufacturers who are well versed in hardware because it's one thing to write code and have very good code. Manufacturing hardware is a whole other world. I mean you could have a great idea, but mass producing it is a monumental task and expensive and you've got to have quality control. And all this sort of integration, it's a headache. And if Steam could go, okay, we did it, now we let all these other manufacturers who are going to fight for it run our operating system, which Linux can very easily tailor to whatever the hardware you have and you can add and subtract what you want versus Windows, where you're kind of stuck with the whole ball of yarn, you know, I mean you, it's kind of all or nothing so many times with Windows and I'm sure there's ways you can cut it back, but they don't like to. And there's probably a lot of extra licensing to have that custom version if you want a custom version. And versus Linux, it's like, I want to do it. Okay, have at it.
- [18:11]
Jonathan
Yep, yep.
- [18:13]
Jeff
So when will we see a console version?
- [18:16]
Jonathan
That's an interesting question. I personally, I think it makes sense to have a SteamOS console, maybe even in like the Chromecast kind of form factor, the little thing that just hangs behind your tv. I mean there's nothing that says that a console has to be a huge box.
- [18:35]
Jeff
Somebody comes out with Bluetooth or wi FI capable controller that would hook up to it.
- [18:47]
Jonathan
I mean.
- [18:50]
Ken
Well, I think you'll see a console when you see the full os, Steam OS PC release. Because really, what's a console? It's a simplified PC. It's just a small form factor. It's, you know, one of the powerful things of consoles is just they're very dedicated hardware. So, okay, you, you will just make up an example. You have an amd chip with 3D cache and an internal GPU, integrated GPU. Well, now you don't need any of the Nvidia driver stuff. You don't need intel driver stuff. You don't need. You know, there's so much stuff you don't need because here's your hardware. I can put it in a smaller package and only support these limited things.
- [19:40]
Jonathan
Hasn't there been some. Speaking of which, for those of you listening, I held up my Steam controller that just happened to be on my desk with a significant look on my face. Isn't there some like next gen Steam controller rumors that's been going around a little bit?
- [19:55]
Jeff
I didn't start them.
- [19:57]
Ken
Yeah, I, I don't think it would not surprise me. There's not going to be a second Steam deck. They, they said they were going to have a second Steam deck when they had a very major jump in hardware performance. I'm thinking with all the hardware manufacturers getting on board, why compete with your audience? Because their Steam's main business is selling games and if they're partnering with a whole bunch of other hardware manufacturers, they're in it to win it. And I think it's. I bet we don't see a second one.
- [20:34]
Jonathan
It's very possible like so you kind of think through the economics of that and what does Steam make its money on Steam? I mean they've made money I'm sure on the Steam deck, but like it's not the money printer that the valve, the, the store itself is. Right. The Steam store where they can just, they just have to transfer bits and they get 15% or whatever. However much they get on the store, they just get a percentage of the cost of the bits and that's all they have to do. Whereas when you make hardware there's all kinds of liability and investment. And as you said, making hardware is hard selling. Selling software is easy in comparison.
- [21:14]
Ken
Well, I mean they might not have even made any money on the Steam deck. It could be a break.
- [21:18]
Jonathan
Even though it could be. That's very possible because a lot of times later.
- [21:22]
Jeff
And they make it up with the software sold through it.
- [21:25]
Jonathan
Yep.
- [21:25]
Ken
Yeah, exactly. PlayStation and Xbox have done that for over a decade now. They sell the hardware at a loss, but they make it up in the software.
- [21:37]
Jeff
It's funny you mentioned that because I was noticing that major company behind very popular streaming service is in. It looks like they're partnering with Microsoft to let you stream Xbox games or play Xbox games through their streaming service.
- [22:03]
Jonathan
Which service is that?
- [22:06]
Jeff
Amazon's gaming service.
- [22:08]
Jonathan
Yeah, that makes sense. Amazon. Amazon has been trying to do that sort of thing. Various companies have been trying to make game streaming like that work for the longest time. And I just, personally I don't see it. The value proposition does not make sense to me because most people, I don't know that I'm ever going to buy the idea that you can meaningfully play a game, you know, a high performance game at Internet latencies because Internet latencies are like 20 milliseconds and that's a lot. Especially when it's added on top of all the latencies you already have. It just, it never did make a whole lot of sense to me though.
- [22:49]
Jeff
Would sure be a lot of help in pushing our. At least here in the states, our people who are responsible for our infrastructure on improving it.
- [23:03]
Jonathan
I'm not going to touch that one. I have opinions, but I'm not going to touch that one. Instead, we are going to go on.
- [23:10]
Ken
Ken is so optimistic.
- [23:14]
Jonathan
We're going to go on to rescue Zilla. And that is Ken's story too, because we did things topsy turvy out of order to start with. But we'll let Ken pick it up and tell us what is new in the newest version of rescuezilla.
- [23:26]
Jeff
Well, yes, we're talking about rescuezilla. And thank you Marius Nestor, for writing about the latest stable version of Rescuezilla version 2.6. He states this Swiss army knife of system recovery distribution includes a brand new base derived from Ubuntu 24.10, Oracle or Oracular Oriole to provide users with the best possible hardware support, as well as an updated UEFI Secure Boot shim package to support Windows 11 machines under the hood. Rescuezilla 2.6 includes the latest part clone 0.3.33 open source partition clone and restore tool and the Memtest 86 + version 7.0 open source memory Testing Tool. It also includes many new and significantly updated translations alongside other minor improvements and bug fixes. Rescuezilla version 2.6 release note states Rescuezilla creates backups that are fully compatible with the industry standard clonezilla tool and works with images created by in addition to Clonezilla VirtualBoxes, VDI, VMware's VMDK, QMU's Qcow2 Hyper V's VHDX and the raw image files dd or img redo rescue foxclones fog project fs archiver. Now Rescuezilla will only do restore only it won't let you explore those FS archiver files as well as a part GTK and redo backup and recovery. Now as always, I do recommend following the link in our show notes for more information about rescuezilla.
- [25:36]
Jonathan
Yeah, so just kind of thinking about that as you as you rescuezilla. Is it synced up with clonezilla? Like do they do it releases at the same time?
- [25:51]
Jeff
It seems to be close to the recent Clonezilla update, doesn't it?
- [25:54]
Jonathan
Yeah, I was just thinking through like what the what the release cadence of those two projects look like. Because you know, clonezilla is the it's the tool itself which is also bootable. And then rescuezilla is the Linux distro that has a lot of that built into it. So yeah, it's an interesting pair of projects the way they work together.
- [26:20]
Jeff
So you can use Clonezilla for backing up, but if you do have used another thing or you've got virtual devices that you've been backing up, you can use Rescuezilla for recovering those if you have to.
- [26:38]
Jonathan
Yeah, yeah, that's interesting.
- [26:40]
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- [28:10]
Ken
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- [28:13]
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- [28:34]
Ken
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- [28:38]
Jonathan
All right, so probably one of the things that you use in Rescuezilla to not take or well in Clonezilla. I suppose to not take up as much space on the disk is things like XZ and xzutils. And we just had a release of xzutils and this one is kind of a big deal. I'm not sure if Jeff is going to tell you why it's a big deal, and if he doesn't, I will, but we'll let Jeff take it away and tell us about xzutils.
- [29:08]
Ken
Well, now I'm interested to hear what you think is a big deal because I'm, I'm keeping a little high level because this can get pretty, pretty deep, pretty quick, but. So XZ Utils 5.8 has been released bringing performance improvements to the LZMA and LZMA 2 decoder, which sounds like a mouthful, right? Let's take a step back and look at the bigger picture. Now, maybe you can argue not quite as critical today as it was years ago. Compression algorithms have been around for a long time, and not just for storing data on block devices, but also for transferring data across phone lines and the Internet. Some of our audience might even remember in the days when computers transferred data with the speed and efficiency of two tin cans connected by a string, and their storage capability was akin to a small stone tablet. Over the decades, much of the compression we use today has become built in. And there's still a need for high efficiency compression and decompression. So it hasn't gone away. And this is where XZ comes in. XZ is not only a highly efficient compression suite of utilities, but it's also a file format or compression format, sorry, the XZ file format, to be precise. It improves compression and decompression using the LZMA and LZMA2 algorithms. Now, I won't dive too deeply into how these algorithms work, but. But it's the kind of stuff that lands you a doctorate. But for those unfamiliar with compression, think of it this way. Imagine I've got a Text file with 100 spaces. To make it smaller and transfer it faster, you could use a special character to represent that there's a compression coming. Then you follow it with a space followed by the number 100. So instead of storing 100 characters, you only need 5, 3 for 100, 1 for the space, and 1 for your special character. Well, when decompressing the program, it'll see that special character and the number and the space, and it can expand it back to its original file. While actual compression methods are far more complex, the concept is similar, so the dictionaries and everything, it's basically getting rid of redundancy and patterns. So can get very deep, very quickly, but the the concept is solid on the x86 platform. Going back to our update, XZ Utils 5.8 updates the Lib Zma compression library, boosting decompression speed by up to 5% on systems built with GCC runtime library exception, and up to 15% on systems using the MUSL LIBC standard library for highly compressed files. Additionally, PowerPC sees improved compression speeds for both Big Eddie and Little Little Eddie in systems as well on as as well as 64 bit RISC V processors that support unaligned access. For those wondering, eddiness determines whether the most significant bit in a binary number is stored on the left or on the right. The release also deprecates the LZMA utility script aliases including lzcmp, lzdif, lzless lzmore, lzgrep, lz egrep, and lzfgrep. It also rewrites the x86e2k CLMUL CRC code for a performance boost as a general purpose data compression library and command line tool suite. Xeutils 5.8 includes several other other updates, and these include support for CMake 3.20, minor tweaks to ARM64 CRC32 code, and improvements to BCJ filters. Be sure to check out the article linked in the show notes along with a link to the official website. There you'll find detailed documentation, links to the official GitHub page and there the official LZMA software development kit which XZ Utility utilities is built on. So from there you can dive as deep into the subject matters you like. So happy researching.
- [33:23]
Jonathan
All right, so as to why this is an important release that is because XZ Utils uses the even odd rule they have just they've made it standard and so your like 5.7 was their unstable beta releases, so you had 5.6 as a stable release and 5.8 as a stable release. It is significant because this is the first major release after the backdoor, which I think that is actually fairly significant. Not necessarily anything directly to do with the backdoor in the code, but just I find it a good sign for the health of the project that they've been able to move past it and do another major release after all of that happened. So it's sort of a significant release.
- [34:11]
Ken
For xz and in their documentation they actually talk about some of the CVEs and what they've done and they do cover some security stuff in their official documentation.
- [34:24]
Jonathan
Thankfully the 5.7 and 5.8 branches have been much less interesting when it comes to all of that. When you're in the security world, interesting is not necessarily a good thing.
- [34:35]
Ken
Yeah.
- [34:37]
Jeff
Unless you're trying to write a book.
- [34:39]
Jonathan
Well, yeah, I mean, I like interesting security things, but yes, I cover this stuff, so I don't, I do not want interesting security things in any of my projects. Just in my writing.
- [34:49]
Jeff
Just in your spy thrillers?
- [34:50]
Jonathan
Yeah, pretty much, yeah.
- [34:54]
Jeff
Jeff, do you think Michael Larabel might do a, do a performance check of it to see if it's any faster than the older one?
- [35:03]
Ken
Benchmarking, I bet. I don't think he will because it's very specific for the most part. I mean it's, it's compression, so I don't know as you'd get a whole article out of it because you compress, you know how you compress and decompress a few different ways and it's, it's kind of a evolutionary release, not revolutionary. So I don't think he would probably do it, but I could be wrong.
- [35:35]
Jonathan
Yeah, I would almost expect that kind of a thing to be. Well, honestly, it'll get covered in something like the Ubuntu 2410 versus 2504 roundup. You might have an XZ test in there that is going to use the two different versions of it and that's sort of where that would get picked up.
- [35:55]
Jeff
Or I could do a comparison between it and I'm trying to. What's the one I'm using? Went to the. I can't think of the name of it.
- [36:08]
Ken
Well, and you know, I say like in the XZ utils, but the LZMA and LZMA2 compression algorithms, they actually get used in a lot of different. You know, I think 7zip uses it and there's some other, other ones as well. So it's, you can't even just say, well, it's only xz. It covers a lot of different stuff. And for the most part, at least on the computer, data compression transfer, the LZ algorithms pretty much have kind of been semi standardized. I mean there's other like compression programs out there, but a lot of them are based somewhere in the LZA or LZMA tree somewhere.
- [37:02]
Jonathan
Yep, yep. And, and the differences. So like when you, when you talk about optimizing things, it's, it's going to be little differences at this point. It's things like, oh, we have AVX512 everywhere. There's this one AVX512 instruction that we can use to do this, this one part of the decompression and it's stuff like that. Most of the time it's not going to make a huge difference. Sometimes it will. Most of the time though, it's going to be just little incremental improvements and.
- [37:28]
Ken
It'S for those servers that it's maybe streaming some data and that's all it does. So that small improvement actually turns out to be pretty big because that server is got all it does. Yeah, 256 cores continuously compressing things going out or something and it, but for most of this audience, unless you run an enterprise, you'll, you won't feel it. You just want to know it gets a little better.
- [37:57]
Jonathan
Yeah, there's one other place where you might actually notice little, little changes like that, and that's things like in the kernel compression itself because on almost all modern desktops the kernel that is on the drive is actually compressed and a lot of times it's compressed with lzma. And so if a big win shows up in, you know, in the kernel itself, then your machine might boot a little bit faster and you may notice that that's one of the other, the other places that we all sort of interact with these compression libraries a lot. Warren Tar yeah, sure, you do a lot of tarring.
- [38:32]
Ryan Seacrest
Hey prime members, Are you tired of ads interfering with your favorite podcasts? Good news. With Amazon Music you have access to the largest catalog of ad free top podcasts included with your prime membership. To start listening, download the Amazon Music app for free or go to Amazon.com adfreepodcasts that's Amazon.com adfreepodcast to catch up on the latest episodes without the ads. Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons N. Safeway. Spring is in full swing, so take some time for self care. This spring now through April 22, buy two self care items and save $2. Shop in store or online for self care essentials like Tom's Toothpaste Soft Soap, Liquid Hand Soap, Colgate Optic White Toothpaste and Colgate Total toothpaste. And save $2 when you buy two participating items. Offer ends April 22. Promotions may vary. Restrictions apply. Visit albertsons or safeway.com for more details. If you're a facilities manager at a.
- [39:30]
Ken
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- [39:37]
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Jonathan
Enter Grainger.
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Ken
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- [39:53]
Ken
Call click grainger.com or just stop by.
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Ryan Seacrest
Grainger for the ones who get it done.
- [39:58]
Jonathan
All right, well let's talk about something else new that is coming that we all interact with and that is display desktop managers. And this has been quite the story over the last years. The number of years that I've been running Linux, I've been through quite a few display managers. I think there was a K display manager once upon a time and then there's gdm, the GNOME display manager and then the folks from KDE and maybe Fedora helped, I don't remember eventually went to sddm, the simple something display manager. And it turns out that SDDM is maybe a little too simple or maybe just doesn't have the right architecturing. There is now a very work in progress experimental plasma login manager, the PLM I guess and the folks at KDE are working on this and yeah, it's, it's going to be wayland first. It's going to allow some theming things that the other ones didn't. But one of the big things, one of the things that really intrigues me that they're wanting to do with this is have like VNC and rdp. So remote desktop from startup. I don't know how many people have tried to crack this nut before, have worked on this problem. But having remote desktop on a remote machine and being able to maintain remote desktop even after say a reboot of that desktop or power off and power back on is really challenging. So being able to have a desktop manager, display manager that has like VNC or RTP support in it from boot is really intriguing. It's also going to have things like automatically log into WI fi, which is important if you're doing something like you know, user management, LDAP or one of those, you're going to be able to pair with trusted Bluetooth devices. So that's kind of important if you have a Bluetooth keyboard, screen, readers, power management, display and keyboard brightness, even Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese input. Apparently SDDM does not handle that very well. Virtual keyboard is something again not handled very well. And even the high DPI and HDR support, right? So like all of these things are not done very well in sddm. They talk about gdm, the GNOME display manager being the gold standard in this. And one the question, well, why doesn't KDE just use gdm? And I think for the longest time you could, I think it may be that you still can do that, but the problem is that it just, it doesn't have all of the, all of the integrations with the rest of KDE that you would want. So ideally you want to be able to set your, say, your screen layout in KDE and then have your display manager use the same screen layout. And so that's the sort of thing that hopefully we're going to see with the kdm. The. I don't know, that's not what they're calling it. It's not kdm. KDM was the old one, but anyway, the new KDE based utility here, so it's not ready for primetime. It apparently actually has enough code together that it works. But this is something to look forward to in a couple of more releases. I don't know, maybe around KDE 6.4 or 5, maybe it'll be usable in Fedora 43, somewhere around there. Really reading the tea leaves on those.
- [43:43]
Ken
I wonder how much it has to do with getting rid of a lot of X, then maybe simplify some of the.
- [43:52]
Jonathan
Well, that's actually a really interesting question because kde, I think we talked about this last week or the week before KDE is intentionally splitting their X and Wayland support like into two different projects. And they are going to continue supporting X, but it's basically frozen at a standstill because nothing new is happening there.
- [44:12]
Ken
Right.
- [44:12]
Jonathan
And so I don't know if the new manager, the plasma login manager, I don't know if it's going to have X11 support or not. I could see that going both ways.
- [44:24]
Jeff
And isn't it going to end up being tied to the kwin, the. Their Wayland compositor?
- [44:33]
Jonathan
It will reuse some of those things, I'm sure. That's an interesting question, I think because.
- [44:43]
Jeff
One of the things they mention is that if they tried, when they were trying to do it as agnostic as far as the compositor, they couldn't.
- [44:55]
Ken
Yeah.
- [44:56]
Jonathan
So it's probably going to re. It will certainly reuse a bunch of K1 code, but I don't know if it's going to be like directly based on K1 or not.
- [45:04]
Ken
I guess I was. Where I was kind of going was would it make it easier to just say, okay, we're only going to take care of Wayland and whatever's working on X, working on X and we're just going to leave it at a standstill and that way you just have one less set of problems you have to work through.
- [45:21]
Jonathan
I mean that's A that's a reasonable way to look at it. I'm not sure if that's the plan or not. I'm not sure if they know yet if that's the plan or not. There were still early days on this, but yeah, it's definitely makes sense to do it that way. Yeah. So very interesting. Something we will see in the future as it makes progress.
- [45:47]
Ken
I don't know, I'm just happy how far we've come because I remember some of the old ones too on Unix, like cd Common desktop environment. I think that was the sun thing and boy, that was pretty clunky compared to what we have now.
- [46:02]
Jeff
There's a couple of people that are wanting to try to come up with a common desktop.
- [46:10]
Jonathan
You know, that's been a thing that people have wanted for the longest time and every time you try to do it there are problems with it. And one of the big ones is that KDE and GNOME are just different, they do things differently. You know, you could say that Wayland itself is the common desktop, like Wayland is the set of protocols that is common to the desktop. So I don't know, maybe you could make a login manager specification and put it into Wayland. I don't know if that would help anybody though. You know you kind of get to that go that, that, that joke about. Well, the problem is there's too many. There's. There's seven specifications. We should just make a new one so everybody can get on the same page. The problem is that there's eight specifications. We just make a new one.
- [46:57]
Jeff
Don't, don't go with making a new one. Just do a proof of concept.
- [47:01]
Jonathan
Yeah, and sometimes that works too.
- [47:03]
Ken
Yeah, except the problem is when, oh we're going to standardize in this. I don't like it, I got to fork it. I'm going to make a different one.
- [47:10]
Jeff
I've got an example of somebody trying.
- [47:12]
Jonathan
To do that with Linux distros. Right.
- [47:16]
Jeff
With a limits distro and using your favorite distros as a starting point. This is coming from the it's FOSS community. They posted about a new community led initiative called EU os. It is led by Robert and I do apologize of mispronouncing your last name. I want to put the emphasis on the I Ryman. He's a physicist and computer computer scientist by education currently working in Brussels on data protection policy. Now the EU OS is, as I'd mentioned earlier, proof of concept for the deployment of a Fedora based Linux operating system with a. Would you Believe it, a KDE plasma desktop environment in a typical Is there anything such as a typical public sector organization? But it is specifically created to address the unique requirements of the European Union's public sector organizations. This is not the first time a Linux powered operating system has been proposed for the eu. Similar goes have been inspired in earlier projects like France's genbuntu for law enforcement use and Munich's Limax or Linmix for government administration. Now despite the name, EU OS is technically not a new operating system since it is going to be based on Fedora. It's just going to be a. I would say a spin at the moment that would give you the added value of EU OS is standardized, gives you standardization. It would standardize own a comment Linux OS as a base for all EU OS users with options to layer on top modifications. You could think maybe a national layer, regional layer, sector specific layers, maybe even organizational specific layers similar to the way that Fedora and Ubuntu currently have spins like Kubuntu, Ubuntu Studio. The two examples we've had tonight, you'd also as we were talking earlier, we were talking about the plasma lock in a common desktop environment to make it easier for someone to move from one hardware system to another without having to relearn desktop behavior. Jonathan, have you moved from KDE to GNOME and then back again? Do you find your muscle memory getting in the way?
- [50:19]
Jonathan
Not for a very long time. It has been a long time since I've actually done anything with gnome.
- [50:25]
Jeff
Another area that it would help to standardize would be a common method to manage users and their data, software and devices. Now what do you think drives the EUOs?
- [50:41]
Jonathan
A government grant?
- [50:44]
Jeff
In a way, yes. It's the concept of public money, public code. I think we've talked about that in the past, haven't we?
- [50:52]
Ken
Supposedly this though isn't an official EU driven project, but to me it doesn't make a lot of sense. Why would. Why wouldn't they start with like SUSE or even Ubuntu? Ubuntu is from the Isle of Man.
- [51:12]
Jeff
Got a website it's a link to in the show. There's a link to it in the article I've got in the show. Notes that some of y'all can go and it's even got where people have come put in suggestions about that and discussed it.
- [51:29]
Ken
But yeah, you're right because like yeah, Cashios, Manjaro, there's. I mean there's a lot of German French distributions. There's. And why Reinvent it. I mean, if you could just say, you know what, we're going to take SUSE or Ubuntu or Manjaro or whatever. You pick one and like, okay, this is going to be our standard and help develop that for the. Rather than kind of recreate a bunch of stuff. It. To me, it just doesn't seem like it makes a lot of sense or else I'm not fully understanding what the goal is.
- [52:11]
Jeff
Basic, think of a minimal Fedorian installation that would meet all the EQ compliance requirements. And then.
- [52:24]
Ken
But if you have a European distribution that already is there, like say suse, it's already in the eu, it would need to meet EU compliance. Why not just tweak that a little bit? And then you could even then say, look, we have our own distribution we're using, not based on another country's. I mean, I understand they'd like to standardize it, have kind of a common base, but it seems like you could be further ahead by just, you know, you, you create the SUSE Manjaro Ubuntu EU edition.
- [53:04]
Jeff
Be honest. My personal opinion on why Robert went with Fedora. He already knows it.
- [53:13]
Jonathan
There's. There's one other thing I'm doing a little bit of digging into the same question and they're actually using it sounds like Fedora Kyanite and it's because they. It's about the only immutable distro that has a stable release.
- [53:33]
Ken
Okay.
- [53:34]
Jeff
Yep.
- [53:36]
Jonathan
That also checks all their other boxes.
- [53:40]
Jeff
And I think by going with stable release that checks all the other boxes, it'll make it easier for them to convince the European Commission to host them at Code Europa eu.
- [53:56]
Jonathan
Yeah, I'm still not entirely sure what I think about this project. There are some interesting ideas like take a standardized base and install or then have layers that you put on it. You know, so one layer for one country, one layer for another country and then you kind of descend down the. The organizational tree. You have, you know, different. Here's my Americanism coming out. You have different states inside of that country and you have different layers for them for their needs. Like that's an interesting idea, I suppose.
- [54:25]
Jeff
And those layers then would be. The responsibility for managing them would fall at whoever does that creates that layer. And then Liu, the European Union itself wouldn't have very minimal coding to worry about probably. And probably be able to just go with a commercial entity or a subcontractor in Europe to provide the maintenance on it.
- [55:00]
Ken
And there's a lot of Linux that comes out of Europe that's pretty true. A lot of a lot of projects, a lot of, you know their Europe's heavily involved in it and I bet.
- [55:08]
Jeff
Fedora's getting a lot of that European assistance.
- [55:13]
Jonathan
Sure, lots of lots of the developers are from Europe, from all over the place.
- [55:18]
Jeff
But just want to let everybody know about this. Maybe we should keep an eye on it. But check out the link. Be careful you don't go down the rabbit hole. I went down and reading about with the EU OS website and then the code Aropa EU website though you may find some interesting projects there that you may want to take advantage of.
- [55:45]
Jonathan
You just may Jeff, what about drm? Do we want to take advantage of drm or is there something disgusting about it where we wouldn't want to touch it?
- [55:56]
Ken
You know.
- [56:00]
Jonathan
That was such a terrible and perfect tee up at the same time. Jeff just doesn't know what to do with it.
- [56:05]
Jeff
Which definition of DRM are we talking about?
- [56:08]
Jonathan
Direct Rendering Manager for hdr, which is.
- [56:14]
Ken
Jonathan Loves so what we're kind of fumbling about with is what would an untitled Linux show be without out a good Linus Torvalds rant? Now the rants may be a little more politically correct these days than they used to be, but they're still fun nonetheless. And the rant comes about because of some testing code for an HDR test that Linus is not very happy with. The code is for the Intel XE kernel driver and it's to make sure DRM header files are self contained and pass kernel driver doc tests. These are these are basic maintenance checks to ensure header files are in good shape. This isn't anything really advanced or super complex. It's it's basically housekeeping code. So I'm just going to read Linus's quote or what he what he responded to directly. So grr. I did the poll resolve the trivial conflicts but I noticed that this ended up containing the disgusting HDR test crap that a slows down the build because it's done for regular all mod config build rather than some simple thing that you guys can run as needed and b also leaves random HDR test turds around the include directories. People already complain separately about this and it should have never made it to me in this broken form. Why in the heck is this testing being done as a regular part of the build? And dammit, we don't add random turd files for dependencies and then make the source tree that then make the source tree nasty. The stupid that made me notice it was that it was still, the thing that made me notice that it was still there was that git status complains about the stupid turds not being removed. But more importantly, those turds also break file name completion. So no, adding it to gitignore doesn't actually fix the problem. It would just have made me notice, not have noticed it as quickly. This thing needs to die, and that's in. Got some asterisks around that. If you want to do that HDR test thing, do it as part of your own checks. Don't make everybody else see that disgusting thing and have those turds in their trees. I'll disable it by marking it broken. For now, you guys can figure out what you want to do. But no, forcing others to see those things is not the answer. I would suggest you not make this part of the K config setup and normal build at all, but be somewhere else. You can run it as part of your tests, I. E. Do it as a make DRM HDR test kind of thing, not as part of regular builds. Linus. So I thought that was a fun rant to go over. I don't have a lot to say about it other than I agree that you shouldn't leave garbage everywhere for a specific build. Enforce everyone, even if they don't have the hardware to deal with it. So any. Any thoughts from my co hosts?
- [59:15]
Jonathan
The kernel needs more automated testing, but this sounds like it was not the right way to go about it.
- [59:23]
Ken
Yeah, and it literally was. They were forcing every time you build the kernel that it would run this test whether you needed it or not.
- [59:31]
Jonathan
And. And running the test was creating extra files it didn't get.
- [59:35]
Ken
Yeah, and it's one of those where really the only people that need to do that are the original maintainers of those files. Is everything good? Yep. Okay, then we don't have to do it again. We know it's good. It can be in the tree and it doesn't have to be built again every single time.
- [59:56]
Jeff
Click over here and have the HDR test run one more time.
- [60:00]
Jonathan
Yeah, all the fun of the maintaining a whole bunch of code together. It's always challenging and entertaining. All that good stuff.
- [60:10]
Ken
And it was probably like, oh, we got to get it in the window quick, throw it up there and go. And it should have probably waited till next revision, but they needed it then.
- [60:23]
Jonathan
That's how it goes.
- [60:25]
Jeff
They needed it or wanted it.
- [60:28]
Ken
Well, I don't know.
- [60:29]
Jonathan
One of the other.
- [60:30]
Ken
Or it could have been. Yeah, we're gonna fix that. And then it kind of got on some the sticky note lost the stickiness and fell off the monitor and they forgot to go back and clean it. Clean it up or I don't know.
- [60:41]
Jonathan
Oh yes, so true. So true. The the to do this is broken. Don't leave this in production. Get blamed. Last edited 5 years ago. Yeah.
- [60:54]
Jeff
At the bottom of the to do list.
- [60:56]
Jonathan
Yes. No it's on the floor behind the desk. Yeah so that's sticky note landed.
- [61:02]
Ryan Seacrest
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- [62:03]
Jonathan
All right, so one last bit of news. This is particularly for us Raspberry PI fans, and this one surprised me when I read it. It's from Evan Upton. And the Raspberry Official Raspberry PI PoE Plus Injector is now on sale at at just $25, which for what this is, that's actually a pretty good price, I must say. It is not a POE switch. It is literally just a POE plus injector. So if you want to run a POE plus device over Ethernet, this thing will do it and it will do it off of a regular switch. It lets you inject that power and it's specifically for the Raspberry PI. There's a. There's a really interesting little quirk here in the timing. The Raspberry PI 5 doesn't have a Poe plus hat yet. It is missing in action, as they say. We do have one for the PI 4, which works rather well. You can push a whole bunch of power through it and of course the old school Poe regular POE hats work for the older PIs as well, but we don't yet have anything Official for the PI 5. And one of the things that he mentions here that I found real fascinating is that the, the snappily named raspberry PI poe plus hat plus for raspberry PI 5. That's the name of this upcoming device, the HAT itself, it's missing in action. He says this promises to be our smallest, most efficient PD accessory and is in the final stages of development, having absorbed a lot of Dominique, one of their engineers. Dominique's attention and brainpower over the last couple of years. It's been going for a long time. Watch this space. So coming soon, we've got the new Pi5 Poe plus hat. There are some things that I would love to see on the POE hat for the PI 5. One of the big ones is maintained access to the 40 pin GVIO headers. I don't know if that's actually ever going to happen, but I would love to see it anyway. Coming soon, we now have the official POE injector. And you know, one of the advantages of that is, you know, cheap. How would it go in this case to cheap and cheap or good to pick any one is kind of how the POE injectors work. And so, you know, you can get one on Amazon for next to nothing. But beware, it may burn your house down. Or you can pay $100 for one that's like, you know, got all of the markings and, you know, you're pretty sure it's not going to catch on fire. I'm, I'm reasonably certain that the, the unit here from Raspberry PI is not going to burn your house down. And it's only 25 bucks. So they, they kind of, they kind of hit the sweet spot on that. So yeah, there you go.
- [64:57]
Ken
Nice.
- [64:58]
Jeff
So you're gonna wait for the hat or put the 25 out now?
- [65:02]
Jonathan
I'm probably not going to buy one of these because I tend to buy network switches to POE plus support.
- [65:09]
Ken
Because.
- [65:09]
Jonathan
I do cameras and I do pies and I do, you know, access points, all kinds of stuff. I love poe. I think POE is just the coolest thing. I hate having multiple cords on little IoT devices. It's like just one. Just plug it in Ethernet and let it power itself that way. So much better.
- [65:28]
Ken
John. It's got that 64 switch connection switch probably going.
- [65:33]
Jonathan
Then I've got a pair of 24 Port Poe plus switches.
- [65:39]
Ken
Oh, 48 ports total.
- [65:42]
Jonathan
48, yep.
- [65:44]
Jeff
And I've got 15 year old Cat 5 cable that I ran throughout my house. I'd probably have to replace it.
- [65:51]
Jonathan
Cat 5 still works.
- [65:52]
Ken
Might not have to. You would be surprised at the speeds good quality Cat 5 can do, especially if you're not running it, you know, 300 meters or something like that. You're. When it's short distances, you can really crank up the speed.
- [66:07]
Jonathan
You can. You can definitely do 2.5 gig over Cat 5. I think you can do. You can get away with 5 gig over Cat 5 pretty well. I think technically you can't do 10 gig over Cat 5 at all. But I'd plug it in and see.
- [66:21]
Jeff
What happened and the power.
- [66:23]
Jonathan
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you can. Yeah, you can do POE over.
- [66:28]
Jeff
Then maybe it's worth me and investing in that injector and then the hat when it comes out.
- [66:34]
Jonathan
Yeah, I'm just waiting for when they figure out how to do POE over WI Fi.
- [66:42]
Ken
Well, Tesla had something like that going years ago, but that's probably outside of the scope of the show a little bit.
- [66:50]
Jonathan
Somebody paged Tesla?
- [66:53]
Jeff
Not the car.
- [66:55]
Jonathan
Yeah, no, not the car company. That's not the one we're talking about right now. Talking about the original. Okay, let's get into some command line tips and Ken is going to lead us off and he's got an interesting here continues with his pipewire series of tips. What's the next one in that series, Ken?
- [67:15]
Jeff
It's going to be PW Mid U M P MIDI dump. PW MIDI dump. It has only three options. And let me go ahead and switch over to my command line here. And I've also got my QT pipewire graph up because I'm going to be showing how you're going to need it to help it. But it has the obligatory dash h or dash dash help, which of course gives you all the options that you can use. There's only three. The other one is the dash dash version, which of course tells you that I am behind with 1.2.4. So I'm definitely looking forward to Ubuntu 2504 coming out so I can at least move up to Ubuntu 2.1.2.7. But PW MIDI dump can be used to. And let me get back because I don't want to have to type all that over again. For those of y'all listening, the Command line says pw miditi dup space/media dad/home daddy/public/audio_file/midi/12daysofchristmas mid. It's a midi file. So with midi files, it will just dump it to the screen. You'll see all the events that are recorded in that MIDI file.
- [68:58]
Jonathan
So that's probably a little more useful when you've got a hardware device and you want to connect the hardware device and see what it does over midi.
- [69:07]
Jeff
And I'll show you how you do that. To do a hardware device, you just do run PW MIDI dump all by itself. And for those of you all listening, my QTP graph just popped up a. Let's go over here.
- [69:28]
Jonathan
It's there somewhere right here, MIDI dump.
- [69:35]
Jeff
Which is a pipe wire MIDI stream input. And I am going to connect it to that device.
- [69:49]
Jonathan
And then go twiddle a knob and see what happens.
- [69:53]
Jeff
Then turn on my Yamaha keyboard.
- [70:02]
Ken
Which.
- [70:02]
Jeff
I probably should have had on before I ran it because it didn't connect.
- [70:06]
Jonathan
Yeah, I don't think you're connected to the right device.
- [70:09]
Jeff
So disconnect. And by the way, I've found that if you hold the control key down when you press on one and then the other and then hit Control C, that will connect it. And now you're seeing everything running. And I'm just going to hit a few random keys here.
- [70:35]
Jonathan
Nice. I can name that tune in two notes.
- [70:43]
Jeff
And then you can just exit out of it after you've tested that by hitting Control C. Nice. Simple.
- [70:50]
Jonathan
Oh, yeah, no, that's. That's super useful for. You know what I probably will use that for is control surfaces. You know, I've got several control surfaces that got knobs and faders to be able to do stuff. And that would be extremely useful to be able to see what each fader is mapped to ahead of time.
- [71:10]
Jeff
And I did a live demonstration without blowing out my audio.
- [71:14]
Jonathan
Yeah, it didn't die.
- [71:17]
Ken
Show isn't over yet.
- [71:19]
Jonathan
Yeah, well. All right, Jeff, what do you have for us?
- [71:23]
Ken
DDGR, which is a command line utility designed for searching DuckDuckGo directly from the terminal. While the tool Googler has become incredibly popular among command line users, there was a clear demand in online forums for a similar utility tailored to the privacy conscious DuckDuckGo search engine. That's where DDGR comes in. Now, it's important to mention that DDGR isn't affiliated with DuckDuckGo in any way. So this is a. Another group decided to do this independent of DuckDuckGo. One of DDGR's highlights is its ability to let you specify the number of search results displayed per page. And this is far more practical than scrolling through dozens of results at once, as you would with a Web interface. Plus its default layout is designed to save space while maintaining excellent readability. Another standout feature is DD GR works seamlessly with the Tor network, so a major advantage for those prioritizing prioritizing privacy. For examples of how you can use ddgr, be sure to check out the article linked in the Show Notes. It dives into features like shell completion, customized searches for Wikipedia or any specific website, file type filtering, quoted text searches, custom color schemes, HTTPs proxy tunneling, and much more. Now just keep in mind that ddgr requires Python 3.8 or newer to install it. You simply just use your usual package manager. For example, I was able to install it effortlessly using the command sudo space apt install space ddgr. Now I won't cover all its features because there's so many, but you know I give DDR I recommend giving DDGR a try or even looking at the link in the Show Notes. It's compact, it's fast, it's user friendly tool and I used it some and played with it and it's pretty cool. And since it's a command line utility, it comes with a handy man page for a guide so you'll have everything you need to know. So happy command line browsing.
- [73:33]
Jonathan
Nice. So the ultimate next step of that by the way is one tool that you can just say I want you to connect to Google or I want you to connect to DuckDuckGo or whatever other search engine that you prefer. True, that is the let's see, what will we call it? Yagr, Yet Another Google replacement, Something like that. All right, I have a very very quick command line tip for you and it's just CD space dot and let's talk about what that does. First off, it changes directory to the current directory and those of you in the kind of middle amount of Linux command line knowledge are going to scratch your head and think why would I want to change directory into the current directory? And I will tell you if that directory was deleted and recreated out from underneath you, that is why you will want to do it. I've come across this when test running Firefox nightly on my fedora machine behind me. When you first start Firefox from the command line from within the folder, it will go out and check for updates. Because it's nightly, it basically has an update every day. The way that it installs that update apparently is it completely erases and then redownloads that folder. And so so when you run something like Firefox it installs that and then you either close it or because it's nightly. Let's be honest. What's more likely to happen is you're going to crash the browser, and then you go to run Firefox again, and nothing's there. You run LS nothing's there. It's like you're nowhere on your file system because the folder got deleted out from under you. So CD space dot BRINGS you right back there. It refreshes the list of files and folders, and then the world is once again right. And you can fire Firefox back up to crash it yet again on whatever thing you were trying to test. So there you go. Now you know how to handle that. Nice.
- [75:42]
Jeff
And you've rescued somebody another day.
- [75:46]
Jonathan
Yes, yes, Myself, in this case. You can also use cdsplace/, which was how I was doing it. And then I realized, actually found on the Internet somebody else in the same problem. They're like, yeah, CD.it's like, think about it. Yeah, that probably would work, wouldn't it? That's the same thing.
- [76:07]
Jeff
All right, now, one quick question. What does cdspace do that goes to directory up?
- [76:16]
Jonathan
That's the way it works. All right, I'm gonna let each of the guys plug whatever they want to get in the last word on something that they want to. We'll start with Jeff, see if he has some poetry for us.
- [76:27]
Ken
I do. And we'll see if I have maybe the next one of the week or two, I might have a story about trying the Kubuntu beta. I might just load it on and just go crazy and say, I'm just gonna run the beta. Let's see how it goes. But nothing else to go. So, a haiku this week. Oh, blue screen of death. Fatal error has occurred. I move palm to face. Have a great week, everybody.
- [76:59]
Jonathan
I move palm to face. That's great.
- [77:05]
Jeff
All right, Ken, well, before you try that, but Kubuntu beta, may I recommend that you back up? You could either use Clonezilla, my favorite, or Rescuezilla, but definitely back up before you do try any of these betas we talked about tonight.
- [77:22]
Jonathan
Yeah, you might want to back up before you try Clonezilla, too. And I say that only half jokingly. If you have anything really, really important on your hard drive, throw it on a flash drive first. Because it is quite possible to trash a machine with Clonezilla. Ask me how I know that.
- [77:41]
Jeff
And what's your favorite TAR command for backing up with?
- [77:47]
Jonathan
It's going to be something like tar space, cavf the name of the file, and then the files that you want inside of it. I think that works. I think that's right.
- [78:01]
Ken
Yeah, I just use rsync.
- [78:04]
Jonathan
Yeah, that works too.
- [78:05]
Jeff
Go through our command line tip spreadsheet and find where we've demonstrated tar and determine which one of the ones we've shown would work best for you.
- [78:15]
Jonathan
We've probably talked about tar several times over the years. I had to guess.
- [78:19]
Ken
Oh yeah, you could write a book on tar and somebody probably has.
- [78:23]
Jonathan
Oh, I'm sure. I bet there is a O'Reilly animal book just about Tara. All right, it is time, guys. We're going to wrap it up. If you want to find more of me, there is of course Hackaday you can find. My weekly security column goes there basically every Friday morning. It's also the new home of Floss Weekly. We have a lot of fun there. You should go check out our latest episode. Talking about Fedora 42, the beta, and the KDE stuff going on there. I talked with Neil Gampa. It's been a couple of years since we had him on, so we brought him back. We've got fun stuff going on there as well. We appreciate everybody that watches us and those of us that are part of Club Twit. We definitely appreciate it. And if you're not, why not? You need to think about it. It's about the price of a cup of coffee per month. Definitely worth it. And a way to support the network and the shows that you love. You should check out Club Twit. Appreciate everybody being here both live and on the download. And we will see you next week. Week on the Untitled Linux Show.
- [79:32]
Ken
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- [79:52]
Jonathan
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- [79:54]
Ken
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- [79:57]
Jonathan
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