Untitled Linux Show 205: RHEL: Spicy Edition

Summary

Podcast Summary: Untitled Linux Show 205: RHEL: Spicy Edition

Release Date: June 1, 2025 | Host: TWiT

In Episode 205 of the Untitled Linux Show, the TWiT team delves into a variety of pressing topics within the Linux and open-source ecosystem. From critical updates on Ubuntu and Red Hat derivatives to advancements in OBS Studio and kernel developments, the discussion offers valuable insights for both enthusiasts and professionals. Below is a detailed summary of the key points covered in the episode.

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1. Ubuntu's Support Lifecycle and Upcoming Changes

Timestamp: [02:58] – [17:34]

The conversation kicks off with a critical update regarding Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. As of the latest developments, Canonical has ceased accepting package updates to the primary archive for Ubuntu 20.04, signaling the end of standard security updates and bug fixes for this version. Jeff shares his personal experience with maintaining Ubuntu 20.04 through an Ubuntu Pro subscription, which extends security updates and offers additional features like kernel live patching.

Notable Quote:

Jeff: "Ubuntu 20.04 was originally released on March 23, 2020, so it's had a good five years run and it did receive a standard support for that full five years."

Canonical is introducing monthly Ubuntu snapshots to bridge the gap between the six-month interim releases and the two-year Long Term Support (LTS) releases. This initiative aims to enhance testing processes and catch failure modes earlier in the release cycle.

Notable Quote:

Rob: "Canonical is planning to release a monthly Ubuntu snapshot for testing and building out automation... So this is going to be a step towards having an official Ubuntu rolling release."

The team discusses options for users still on Ubuntu 20.04, emphasizing the importance of backing up systems before upgrading and exploring alternatives like upgrading to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS or transitioning to Ubuntu Pro for extended support.

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2. OBS Studio 31.1 Beta Enhancements for Linux

Timestamp: [25:03] – [30:32]

The hosts shift focus to the latest developments in OBS Studio, specifically the upcoming 31.1 beta release. Rob highlights several new features aimed at improving the streaming experience for Linux users:

• Multitrack Video Recording: Bringing multi-track recording capabilities to Linux and macOS, allowing more advanced audio and video management.

• V4L2 Virtual Camera Support: Extending support beyond Linux to include BSD systems, enhancing cross-platform compatibility.

• Hardware-Accelerated Browser Source Handling: Optimizing performance for browser-based sources in streaming setups.

• Preview Zoom Controls and Color Format Enhancements: Providing more granular control over stream previews and color management.

Notable Quote:

Rob: "OBS Studio's multitrack feature allows managing multiple audio and video tracks simultaneously for more advanced streaming and professional studio use cases."

The discussion underscores the significance of these updates in making OBS Studio a more versatile tool for content creators on Linux platforms.

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3. Linux Kernel Developments: Scheduler Overhaul

Timestamp: [41:06] – [61:05]

Jonathan introduces a significant change in the Linux kernel's scheduler code, specifically targeting single-core processor support. The Linux developers are streamlining the scheduler by removing code dedicated to single-core systems, favoring the Simultaneous Multithreading (SMP) scheduler used in multi-core processors. This shift reflects the industry's move away from single-core processors, even in embedded systems.

Notable Quote:

Jonathan: "The Linux devs are finally moving into this bright new future and going in and killing the scheduler code that specifically deals with the single core."

Jeff elaborates on the impact of this change, noting that it enhances the maintainability of the kernel by reducing conditional compilation segments (e.g., #ifdef directives) tied to SMP configurations.

The hosts also discuss the broader implications for users with older hardware and the potential benefits in terms of performance and codebase simplification.

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4. Almalinux 10 Release: Enhancements and Compatibility

Timestamp: [36:12] – [49:56]

Transitioning to enterprise Linux distributions, Jonathan and Jeff examine the release of Almalinux 10. Built as a downstream fork of CentOS and aligning closely with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 10, Almalinux 10 introduces several noteworthy features:

• Extended Hardware Compatibility: Supports older processors like x86_64v2, ensuring continued use of legacy hardware.

• Spice Support: Enhances remote desktop interactions by allowing users to access and manage virtual machine desktops remotely.

• ARM Support: Extends compatibility to ARM-based architectures, broadening the deployment landscape for Almalinux.

Notable Quote:

Jeff: "Almalinux 10 adds Spice support, allowing users to access and interact with a virtual machine's desktop environment remotely."

Jonathan expresses appreciation for Almalinux's efforts to maintain backward compatibility and support diverse hardware configurations, making it a viable choice for both enterprise environments and enthusiasts running older systems.

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5. Fedora's H.264 Codec Vulnerability and OpenH264 Challenges

Timestamp: [41:35] – [49:41]

Rob raises concerns about a security vulnerability (CVE-2025-27091) in Fedora's implementation of the OpenH264 codec provided by Cisco. The vulnerability, rated 8.6 out of 10 on the CVE scale, poses significant risks by potentially allowing remote attackers to trigger heap overflows through malicious H.264 streams.

The issue stems from Fedora's reliance on Cisco's OpenH264 binary updates, which have been slow to address the vulnerability despite recent fixes being available upstream. The lack of timely responses from Cisco has left Fedora users in a precarious position, highlighting the complexities of managing proprietary, patent-encumbered codecs within open-source distributions.

Notable Quote:

Rob: "Fedora keeps proprietary things off the distro like the H.264 codec, but over the past few months, Fedora and OpenH264 users have been stuck with an out-of-date and vulnerable version of OpenH264."

The hosts discuss the broader implications of patent-encumbered codecs in open-source projects and the challenges in maintaining security without compromising licensing agreements.

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6. Armbian 25.5 Release: Optimizations for ARM-Based Single Board Computers

Timestamp: [49:53] – [54:54]

Jeff introduces Armbian 25.5, the latest update aimed at enhancing performance, security, and hardware compatibility for ARM-based single board computers (SBCs). Key features include:

• Support for New SBCs: Includes devices like Banana Pi M2 Plus, BeagleBone AI, and others, expanding the range of supported hardware.

• Kernel Improvements: Integrates Linux kernel 6.14 from the edge branch, offering better support and stability for Rockchip devices.

• Enhanced Application Deployment: Simplifies the deployment of self-hosted applications such as Home Assistant, Grafana, and Netdata through Armbian Dash Config.

Notable Quote:

Jeff: "Armbian 25.5 introduces support for new single board computers and updates the application library to allow users to deploy popular self-hosted applications directly from Armbian Dash Config."

Jonathan and Rob commend Armbian for its dedication to making Linux accessible on a variety of embedded devices, contrasting it with the often challenging experiences associated with other SBCs. They emphasize the importance of user-friendly distributions like Armbian in promoting Linux adoption in embedded and IoT applications.

---

7. AMD Radeon Software Moves Towards Open Source

Timestamp: [54:54] – [61:18]

A significant portion of the discussion focuses on AMD's strategic shift towards open-source drivers for their Radeon GPUs. Jeff highlights that the upcoming Radeon Software for Linux will discontinue proprietary OpenGL and Vulkan drivers in favor of community-driven alternatives like Mesa RADV.

Notable Quote:

Jeff: "Radeon Software for Linux is dropping the proprietary OpenGL and Vulkan drivers... Radeon is moving to open source or bust."

This transition is lauded as a positive move for the Linux community, fostering better collaboration and support from developers. The hosts discuss the historical struggles with proprietary drivers and express optimism that AMD's commitment to open-source initiatives will lead to more stable and performant driver support.

Notable Quote:

Jonathan: "It's really pretty fascinating that we've come so far so quickly with AMD and their video card drivers, the open source drivers."

The conversation also touches on comparisons with other GPU manufacturers, noting AMD's progressive stance contrasted with NVIDIA's continued reliance on proprietary solutions.

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8. Command Line Tips: Utilizing 'p' and 'disown' Commands

Timestamp: [65:14] – [75:33]

In the final segment, Rob shares practical command-line tips to enhance productivity:

• 'p' Command: Rob explains the usage of the p utility, which allows splitting standard input into multiple outputs. This is particularly useful for scenarios where one might want to log output while simultaneously processing it further.

  Example:

  echo "Linux is fun" | p 'cat > file1.txt' 'rev > file2.txt' 'wc > wordcount.txt'
  

  This command splits the output into three separate operations: writing to a file, reversing the text, and performing a word count.

• 'disown' Command: Jonathan introduces the disown command, which detaches background jobs from the terminal, allowing them to continue running even after the terminal is closed. This is beneficial for long-running processes or when terminating an SSH session.

  Usage:

  jobs -l
  disown %1
  

Notable Quote:

Rob: "The Linux 'p' command will split your stream into two or more streams, pun intended."

These tips are aimed at helping users manage subprocesses more effectively, reducing the need for additional tools like TMUX or Screen in certain scenarios.

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Conclusion and Community Highlights

Timestamp: [75:33] – [79:32]

As the episode wraps up, the hosts briefly mention emerging technologies and tools within the Linux ecosystem, such as VirtualBox's support for Windows 11 on ARM and the importance of community contributions in open-source projects.

Notable Quote:

Jeff: "Club discussions and special events are your backstage pass to the world of TWiT."

The episode concludes with promotional segments encouraging listeners to engage with the TWiT community through Club TWiT, offering exclusive content and ad-free experiences.

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Final Thoughts

Episode 205 of the Untitled Linux Show provides a comprehensive overview of current developments in the Linux landscape, from distribution updates and kernel enhancements to advancements in multimedia tools and driver support. The hosts offer insightful discussions, practical advice, and forward-looking perspectives that cater to a diverse audience of Linux users.

Whether you're managing enterprise servers, content creation, or exploring the latest in open-source drivers, this episode serves as a valuable resource for staying informed and making informed decisions in the ever-evolving world of Linux.

Transcript

[Jonathan]

This week we're talking about Ubuntu and why you probably should go ahead and Update off of 24.04. There's H.264 troubles on Fedora OBS releases, the 31.1 beta. Didn't we just get 31.0? There's a 6:15 release of the kernel, the 6.16 merge window is open, and a whole lot more. You don't want to miss it, so.

[Ryan]

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[Ken]

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[Jonathan]

This is Twit. This is the Untitled Linux show. Episode 205 recorded Saturday, May 31st rel spicy edition hey folks, it is Saturday and you of course knows what that means. It is time for the Untitled Linux Show. We're gonna get geeky with open source and Linux and some hardware, all sorts of stuff. I've got a part of the normal crew here today. We've got Ken and we've got Rob, and we're going to get up to some fun. And Rob has a story about his second favorite operating system and we're going to let him take it away and tell us about that.

[Rob]

I mean, I guess in all honesty, I do run it on my servers all the time. So as much as I like to dig on Ubuntu, you're probably not completely, completely inaccurate on saying it's my second favorite. But you know, all the commenting on, on how, you know, my digs have usually been on how not up to date they are, which is good for my servers. But you know, I like to be up to date on, I like, I like the latest and greatest on my desktop.

[Jonathan]

Bleeding on the desktop, old and boring on the servers.

[Rob]

That's kind of how I like to roll. But you know, they have their LTS release, you know, their long term support that is released every two years, you know, with, with the majority of kind of the real world testing being done on their, on there for those adventurous types on their six month interim releases. But you know, I mean it's not just testing, but it's kind of testing. It's kind of where a lot of the testing goes but before they do their long term release. But you know, really only testing on a new system every six months kind of leaves a lot of element in, in between. That deal could be tested on that. That isn't much. You know, they don't have an official testing rolling release. You know, they got Rhino. I mean they don't have Rhino, but someone has Rhino. They spun it up if you want a rolling release. So you know, if you want to test the up to minute latest and greatest releases you can install, they have a daily ISO. But, but for most, you know, downloading, installing an ISO every day is probably a little extreme. You know, unless, unless you're developing for Ubuntu, then If that's per your job, then maybe, maybe you want to do that. But for others, you know, you know we have the, we have the six months, we have the daily. But you know what, what's in between? There hasn't been anything really in between there until now. So Canonical is planning to release a monthly Ubuntu snapshot for testing and building out automation. So, so they're not going to go away from the six month in terms and the two year LTS cadences, but complementing their testing by leveraging more automation, enhancing testing. So a quote from their announcement, it says with their current model, failure modes are not detected until they're urgent and blocking and eminent release. The team conducts regular rigorous retrospectives on each release. But in my opinion it's hard to meaning to meaningfully evolve such a process when it's only exercised every six months. So, and then it goes on. The monthly snapshots will create opportunities for us to test, understand and improve that process. So the monthlies are kind of going to be deployed and use their same automation that they're six month interims. Do I believe they're, they're, they're dailies, nightlies, whatever you call them, are, you know, not quite as on par with that. So the process, it has already started with the following releases, the following released and planned for Uber 225.10 on the following dates. So May 29th, snapshot one is already out. Then the next ones, snapshot two is on June 10th, snapshot three is on June 15th, snapshot four is on on August 19th and I guess October they expect Ubuntu 25.10 to be up. So maybe this is an attempt to catch some of those blocking failures that have caused some releases to be delayed in the past though, you know, I know we've seen some where it gets released and then they hold back updating or upgrading or whatever and, or the release just has come on time. So you know, like I said, I'm not quite sure how the nightlies, you know, maybe they, I don't know, the nightlies aren't accomplishing that and not catching it because it's, you know, it's just too frequent, I suppose to do the vigorous testing automation that they do with the actual release. So this is going to, you know, hopefully improve that process for them. Personally, I'd still kind of like to see an official testing Rollie release so I could actually see the software as it goes. But yeah, like I said, I only use Ubuntu on my Desktop. Anyway.

[Jonathan]

Yeah. So this is. There's a couple of ways that they could do this. I want to make sure. I understand. So when they, when Ubuntu mints a release. So 25.04 got minted, that's a fork, right. They. They fork Ubuntu and you've got the old stable becomes 2504 and then updates to that and then they fork it off and you've got now a bleeding edge that's going to become 2510. These builds are coming out of that. That bleeding edge fork, right?

[Rob]

Yes, yes. These, these are what's going to become 2510.

[Jonathan]

So they're. They're pre. Release. Pre releases of the next version, essentially.

[Rob]

Yep.

[Jeff]

Or RC releases.

[Jonathan]

I'm sure they had. They have releases. These are not release candidates. Definitely not release candidates. Yeah, way before that.

[Jeff]

Think of the nightly builds.

[Jonathan]

It's. It's basically a nightly build with it's.

[Jeff]

Nightly released once a month.

[Rob]

Yeah, it's. Well, it's basically the nightly build, but utilizing the same automation that they use to release their interim build. So that way they get to test their automation, their build automation tools.

[Jonathan]

Yeah. Interesting. Oh, so it looks like they are based on what he says here, they are actually going to give it some testing. Like they test a release. Is he talking about it being a. It's a practice run for the big six month release. So maybe they will be a little bit more stable than an actual nightly build. Regardless, is interesting a step towards having an official Ubuntu rolling release.

[Jeff]

Maybe for those that want to risk it.

[Jonathan]

I mean you could roll with it if you want to. I'm sure there's a way to tell go into your Ubuntu install and tell it to jump to that bleeding edge fork every time.

[Rob]

But I'm a little curious how the process would work, you know, if you did the nightly or daily I guess they call it, but updating day after day, if, if, if you update your system every day, if you're basically keeping up with every daily ISO and also along with the monthly. If you install snapshot one and all of a sudden you keep updating, updating and then snapshot two comes out. Are you up to date with that? Is there update process?

[Jonathan]

I think so, yeah. Yeah. The real question is when they actually get to. When they fork a release. So when they fork the. If you do that right now and then they fork 2510, which branch are you going to take on that fork? That's the one I'm not sure about. What I am sure about is if you're running Ubuntu 20.04 you've got a problem on your hands and Ken I think has the full scoop as well as hopefully some options to give to people. What can we do Ken?

[Jeff]

For those of you all that are on Ubuntu 20.04, you may want to say goodbye to a dear friend. Now I'm actually still running Ubuntu Studio 20.04 based on Ubuntu 20.04, but we hear from Bobby Borisov and Surf Rudra. They both wrote about Canonical no longer accepting package updates to the primary archive for Ubuntu 20.04 after this last Thursday. So this does send the signal the end of standard security updates and bug fixes of this version. Now According to Bobby, Ubuntu 2004 was originally or initially released on March 23, 2020, so it's had a good five years run and it did receive a standard support for that full five years. Now as I said, my Lenovo Think Center A63 can still receive system security updates under my Ubuntu Pro system subscription that I have. In fact, let me go ahead and show you what it's currently showing. That's me sshing into the system and running Neo fetch and you can see it's Ubuntu 20.0 4.6 LTS. This has actually been up for two hours because I tried updating to 2204 and ended up having to roll back using my backup. So whatever you decide to do after this article hearing about some options, I do recommend first backing up everything. Now this gives with the Ubuntu Pro subscription. It gives me access to security updates for both the main and userverse repositories, kernel, live patching and compliance tools. I could Keep using Ubuntu 20.04 for another 10 years this way, but serve gives you, in addition to the Ubuntu Pro subscription, two other options. His first recommendation, and I'm sure Jeff would agree with this, is to do a fresh install of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS so you can get all the latest packages. Personally, I don't want to rebuild my Plex Media server by doing that because that means having to rebuild it from scratch again, especially since I've got several shows that I DVR from over the air broadcast using my Plex media server that I'd have to try to reschedule again and some of them are in between seasons so that makes it that a little difficult.

[Jonathan]

A little bit sort of.

[Jeff]

Second recommendation is to upgrade to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS since this will keep in my case my files intact. In fact, I even tried that last weekend after the last week's podcast. But Serves article also talks you through the upgrade process, while Bobby has links to guides for upgrading from 20.04 LTS to 22.04 LTS and then to 24.04 LTS. That sounds like a long session doing all of that as always. Again, I can't say it more often, always back up before starting either of these last two options. Now even though I have Ubuntu Pro's Extended Security Maintenance 420.04, I am going to try to upgrade again to 2204 and then see if I can reinstall XFCE because the upgrade switched me to gnome's desktop.

[Jonathan]

Oh terrible.

[Rob]

Lucky you.

[Jonathan]

Oh yes, just ruins the whole experience.

[Jeff]

Especially with all the customizations I've done to my current XFCE desktop so I can quickly go up to my panel and start certain applications from there.

[Rob]

Well, KDE must have still been installed. You just had to switch your session over, right?

[Jeff]

No, it's XFCE on that one.

[Rob]

Oh, xfce. Yeah, they are trying to get you off the old almost unsupported software.

[Jeff]

Yep.

[Rob]

But yeah, it must have still been installed Anyway, I assume you just had to switch your session and would have been there. My I'm. I'm kind of.

[Jeff]

I like to When I did upgrade I was still able to launch G. Potter from the command line as well as verify that my Plick server was still up and running. So I can't can do that. I just have to take the time to set up new quick links for everything that I like to have access to from the desktop. Even though for all intents and purposes I'm actually just using it as a file and media server now.

[Rob]

These days, you know, I don't have any problems upgrading from one LTS to the next. You know, back in the day I've had some, you know, PHP did some major breaking things where I got stuck on I had a server that was stuck on an old version for a while until I could get around to reprogramming those sites going back to that.

[Jeff]

Ssh I do want to show if you all can read it there. It does say system restart required because a new release 22.04 LTS is available. It says run do release upgrade to upgrade to it. I don't think I want to do that right now.

[Rob]

But yeah, with my web servers I always just like to set up a new one and and install fresh because then I get I get all the cruft off of there that has accumulated over the couple of years. So I always like to get a nice fresh start. But as far as even backing up goes when I just do a regular APT update at APT upgrade upgrade, I always do a snapshot before every one of those. Even though I have regular weekly backups on my web servers, I still like to do that right before just in case I so I don't lose like half a week or whatever of whatever is on there.

[Ryan]

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[Ken]

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[Ryan]

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[Ken]

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[Jonathan]

Race the rudders, Race the sails. Race the sails.

[Ken]

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[Jonathan]

Over Roger, wait, is that an enterprise sales solution?

[Ken]

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[Jonathan]

All right, so what about Haha, what about Linux itself, the kernel? There's some interesting things going on there and I am going to talk first off about the Scheduler. One of those fun geeky things to talk about. You may have seen this article about the Uniprocessor scheduler and the link here off to Pharonix says specifically the big Linux Patch series shakes up the scheduler code for anyone with only one CPU core. And my first thought was oh, they're going to make it better for single core because of course these things are still around. No, actually it's quite the opposite. Even in embedded systems and all kinds of places you very rarely see single cpu, single core processors. That is almost everything is S and P simultaneous multiprocessing. And so Linux is. The Linux devs are finally moving into this bright new future and going in and killing the scheduler code that specifically deals with the single core. Now these old devices will still work. I mean like you can still run 586 with Linux and the kernel will work on the CPU. I think it's 586. I think that's where we're at. They killed 486 with 586 is still in there, I think. But what this does is it gets rid of all of the code specific to the single core and just lets it run on the SMP scheduler. Now the reason that this matters is because every time somebody went to touch the scheduler there was this like massive IFDEF tree. There was ifdef spam everywhere regarding, you know, if def config smp. And so they're, they're going in and it sounds like they're trying to eventually only compile for config smp. That's kind of the direction that reading between the lines here. That's kind of the direction it seems like this is going. I don't think they're entirely there. This is just doing it for the scheduler. But it, it's interesting to see sort of things in the kernel moving this direction. Do either of you guys have any single core processor machines around anywhere?

[Jeff]

I'm going to say yes. I think that Dell I've got's got.

[Jonathan]

A 486 in it, but is it running? How long ago?

[Jeff]

How long ago are you running systems?

[Jonathan]

No, yeah, I'm pretty sure I've got some old systems around that are single core, but I don't think I've had one running. I've got one laptop that may be a single core. It's one of those old netbooks. I'd have to go back and look.

[Rob]

I don't think I've seen a single core for years in a long time. What happens with the virtual machine though if you only give it one core?

[Jonathan]

When you give a virtual machine only one core, do you go in and recompile your kernel and turn off S and P?

[Rob]

Of course not.

[Jonathan]

It's the same thing as always happened. This is for compiling without S and P turned on. Essentially this is. Yeah, so in if def, that's a C and C, in this case it's C, not C. Famously it is a C preprocessor which means that when you compile your code, the first thing it does, the first pass it does over your code is it goes through and it evaluates all the preprocessor directives. And so you can have preprocessors that are like if this define exists or if this define evaluates true, or if this define is equal to this. And so when you do compile options, those actually make it into the code as defines. And so you know, you can have a compile option of use smp and then every time one of those pre processor statements matches, it'll do the thing. And if it doesn't match, you know, a lot of times it'll just. Blocks of codes will get erased and be gone before it actually starts the real compilation.

[Rob]

Yeah. So this is just for compiling of the kernel. Everyone using a pre compiled kernel worth their distribution. It's.

[Jonathan]

It's not going to change anything.

[Rob]

It's all the same. It's not saying, if you use this, we're going to run this way, if you don't, we're going to run that way. It's. It's just given that option to detect and compile that. Oh, you, you just have a single core, so.

[Jonathan]

Yes, it makes sense. Yep. So it's a good thing for the maintainability of the kernel. I don't think he said how many lines were removed as a result, but I'm sure this kicked a bunch of lines out of the kernel, which is always nice. It's always good to get rid of code. Good feeling.

[Rob]

So that's not even going to optimize anything running wise, only optimizing compiling and minusculely more for maintainability.

[Jonathan]

It's more for writing new code. Yeah.

[Jeff]

That much less code you have to wade through for logic errors.

[Jonathan]

Yep. And to figure out what it's doing to be able to make a patch. Yeah. All right. Rob has a story here and I've got to ask you, Rob, I thought we just celebrated OBS31.

[Rob]

Well, now we're going to celebrate what's coming at OBS 31.1.

[Jonathan]

Wasn't this like just days ago though, that OBS31 came out?

[Jeff]

That's why this is a beta.

[Rob]

Yes. This is still just a beta at this time.

[Jonathan]

Okay. I guess it was a month ago. Time flies.

[Rob]

Yeah. I don't know when stuff came out. I mean, I don't. I don't know. Seems like my birthday was yesterday. I don't know if it was last month, last week. I didn't even know what Day of the week. It was last week or I thought it was nice what year was. I didn't know what year it was last week. So yeah, so yeah, I mean like some folks over at, you know, like, like Michael over at Pharonics, you know, even though 31 or I mean yes, 31 just came out, you said some folks like Michael over Phronix have been looking ahead at what is coming out in the next OBS Studios release. And you know, we're talking about 31.1 bay release to see what's coming. And he found some, well, pretty good news for Linux users. So those lucky Windows users over there have been able to enjoy multi track video recording since release 30.2, which I have no idea when that was. But now in the up and coming 31.1 release Linux users were will also be able to enjoy this feature as well and Mac OS users too. But whatever, who cares. OBS Studio's multitrack feature allows managing multiple audio and video tracks simultaneously for like more advanced streaming kind of professional studio use cases. I'm not sure I really have a use case for it, but if I really want to get into it, I think you could do some pretty cool things with that.

[Jeff]

So.

[Rob]

And you know that that's about really all I came here to talk about because multi track recording is. I've definitely done a lot of audio and you know, maybe I can make some music videos with multi track recording, I don't know. But you know, as long as I'm here, while I'm talking about what's coming to OBS 31.1, I might as well list what else we can expect to see. You know, features such as V4L2 virtual camera support now come into non Linux environments like our BSD siblings. You know, it's not Linux. I know, but you know, BSD is like a little sibling to us or an older sibling, I don't know. And they also support for hardware accelerated browser source handling on Linux. So another thing coming to Linux and they got some new UI options, a preview, zoom zoom controls. And I'm not talking about the Zoom video conferencing application, I'm talking about you zoom in, you know, so you get, you get preview now support for color format space range, GPU conversions, explicit Sync, support for PipeWire screen capturing. I'm not exactly sure what that is, but pipewire screen capturing sounds like we're getting a lot closer to the pipeware video stuff that we often bring up that we're looking forward to. And then you know, they also have the usual bug fixes that any good software has ever released. There's always bug fixes. There's a good dozen of them. Oh, and if anyone cares, there's also initial support for Windows on arm. So those are a few things in this minor release that we can expect to see in the next OBS Studio.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, very cool. I look forward to all of it. It's neat to see the new stuff land in obs.

[Rob]

And we're all OBS Studios OBS Studio users on this panel here.

[Jeff]

So it's use the screen catcher pipewire with my version of Ops, which is 3.1.0.3. So that's actually been around for an hour. I think it's been a beta, but if you see there it says properties for screen capture pipewire.

[Rob]

Well, they said explicit sync support, so I wonder if that's something a little.

[Jeff]

It's probably going to help with synchronizing things.

[Jonathan]

One would think it's kind of right there in the name.

[Rob]

I thought it was like where you go and do your dishes if you don't have a dishwasher.

[Jeff]

What I'm waiting for though is when the virtual camera can be recognized by pipewire.

[Jonathan]

Yes, that is what we are all waiting for. That is kind of the holy grail is pipewire output from obs.

[Jeff]

Then you can split that stream into other devices.

[Jonathan]

I've said multiple times over the years that'll be when things really get interesting. Being able to do your piping your video around be good stuff instead of.

[Jeff]

Having to use a third party or a cloud based service to do it.

[Jonathan]

Indeed, indeed. All right. Well Ken, what about using a distro specifically something like Chaos? Is that going to be a good choice for. For running OBS and doing video streaming?

[Jeff]

Well, that's a good question. I haven't tried running OBS on it, so I can't answer that one. But thankfully Marius Nister and Jack Wallen wrote about an independent Linux distro releasing its latest itineration that includes kernel 6.14 and KDE's plasma 6.0. 3.5. What are we talking about? It's Chaos. Yes, Chaos Linux 2025.05. Now it is built on top of the latest KDE software and features Arch Linux Pacman Package Manager. Now, starting with this release, Chaos is finally where a default install will be QT5 free. In other words, no more QT5 is necessary. But if you do have some old applications that still depend on it, you can still download it from the repository. But this does allow Chaos to include KDE gear version 25 or later and frameworks 6.14.0 or later because they are both built on Qt 6.9.0, Qt 6 and framework 6. Ready applications will include Frescobaldi, Krita, Camosa and Calligra Plan. I think I said that last one right.

[Jonathan]

Close to it at least.

[Rob]

Doubt it.

[Jeff]

The base system Updates include System D 250.4.24, ZFS 2.3.2, a new toolchain based on glib 2.4.1, GStreamer 1.1/26.1 and PipeWire 1.4.3. Now one of the new packages chaos includes is NextCloud client. This is an open source sync client for NextCloud, which I think we've had you've had as a guest on Floss Weekly, haven't you? So you want more details about nextcloud? I'd go back and re view that episode of Floss Weekly.

[Jonathan]

It's been a while now.

[Jeff]

Chaos does get ready to move away from X11 with SDDM 0.20.0. It's going to add the option to run the Display manager in Wayland mode. As always, you can get more details since I'm just picking out the highlights from the two articles I've got linked in the show notes.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, interesting, interesting stuff. I wonder, you know, when we talk about some of these little I think of them as niche boutique distros.

[Jeff]

I don't think this is boutique necessarily because it's not even based on any of the standard ones.

[Jonathan]

Well, indeed, that's what I mean. It's not a remix, right? It's not Kubuntu. This is their own thing. And I always wonder with these like are they going to hit critical mass and really take off and be used by a whole bunch of people?

[Rob]

When someone else bases their distro on them, then you know, they've, they're, they're.

[Jonathan]

Going somewhere, then they've arrived.

[Rob]

They've arrived.

[Jonathan]

Yeah.

[Jeff]

So Rob, when are you gonna base a distro on it?

[Jonathan]

I think Rob just jumps from distros to distros. I don't think it's really in his wheelhouse to make his own as I used to.

[Jeff]

Then I guess the better question is how far down your next distro to try list? Is it.

[Rob]

As a daily driver? Way down as. As maybe in a vm. If I try it there first and there's something intriguing about it, it might go up on my daily driver list. But I got, I got to See why? What's why? Why do I want to run it?

[Jonathan]

Their website looks slick. I will say that for them there's a reason.

[Jeff]

Because then you can say you've got a distro that none of us have had.

[Rob]

I could say, when I'm at home, I am running chaos.

[Jonathan]

Sure, you could say that.

[Jeff]

Or you could let your wife say it.

[Ken]

Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and safeway. Now through June 24th. Score hot summer savings and earn four times the points. Look for in store tags on items like Starbucks ground coffee, Red Bull energy drinks, Spam Classic Planet Oat milk, Charmin bath tissue, Totino's pizza rolls and Frito Lay chips. Then clip the offer in the app for automatic event long savings, shop in store or online for easy drive up and go, pickup or delivery subject to availability restrictions apply. Visit Albertsons or Safeway.com for more details.

[Jonathan]

Oh goodness. All right, so if you don't want to run a boutique distro and you want to run something boring, maybe even enterprise, there is an option you can run Almalinux. And Almalinux just released version 10, which is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10, although it's also based more on CentOS Stream 10. So the whole, the whole thing here is a little complicated. When CentOS went away, Almalinux was one of the two distros that sort of picked up the torch. And then when Red Hat made their decision to make it more difficult for downstream distros like Alma Linux and Rocky Linux, when they made it more difficult for them to repackage the Red Hat packages, Almalinux opted to move to CentOS Stream as the upstream. And so this means that they are no longer bug for bug compatible with CentOS 10, or, excuse me, with Red Hat 10, Red Hat Enterprise 10, which is potentially good and bad. So, you know, the good thing was that you could buy a piece of hardware that was designed for Red Hat, Red Hat Enterprise hardware software, you could drop it into your local machine and you could be pretty assured that it was going to behave the exact same way as it would in an actual Enterprise Linux install. But one thing that Almalinux has done with this change is they'll push out fixes faster, they'll push out security fixes that for one reason or another, Red Hat is not interested in shipping in Red Hat Enterprise Linux several times. We've seen that with Alma Linux 10. There is actually another one of these changes. They call it Purple lion, by the way. There's another one of these changes that they are making away from Red Hat Enterprise, and that is that it is going to remain. You can run Almalinux 10 on an X8664v2 processor, whereas Red Hat Enterprise Linux requires an X8664v3. And I really need to go back and look. I've got an old server that I got shut out of running newer CentOS and stuff on. I don't remember if that one is x86 64v2 compatible or if that one's still on V. One of the things that I and others have complained about is that there's not quite the. There's not a really, really good technical distinction between, like, what makes the version 1, version 2, version 3 and version 4 of x86 64. And so it's kind of nice to see that Almalinux is bringing some of these old, otherwise really useful pieces of hardware forward into the future. So this is like AMD Bulldozer Era, amd, Jaguar, Intel's Nehalem and Silvermont. Yeah, but there is some interesting stuff. You've also got UAFI on ARM that you can now run on Almalinux 10, and I'll have to try that. I've got some ARM hardware around to give it a shot and see if I can make it work. Let's grab 10 for my XVM.

[Jeff]

And doesn't Alma Linux 10 also add Spice?

[Jonathan]

I did see something here about Spice. Spice support is present.

[Jeff]

Christine Hall's article covered that more, but it allows users to access and interact with a virtual machine's desktop environment remotely, and not just from the host server. But yeah.

[Jonathan]

I don't know the story about Spice being deprecated in rhel, because that's what I use. It's part of a Libvert kvert and I thought that was all based on Spice.

[Jeff]

Not so much deprecated, just dropped up in real 9.

[Jonathan]

Interesting. I have to go look and see what they replaced it with.

[Jeff]

Or did they?

[Jonathan]

I mean, you've got to have some way to be able to do an install. And if it's not Spice, I'm not sure what it would be. Set up an old serial console into your virtual machines.

[Jeff]

But I've added a link to Christine Hall's article to the show notes as well. For anybody that's got the time to read, cover some of what Jonathan touched as well as some things you didn't actually cover.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, I'll have to look more into that with REL and Spice, because I don't know. I don't know that story. I don't know what all is going on there.

[Jeff]

I guess you could say Almalinux 10 is going to be Red Hat Enterprise.

[Jonathan]

Linux with Spice Spicy Edition. It's Rhel Spicy Edition. Goodness. Well, there's some spiciness going on on fedora with H264 or that's what Rob says. I don't know if I believe him. Are we safe? We're probably. Is H.264 in the room with you right now, Rob? It probably is. It's probably what we're all streaming with.

[Rob]

I brought this here for you to defend. I mean Fedora is a pretty great distribution but you know, when I find a flaw in the distro, you know I'm going to bring it to the show. To Rivon, Jonathan's favorite distro. You know, Fedoric tends to keep, you know, one of the things that about Fedora is they tend to keep proprietary things off of the distro like the H2.64 codec. But nine years ago they implemented and this was in 2016 also I know what year it is now. It's nine years ago they implemented an easy way to bring basic H264 support back to Fedora utilizing Cisco's open source open H264 project. But over the past few months, Fedora and openH264 users have been a little stuck with an out of date and vulnerable version of open H 264. Cisco's openH 264 has a high severity. It's 8.6 out of 10 on the CVE scale vulnerability. This vulnerability, well ranking up there right on the very high severity spot is causing some frustration and at least for some of the issues or users online, the the issue is that the decoding functions of the OpenH264 codec library could allow a remote unauthenticated attacker to trigger a heap overflow of the system. The CVE was made public in February and fixed by openh264 version 2.6. But you know, it appears the the Cisco repository for Fedora is a little stuck. Fedora builds Fedora builds have solved this issue and they were sent to Cisco two months ago. But it seems Cisco has been a little slow on the uptake. There's been some back and forth if you go and look in to fall down the trail. But there's a a link to this CVE tracker with the people kind of discussing if they have to rebuild with a different ABI and, and all this stuff. But, and, and they've been, they've been having a little bit of trouble getting a response from Cisco. And you know, looking at, looking at this chain, it looks like they, they sent it in, submit it one here, not the Mac bond month later they'd say, oh, blah, blah, blah, put your stuff in here and this is how you can submit it. And a month later, nothing. And so, you know, there were some promising updates a few weeks ago, but it seems we're still waiting for Cisco to update their repo. It looks like if they update to, I think it's 2.5.1, it would be good. If anyone wants to dig into the CVE, it's CVE 2025 27091. But Fedora users right now, I think they gotta be getting close. It sure seems like when you fall it down, they just get real close. Hopefully soon. But last I knew, I don't know, you know, what version you're running, Jonathan, or we still have to wait.

[Jonathan]

I can find out. I can SSH to that machine. You know what the actual problem here is though, right? Like the root cause as to why all this is broken.

[Jeff]

Communications.

[Rob]

Cisco is a big corporation and they don't work well with open source.

[Jonathan]

There's a more fundamental issue even than.

[Jeff]

That one word communications.

[Jonathan]

Nope, more fundamental than that. Actually.

[Rob]

You can't get more fundamental than communications software patents.

[Jeff]

Oh, you're talking legalese.

[Jonathan]

That is why OpenH 264 is a Cisco thing and why the Fedora people can't just fix it and update it.

[Rob]

Well, yeah, right.

[Jonathan]

It's because H264 is a patent encoded, excuse me, patent encumbered video codec and MPEG la. Those wonderful people have a patent, patent portfolio on it. And so every time somebody uses it, or you know, I probably owe them a few cents just for saying the name of it so many times here on the show. No, they, they have a, they have a patent portfolio for it and they charge people for using it. And Cisco, actually Cisco are the good guys here. At least they were in that. They said, look, we'll license it, we'll pay for the license. We will ship a binary and people can just pick this binary and it will go under our account and we'll just take care of it. Which that's because they wanted, they were working on WebRTC at the time, I think is what it was. And so they wanted everybody to be able to use H264 and WebRTC. And so they made all of this available and picked up the tab for it for people on Linux and Firefox and all kinds of places to use it.

[Rob]

Yeah, it's definitely not Fedora's fault or really anything they could do except for push Cisco to update, which, which they've been doing from what I've, what I've been reading down that thread.

[Jonathan]

Yep.

[Rob]

But the, the only fault of them. Well, it's not a fault of them, I guess is just making, you know, that, that, that, that they're being forced because of their practices to use this, this one from Cisco, the open one.

[Jeff]

It also comes down to what our patent office is allowing to be patented.

[Jonathan]

Yes, it is, because people in the United States don't understand that they are allowing you to patent math. And that's not a good idea.

[Jeff]

Yeah, especially if you want to say one plus one equals three and patent that, then you're going to have problems later.

[Jonathan]

It's, it's, it's a little different, but yeah, yes, it is. Software patents are the patenting of math.

[Rob]

You know, that was the issue. But I believe now, I'm not sure when, but I believe at least in the United States, the H264 patent has expired.

[Jonathan]

The MP3 patents have expired. Pretty sure the H264s have not. The total amount of time that you have to wait for a. So there's two things. One, the total amount of time you have to wait for patents to Expire is like 20 years because of submarine patents. And that's why, where someone invents something and then fails to patent it for like the first seven years and then they can bring that invention up and patent it. And two, H264 has been added onto multiple times because you have like the base profile and then the main profile and then there's H264 plus. And every time one of those things got added onto it and sort of got glommed onto the standard, well, that's new code. Therefore it's potentially accessible for new patents. So like the original H264 may have, but the last time I looked there were still Fedora was not willing to compile it themselves for that particular reason.

[Rob]

Yeah, what I'm seeing it seeing is it's open, you know, and here I'm seeing on open, some expired in 2023.

[Jeff]

It looks like there's going to be some that expire next year, but there's some others that are going to expire after that.

[Rob]

And Cisco makes the source and binary versions available. The source code is available so users so that an implementation of H.264 is available for the community to use across and that's on openh264.org that I'm reading this in their FAQ section. FAQ, yep.

[Jonathan]

All right, well, let's see. What about Armbian? Is it time for Armbian? I think it's time for Armbian.

[Jeff]

I hope so, because this week Marius Nestor also wrote about the Release of Armbian 25.5. This latest update enhances performance, security and hardware compatibility for a variety of armed based single board computers. RBN 25.5 introduces support for new single board computers such as the banana PI m2 plus beaglebone I'm assuming that's AI 64 or is it Al 64?

[Jonathan]

I think it's AI 64 beagle play.

[Jeff]

Ti sk am 69 mediatek genio family radza nio 12L that rolls off the tongue. Qualcomm robotics rb5 radza qba5e now here's an interesting title smart am 40 and then there's pocket beagle 2. Now it introduces support for Linux kernel 6.14 on the edge branch of the rockchip 64 devices and you can now build clean mainline kernels with configurable kernel patching. Rnbn 25.5 adds the latest udash boot and firmware updates to improve boot and peripheral support, improves HDMI and audio Support for RockChip RK3588 devices, and improves EFI partition and BTRFs sub volume support for more flexible system boot and layout. The last thing that I will mention is that Armbian 25.5 updates the application library to allow users to deploy popular self hosted applications directly from Armbian Dash Config including Home Assistant, Sterling PDF, Navidroom, Grafana and netdata in clean and isolated environments. As always, go ahead if you want more details and read Marius article, I've got it linked through the show notes.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, so trying to trying to run Linux on these little embedded devices, the SBCs for the vast majority of them is just pain and suffering. It is a terrible experience. One of the reasons the Raspberry PI is so popular is because the Raspberry PI engineers intentionally made it not a terrible painful experience. That's like. That is one of the main things it has going for it.

[Rob]

Now just to be clear, it's not just running Linux, it's really running anything on them.

[Jonathan]

That's well on most of these devices that is the only game in town, you cannot run anything else. Like BSD will not run on a bunch of these. Windows will definitely not run on a bunch of these. A few of them it will, but a lot of them it doesn't. And part of the reason for that is because the bootstack is U boot. And you know, it's a proprietary or not proprietary, but it's a fork of u boot that maybe nobody has ever pushed upstream. And you know, there's a decent chance that these things don't have any permanent flash to install U boot to. And so, you know, and to install Linux on it, you've got to compile this really weird U boot thing. You've got to then compile a Linux kernel that's, you know, some terrible ancient vendor fork. And I mean it's just, it's just nuts to do it. I've done it on several of these devices. I've gotten excited over several single board computer devices and then been very disappointed by the amount of work. It took all that to say the guys at Raspbian are doing the work and actually do really, really good work making a lot of this work, a lot of making this Linux distro work on many, many of these boards. And so if, if, particularly if Deb Debian is something you want to run, then man, go with, go with this, go with Armbian.

[Jeff]

And what was interesting when I was researching this article is that the Arbian team, it was also I received the Next Box Hero award this year.

[Jonathan]

Next Box Hero, Netbox Hero, Netbox Hero by Netbox Labs. I'm not sure what Netbox Labs is, but.

[Rob]

Do they make Netboxes the world's.

[Jonathan]

Platform for network and infrastructure management? Yes, they make netboxes. It's a lab that makes Netboxes. There you go.

[Rob]

I told you.

[Jonathan]

You've rob called it. Yeah. All right, let's see. Let's talk briefly about as the kernel turns, we are turning in this case from 6.15 to 6.16. And there's a couple of interesting things to cover. Not in great detail, but just in passing. 615 did release on the 25th. May 25th. There is the normal hardware improvements, security fixes, all of that good stuff. More rust. People have been pointing out more rust in the kernel is happening. BCache FS is continuing to get more and more mature and is not quite as scary to run anymore. You know, there's some firmware, there's some subsystem things going on. Interestingly, the Apple Silicon work is continuing, uh, even with one of their maintainers retiring, it is. They're managing to continue on all kinds of interesting stuff in 6.15, but we tend to look forward here and look at 6.16 and it's got, it's got some really interesting things in it too. Like the really stupendous performance enhancement for ext4, everybody's favorite almost old file system at this point. We know that butterfs and bcachefs are the new shiny ones, but if you really want your data to stick around, ext 4 or XFS are good options to go with. But there's some interesting things coming in ext 4 that in the right workloads is apparently going to give you like a 37% improvement when you're doing large sequential IO, which 37% improvement on file system is pretty dang impressive. There are of course other things going on in the 616 kernel, hardware enablement. AMD GPU is adding the user mode cues. We talked briefly about that a couple of weeks ago. I think that is the idea that a full screen game can just skip your window manager and all of that and talk directly to the GPU should, should end up with a bit faster frame rates, lower CPU usage, all of those things. Lots, lots of stuff, lots of stuff going on in there. We'll, we will link to it. And then there was one more that sort of really caught my eye in this and that is Radeon Software. That is AMD's sort of official support for their video cards. Radeon software for Linux is dropping the proprietary OpenGL Vulkan drivers which, with the OpenGL drivers, that's not terribly surprising. The proprietary Vulkan drivers, those are not that old, only been around for a few years. But with the next major Radeon software for Linux release, all of that's going to go away. It's going to be open source or bust for Radeon. And that's, that's really interesting to me. It's, it's really pretty fascinating that we've come so far so quickly with AMD and their video card drivers, the open source drivers. I, I remember when, I remember when it was bad trying to run the open source drivers for amd, very similar to how it is still for Nvidia. It's not a great experience to run the nouveau drivers, but we've come a long, long ways since then. And interestingly MESA RADV is, it's the community Vulcan driver, it's the unofficial and it is now about to become the official Vulcan driver. And so, you know, that's cool. That's neat. Likely to see a bunch of things land in that now that the. Hopefully the AMD engineers will actually start working on that. But yeah, neat stuff. Cool stuff. If you're running AMD like hopefully most of us are. I only know one guy that's running Nvidia on his Linux machine and we.

[Rob]

Did a lot of them on the show today.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, we kicked him off, that's why.

[Jeff]

But yeah, I don't think we kicked him off. I just think he had a problem with it.

[Jonathan]

That's what it is. He is at home right now trying to get his Nvidia drivers to work. That's where Jeff is.

[Rob]

I thought you meant he had a problem with us talking about how, how good AMD was. But even though he's given some AMD love lately.

[Jonathan]

Oh, Jeff said several times that if he builds another machine, he's going to put an AMD card in it.

[Jeff]

Yeah, Ease of use.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, it's.

[Rob]

It's interesting that, that it sounds like they believe that the open source OpenGL driver is good enough or better that that there's just no point in the proprietary anymore. Yeah, that's the way it all should be.

[Jeff]

What I really found interesting from Michael's article is that the release note mentions AMD AMF will also no longer be included, with users encouraged instead to target the video Acceleration API within mesa.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, let's hope that gets some love too. It's much better than it used to be. VA API is it crashes less, it's less likely to take your desktop down all the way now. Yeah, I'm real happy to see AMD sort of washing its hands of their old proprietary stuff and embracing the things that are out there as open source.

[Jeff]

It's more efficient. They get some free assistance with keeping it, improving it.

[Jonathan]

Yep, yep.

[Rob]

Team Red. I think I get confused with the colors green and red, but I believe red is Nvidia. Team Rudd needs to.

[Jonathan]

No, no, other way around.

[Rob]

I got it backwards.

[Jonathan]

You got it backwards.

[Rob]

I'm going to stop using colors. Team Nvidia needs to take some cues from amd, I think here.

[Jonathan]

Yeah. So here's what you do. When you Google Nvidia, you see a logo that pops up. That one's green. When you Google amd, you see a logo pop up and that one's black and white, which is not terribly helpful.

[Rob]

I was picturing a green AMD in my head.

[Jonathan]

No, so Team Red came from the old ati. ATI had the red Logo.

[Rob]

Yeah, there's a green Nvidia logo right there. Huh. I don't know.

[Jeff]

Intel is nonexistent now.

[Jonathan]

What's that?

[Jeff]

Intel is non existent now as far as graphic drivers.

[Jonathan]

I mean they would be team blue. No. So actually intel, intel ran open source graphics drivers way before either of the others did. Intel did actually sort of was the, the, the groundbreaker there. They, they kind of were the pioneers of this. You know their video cards built into their CPUs were. So the, the, the integrated GPU built into all those Intel CPUs were never amazing. You could run a desktop on it, but you didn't want to game on it. They're getting better. Didn't intel just recently release another or announce at least another battle mage card? I'm pretty sure they did.

[Rob]

I thought they were still trying to work on the, on their GPUs. On the. What's the word I'm looking for?

[Jonathan]

They're discrete GPUs. Yup. Yup it is. Yeah. I want to say they're real interesting as kind of a low mid level and really good if you want to do like on the fly video re encoding. That's something they're particularly really good at.

[Rob]

Yeah, their Intel ARC is, is their thing that they're still working on and, and I mean I've never used one. I don't really know anyone who does. But I keep hearing that they keep getting better and better, whatever that means from people. I don't know. But.

[Jonathan]

Yep, absolutely. All right.

[Jeff]

Which graphics company think will be able to support multiple streams with their hardware? First?

[Jonathan]

What do you mean like encoding streams re encoding multiple streams at the same time? Yeah, I'm pretty sure you can do that now with several of them because I know that's something that we were doing with Zoneminder is trying to use the GPU to encode video streams and I think that was working. It's challenging, right? Like you run into hardware limitations trying to move that many pixels around at the same time. But a lot of them, a lot of them can do it in one way or another.

[Ryan]

So every day Predators are targeting children and teens online. The Department of Homeland Security's Know to.

[Rob]

Protect campaign provides resources to combat online.

[Ryan]

Child exploitation and abuse.

[Ken]

Learn how you can help protect our.

[Ryan]

Kids online and join the fight. Visit know to protect.gov so together we.

[Ken]

Can stop online child exploitation. That's K N o w the number two protect.gov does it ever feel like you're a marketing professional just speaking into the boy? Well, with LinkedIn ads. You can know you're reaching the right decision makers. You can even target buyers by job title, industry, company seniority, skills. Wait, did I say job title yet? Get started today and see how you can avoid the void and reach the right buyers with LinkedIn ads. We'll even give you a $100 credit on your next campaign. Get started at LinkedIn.com results terms and conditions apply. Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and safeway. Now through June 24th. Score hot summer savings and earn four times the points. Look for in store tags on items like Starbucks ground coffee, Red Bull energy drinks, Spam, Classic Planet oat milk, Charmin bath tissue, Totino's pizza rolls and Frito Lay chips. Then clip the offer in the app for automatic event long savings. Shop in store or online for easy drive up and go. Pickup or delivery subject to availability restrictions apply. Visit Albertsons or Safeway.com for more details.

[Jonathan]

All right, shall we. Shall we do cover some command line tips?

[Rob]

What else do we got to do?

[Jonathan]

I'm I'm a little scared about Rob's tail. A little nervous about this one, man. I'm not sure which.

[Rob]

Yeah, Rob's got P. Yes. So I am going to talk about P this time. I'm continuing on my more Util series. I think this is going to be my last one in the more Util series before I go on to something and I am finishing with a good one. P spelled P E E. So P is similar to T as in tee, which I realize we have not talked about the command T yet, so I'll have to maybe bring that up next. Once you learn about P, T is going to be very similar. So T what T? You know, I'm just going to talk about. Now what T does is it takes a standard input. So you pipe something to it, the standard input, and it splits it into a standard output and a file. The Linux P command will split your stream into two or more streams, pun intended. So what you can do is you could pipe a standard input into P and it will split it and act upon it as many times as you want. So I'm going to do a little example here for those watching. On my screen I have the command echo space quote Linux is fun quote or double quote or whatever. And then I have that piped to P and then I have I'm running three commands after P. So it's going to Split this into three streams. So it's P space, single quote, cat, redirect into file 1 TXT single quote space. And then I have rev, which is reverse. I have that redirecting into file2.txt and then I have space, single quote WCU. So word count. And I am redirecting that into file word count. Txt so when I run that, I mean you don't see anything because I didn't output anything to the stream. To the, to the. Well, yeah, to the stream, I guess. So now I have these three files. So if I look at them, file one has it just catted into there. So it's Linux is fun. File two has. It's just reverse. That's Linux is fun. Backwards. And then if I do cat word count, so it split that so. So you can act upon it multiple times. You know, this is just for example here. But you could do a lot more useful things if you want to run a command, take its output, put it into a log file and then act upon. At the same time act upon it somewhere else. And whatever else you do, you know, I'm going to do another one here. Echo, sing or double quote. ULS is the best double quote. Piping that to P. And then I'm just running. So P space, cat, space, cat, space, rev, space, cap space, cat. Do that and it's just gonna spit that all out on the screen. It's. Since it's a standard output, it. You could see that it didn't actually do it in the order because the very first thing that popped out of my standard output is the reverse one. Apparently that's faster than cat. I don't know how that worked like that, but every time I done it, that's. That's the one that popped up first. But yeah, I don't know, I could maybe do a whole bunch more and that's cool, see what happens.

[Jeff]

But try putting a riv at the very end and after all these cats.

[Rob]

Yeah, so this time I did a whole bunch of cats, you know, cat, cat, rev, cat, cat, cat, cat, cat, cat, react. And it put. It did it in order that I put it out. So I don't know, but it's not something that really order would likely matter unless you're acting on the same file.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, I was going to say if your order matters, then you have a logical bug in what you're doing.

[Rob]

If your order matters, you want to use one of the commands that I gave you a few weeks ago, which would be, I don't remember, but I know there's something.

[Jonathan]

It's in the notes. Go look.

[Rob]

It's in the notes. I know there's something here. I just get quite placed with the command is. But yeah, there you go. We're talking about P today.

[Jonathan]

All right, Ken, let's talk about pipewire and what are we doing with the Pipewire CLI today?

[Jeff]

We're going to destroy some global objects today. It's a very simple command, but it does take to demonstrate it bit of a setup. Are you able to read my terminals here?

[Jonathan]

I can, yeah.

[Jeff]

Okay, so I'm going to launch PW top first. We've got that launched over in the top left terminal and then I'm going to go ahead and go into the PW command line interpreter over here so I can do it from within it. Now I'm going to go ahead and list my nodes and the one in particular that I'm looking for is the freewheel driver node. It's ID30. In fact, you get that from the top.

[Ken]

But.

[Jeff]

But over here I. You can see information about it. I could have even done it this way by just using the info command with the 30 from a couple of weeks ago. And that's all the data that you have about it. So I'm going to destroy 30. That's all it takes. And you saw in the PWDOP it updated so that it's no longer listed. And if I do an info 30 it's no longer there. But the good news is there is a way to get that back without having to create it all over again in the bottom right. And this is why I don't have myself in the MY video feed at the moment.

[Rob]

So you can see we're all thankful for that.

[Jonathan]

Thank you.

[Jeff]

And to sit rob up for that. But I've got a system command that will let you restart pipewire as well as give you the last 10 lines from your journal control so you can see what it's doing. Now you notice that it closed the pipewire command line interpreter and PW top both. So let's go ahead and run that and you'll see that the free will drivers back because it read it from the config files when it restarted.

[Jonathan]

Nice.

[Jeff]

It's not permanent.

[Jonathan]

It's not permanent. I like it. Very good. Being able to get rid of stuff.

[Jeff]

Is useful, especially if you're wanting to play around and see what effect removing something has.

[Jonathan]

I've got a quick one and that is disowned. And this is. This is for a very particular issue that I don't know, you might find it useful. So it's for if you have launched a job in the Background that you want the job to continue even after you close the terminal. And so you don't want the job to receive like a sighup, the hang up signal or something. When you close the terminal or leave the SSH session, there is actually a command to tell it to continue running even though it is no longer talking to a terminal. And that is the disown command. This works with the jobs command. So jobs l will list the background jobs and then disown. You can specify a job number or you can use disown A and it will disown all of the background jobs. I'm not sure how many people use background jobs in Linux anymore since, you know, TMUX and Screen are so popular and usable. But if you do and you find yourself in this position where I started a background job and I've got to close the terminal, disown is the way to do it. It'll make it run sort of off in the ether, not connected to your terminal anymore. And then it'll be able to finish back there in the far background where you want it.

[Rob]

Sometimes. Sometimes I have accidentally put jobs in the background.

[Jonathan]

Yeah.

[Rob]

And then usually I just bring them back to the foreground. But I guess if I didn't want. And then kill it. If that's what I wanted to do. But I guess I could skip that step and just kill it. Disown it.

[Jeff]

There's times when I'll launch a graphical user application from the command line.

[Jonathan]

That's true.

[Jeff]

And I'll put it in the command into the background so that I can continue typing in the command line. Command line.

[Jonathan]

You might want to close that command line. Terminal and disown is the way to do it. Yeah. Yeah. So Rob, when you disown it, it doesn't kill it, it leaves it running. Oh, it just totally detaches from your terminal.

[Rob]

But then there's no way to get back to it.

[Jonathan]

Not without something like reptir.

[Rob]

So I guess you disown. Gonna just disown my job and not kill it.

[Jonathan]

It's probably a good idea. All right.

[Rob]

Good advice.

[Jonathan]

Good advice. All right. We'll let each of the guys plug whatever they would like to and Ken gets to go first. Ken what? Get the last word or plug whatever.

[Jeff]

You want to in the show notes, I've got a link to an article by Michael larabelle. It's about VirtualBox 7.2 beta, bringing Windows 11 ARM support. And you've got the source code on GitHub.

[Jonathan]

Very cool.

[Jeff]

Yeah, I found it an interesting article.

[Jonathan]

Neat. I've not run VirtualBox for a long time, but that was my VM of choice for a while. All right, Rob.

[Rob]

I too have seen that article. Since it was about Windows, I didn't bring it to a Linux show. But anyway, that's beside the point. We're talking about me here, all me. And if you want more of me, you can come find me my website. Robert P. Camppell.com on that website you can connect with me, my LinkedIn, my Twitter, my blue sky. I saw somebody in the discord say today that they have blue sky. So they're not going to connect a mast on. But I have blue sky right there. Blue sky and connect on there. And if you have mast on at Maston, and if you want to donate $5 increments for coffees, you can click there and donate a coffee to me. Or if you want, you could donate a coffee, put in the notes, donate for one of these other fine gentlemen on the show and just make sure to note it. And eventually here I plan to meet up with them and give them all the money I owe them.

[Jonathan]

He's just going to meet up with us and throw coffees at us. He's like holding one of those trays with four coffees in. Hey, guys, here you go.

[Rob]

Coffee. I'll just bring a whole. A whole like package of ground coffees. Well, this should cover it.

[Jonathan]

Yeah, yeah, I foresee it happening. All right. Thank you guys for being here. Appreciate it was a lot of fun.

[Rob]

Always.

[Jonathan]

Yeah. All right. If you want to find more of me, there's of course, hackaday. That is where Floss Weekly is at. And my security column goes live there for Friday mornings. Other than that, we appreciate everybody that's here. We appreciate those on Club Twits. If you're not and you want access to the unencumbered, the advertisement unencumbered version of the shows, you can get it at Club Twit. It's about the price of one of those cups of coffee that Rob owes us per month. Somewhere between one and two cups of coffee. Anyway, if you're there, we appreciate it. And if not, you ought to think about it. But we appreciate everybody that is here that watches, that listens, that gets us live and on the download. And we will be back. We will see you next week with another episode of the Untitled Lending Show.

[Rob]

Hey, buddy, are you a geek? Are you a tech enthusiast? Then I would love to invite you.

[Ken]

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[Rob]

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[Ken]

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[Rob]

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[Ken]

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[Rob]

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[Ken]

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[Rob]

TWIT tv Club Twit. That's Twit TV Club Twit.

[Ken]

And from the bottom of my heart, thank you and welcome to the.

[Jonathan]

IT.