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Untitled Linux Show 217: Could You Export That to an Epub?
01:47:03
Thundermail, Anime Catgirls, and FFmpeg
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- [00:00]
Jonathan Bennett
This week we're talking about more Apple Soc stuff landing in the upstream kernel. There's the Thunder Mail update, there's anime cat girls in the kernel for some reason. There's OpenSUSE news, there's FFmpeg news, there's KdenLive news, and lots more. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned.
- [00:18]
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- [00:42]
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- [01:16]
Jeff Geerling
Let's map out this week's amazing destinations and travel tips.
- [01:20]
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- [01:28]
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- [01:44]
Jeff Geerling
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- [01:46]
Ken Starks
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- [02:14]
Jonathan Bennett
Podcasts.
- [02:14]
T-Mobile Advertiser
You love from people you.
- [02:18]
Rob Campbell
This is twit.
- [02:22]
Jonathan Bennett
This is the Untitled Linux show episode 217 recorded Saturday, August 23rd. Can you export that to epub? Hey folks, it's Saturday and you know what that means. It's time for the Untitled Linux Show. We're gonna get geeky with some hardware, software, the Linux kernel, all kinds of fun stuff. It's gonna be great. It is not just me. We've got the whole gang here, Rob, Ken and Jeff, and we are going to dive in to some Linux stuff. And Rob is continuing his track record.
- [02:55]
Ken Starks
Of representing it to Apple.
- [02:58]
Jonathan Bennett
Well, I was going to say representing the other guys. If there's a Microsoft story or an Apple story to cover, he seems to be the one to do it, which is fine, I guess. What's up with Apple?
- [03:10]
Rob Campbell
I was going to say, I don't, I didn't know what you're talking about because I was going to be like, there's no drama in the story.
- [03:16]
Jonathan Bennett
I mean, that's your other guard.
- [03:19]
Rob Campbell
It does reference drama and a tiny, tiny way, but if it's got Rob, it's got drama. So, you know, and the drama here is, you know, even though we have reported on some key members leaving Asahi Linux a few months ago. Okay, that was the drama part. That's. That's it. Such as Hector Martin and Asahi Lina, it appears the project has been able to continue on without them. So as of this week we are seeing a number of improvements in the works for Linux on Apple silicon. So the 6.17 kernel merge window kind of just wrapped up and passed them by. They missed that by just a little bit. So Asahi is working on Updates for the 6.18 kernel, starting with DT patches that almost could have made in a 6.1 if it just was a little quicker. But it's all right, they didn't want to push it in like some of the other dramatic, you know, Colonel Patrick people did. So these DT patches add a lot of things like the system management controller nodes for or SMC for the Apple M1 and M2 SoCs, including the new Pmugpio controller and reboot sub nodes allowing modern Macs to actually reboot under Linux and the mainline kernel. So Sven Peter also noted those Apple SMC nodes are also needed for later enabling the Power GPIO line for the.
- [05:06]
Jonathan Bennett
WI FI board, that could be important too.
- [05:10]
Rob Campbell
Next up in the list is code support for handling laptop lid events, power buttons, Apple sensor monitoring support. So James Caligaros posted patches to the kernel mailing list this week enabling the RTC for getting and setting system clock. That's a real time clock I believe the HW Mon for monitoring various hardware metrics like thermals and power and HID or HID sub devices of the Apple system management controller. James worked on these patches with Sven and apparently Hector Martin. Not sure if this is Hector Martin still helping out with the project or if this is just work that he had been involved in before. He Left so he hasn't been gone too long. I think it's been a couple, two, three months. Finally USB 3 support on the Apple M1 M2 devices is being added. This is something that Asahi has already had for a few months in their own code but in their continued efforts to upstream their work into their kernel which glad to see that this part isn't dying with Asahi. So in that continued work a series of patches have been posted to the Linux kernel mailing list. So it's good to see Asahi Linux work is continuing on and to see names of. Well what. Apparently you know this James guy, I hadn't heard of him before I looked him up. He's been there since 2020. So apparently some long time Asahi developers are you know, making their way more into the public light now that some of the key stars, you know, the people that we saw, you know, before we saw Hector, Martin, Asahi, Lena. Well we saw their avatar because they were a. What is that called? A the. Come on John, what's that called?
- [07:20]
Jonathan Bennett
You talking about? Vtubers.
- [07:21]
Rob Campbell
Vtuber. There you go. A vtuber. Yeah, so. So anyway I'm going off track here. What was I talking about? I think it was so yes. So you know those, those two were the limelight of everything they're doing V tubing, long videos of how they got things working and you know they were kind of the, they were kind of the PR team the almost the marketing I guess. I mean they did a lot of work also but they were the ones showing us how they're doing and how cool it is. It's good to know we still have people on the team working maybe a little quieter these days to get things done in Asahi.
- [07:59]
Jonathan Bennett
Indeed.
- [08:00]
Jeff Geerling
Yeah.
- [08:00]
Jonathan Bennett
It's good to see all this continue to go.
- [08:05]
Rob Campbell
There definitely was concerns but you know Sir Sven Peter said he pretty much would take over some of that a lot of stuff that Hector was doing.
- [08:14]
Jonathan Bennett
So.
- [08:16]
Rob Campbell
Then we got James and you know I've never really looked into it but I don't know who else is on the team. Heck for all I know there's like 20 of them just hanging out there.
- [08:26]
Jonathan Bennett
I'm sure there are several and so like there, there's a group of people that really like the Mac hardware and so that's going to attract like developers that want to, want to use a Mac, want to run Linux on it and then you know inevitably something is going to be broken. Right. And so you just there they are scratching their own itch to get in there and fix it and try to push it upstream. Yeah.
- [08:46]
Rob Campbell
I'm not going to lie. I like, I like the MacBook hardware too. It's, it's slick, it's sleek.
- [08:52]
Jeff Geerling
There we go.
- [08:52]
Rob Campbell
That's the word I'm looking for.
- [08:53]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, I, I've, I've considered, we talked about it on this show. I've considered going and finding like an M1 or M2 because I'm sure you can get them secondhand now, reasonably cheap.
- [09:02]
Rob Campbell
Yeah, yeah.
- [09:05]
Ken Starks
Or cheaper than the msrp.
- [09:07]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, yeah, I would hope so. It would not be worth it.
- [09:10]
Rob Campbell
I saw an ad on Reddit, I think just to take just Today, Walmart has M1s for 599.
- [09:16]
Jonathan Bennett
That's still a little expensive.
- [09:17]
Rob Campbell
That's what I thought.
- [09:18]
Jonathan Bennett
I was, I was hoping for half of that.
- [09:21]
Rob Campbell
It didn't quite peak my interest yet. I mean, it piqued my interest, but it got my interest. It didn't peak it, though.
- [09:27]
Jonathan Bennett
That is not the same word peek, by the way. Pique. Your interest is P, I, Q, U, E, I think. And Peking is P, E, A K. Yeah.
- [09:37]
Rob Campbell
But you know, there's a thing called a play on words.
- [09:43]
Jonathan Bennett
Oh, see, I didn't think you were doing it on purpose. I'm still not sure you were doing it on purpose.
- [09:48]
Ken Starks
And there also a thing called play on Linux.
- [09:51]
Jonathan Bennett
There is, but that's not what we're going to talk about next. We're going to talk about anime cat girls next. And yes, you probably have seen them. When you click on an LKML link, you have probably seen the anime cat girl pop up and say, making sure you're not a bot. You guys have seen this, right?
- [10:14]
Jeff Geerling
Oh, yeah, I just noticed it.
- [10:16]
Jonathan Bennett
Yes. Now that you've seen it, you can't unsee it. Yeah, it's stuff like, sadly. So it'll say, making sure you're not a bot. There'll be the little picture of an animated female with cat ears, and usually it'll go away after a few seconds. And if you're like me, you've seen that and gone, I wonder what's up with that? And never really looked into it. Well, this week, actually, for my security article over at Hackaday, I looked into it and I also sort of followed along where Tavis Ormandy was looked into it. And what's happening here is this is a. It's sort of a web firewall that what it's doing is it is checking for are you a real web browser or is this someone's scraping tool? Right. Essentially, it's looking for AI bots. AI scraping bots. It does a couple of different things to try to make this determination. One is it looks at your user agent string and if you've got something like a Mozilla user agent string, then it goes, oh, this is probably a web browser and if not it figures that you're a bot. But one of the other things it does is it makes you do hashes. So in JavaScript in your browser you have to calculate a, it gives you a challenge string. You have to calculate an additional string to append to the end of it, such that when you run a SHA256 hash of the whole thing, the first X number of bits at the very beginning are zero. And that is part of its process to try to keep AI scrapers out of these open source projects. And this hit Tavis Normandy because he was accessing things like the Linux kernel mailing list LKML from not a desktop web browser. He didn't say exactly what it was using, but it would have been something like maybe a text based web browser. Pine Pines, is that what that one's called? I can't remember now but you know, there's a couple of those. Or he may have another tool built on Curl just to do this in particular. And because he didn't have JavaScript running, it blocked him and he got the pop up that said, sadly, you must enable JavaScript to get past this challenge. And so he found that kind of weird and went looking for a workaround, found a workaround by, you know, processing this, this kernel response offline. And then he started doing the math, like how effective is this really against someone that really wanted to scrape these websites? And it not very effective. He sort of did this, this experiment where he said, okay, let's go look at the number of stars that this, the Anubis, that's the name of the project, the number of stars that Anubis has on GitHub. And we'll just sort of assume that each one of those stars is a website that it protects. You figure that they're all set up with the defaults and then, okay, say we wanted to break the challenge, we wanted to calculate the challenge string for all of these websites. How much would it cost? Right? Like what is the. If we were to rent a VPS virtual private server and actually do this calculation, what would it cost to do all of them? And six minutes, it took about six minutes to do all of them on this server that he rented. And he says it's such a small amount of work. It's Literally below the threshold to get billed for. It literally costs nothing to break Anubis for every one of these websites. Then he says, think about this. The people that you're trying to keep out are the ones that already have loads and loads of GPU cards that can do these SHA256 hashes. They have whole data centers filled with nothing but SHA 52, SHA 256 generators. And then he links to a complaint where someone says, the Anubis challenges are very slow on old smartphones. They can take up to 30 seconds on some of this really old hardware. And so he basically just makes the case that this is interesting as an art project, but for actual security, it is completely useless. I have to agree, actually. I think that is almost the. You can't much argue with the math of it. So it's interesting, the Anubis thing. It's fascinating. It's sort of an art project more than it is real security. I call it security theater. It's in the. In in my security column because it makes you feel better about it, but doesn't actually help anything. But that is why you see anime cat curls when you're trying to get to the kernel.
- [15:16]
Ken Starks
So this is just an obscure security feature because it's up.
- [15:22]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, it's obscurity.
- [15:23]
Jeff Geerling
Yeah, Well, I just, I just thought it was more, you know, just putting a delay in there. So if somebody was really hammering the site, you know, have. I didn't realize it was doing a calculation. I just thought it was like, oh, it's got a few second delay in there just to.
- [15:39]
Jonathan Bennett
No, it's actually, it's actually calculating SHA286 hashes. And the thing is, if you have the SHA256 hash calculated already, you don't have to sit there while it does. So, like, you can access the site. If you have the right cookie, you can access the site without ever seeing that. And so that's why the whole thing is if someone is willing to just do the calculation, they don't have to go through that screen at all. That's kind of the point that Tavis was making, that it's like it's completely worthless for its stated purpose. Right.
- [16:08]
Jeff Geerling
Well, like I said, I didn't realize it was doing all that. I just thought it was somebody was just throwing a delay in there and. Oh, okay, whatever.
- [16:16]
Ken Starks
Is there anything that AI is good at?
- [16:21]
Jonathan Bennett
Yes.
- [16:22]
Rob Campbell
Maybe what they really wanted to do is just save on bandwidth and minimize the people they're automatically downloading and make it a little difficult on them.
- [16:32]
Jonathan Bennett
Well, that's. Yes, they were. They were trying. Well, I guess you be Tavis and the like.
- [16:37]
Rob Campbell
I'm not just saying malicious people. I'm just saying people who maybe want to go on and download all the kernels for no reason at all.
- [16:44]
Jonathan Bennett
No, I think so. At least the stated goal of Anubis is that they are fighting against people that are scraping these things to feed AI. They consider it to be a lousy thing to do.
- [16:58]
Ken Starks
So if somebody wrote a batch file using Curl and just the link for every one of those items they wanted to download and ran that, how would it affect this effect doing that?
- [17:12]
Jonathan Bennett
You can't do it with Curl. You have to follow. Well, you have to follow Tavis's steps to calculate the, calculate the cookie and then you can just respond, you know, you add it as a. I don't remember if it's a form field or a cookie. But anyway, there's a link, there's a command line flag that you can use to add that inside of Curl to then be able to get the download. So still doable. We can talk about what AI can be useful for, but I think first we're going to talk about OpenSUSE and Ken, is there something AI related in OpenSUSE or is is this always nothing.
- [17:54]
Ken Starks
AI related in this article, in these articles by Bobby Borisov and that he wrote about Douglas DeMeo's and I do apologize if I mispronounce that, but he wrote Doug Douglas wrote a blog post talking about retiring the current OpenSUSE Dash welcome window. Y' all may have seen that occasionally when I brought up my VM because I never unchecked the box to say don't show on the next one. But OpenSUSE's release team have decided to tweak and refine existing solutions like Gnome TUR for Gnome and plasma welcome for KDE's Plasma by making a new controller and OpenSuse welcome launcher to coordinate them and provide desktop specific content. According to Douglas, the rollout of this new greeter will be done in multiple phases. They'll initially start with the launcher we'll call the well known legacy OpenSUSE welcome but without the checkbox Show Onx boot. That's the one I never check that I always leave checked so I can see it every time I log into my vm. And then in the next phase, the launcher triggers opensus branded GNOME Tour and Plasma welcome while keeping opensuse welcome as a fallback. That's if it is still installed now in the last phase, the Legacy QT5 based greeter will eventually be decommissioned. There should be an agreed fallback on desktop sessions. Without dedicated greeter. Without the dedicated greeter. This last phase explains One reason why OpenSUSE is phasing out the OpenSUSE welcome window. It is considered legacy and is one of the last Qt 5 dependent applications. This should help phase out some remaining Qt 5 components across the distribution. Now, since I have condensed the information provided by both Douglas and Bobby, I do recommend following the link in the show notes if you do want even more details.
- [20:19]
Jonathan Bennett
So why are they good? Jeff, go ahead.
- [20:26]
Ken Starks
All right, I think we're waiting.
- [20:28]
Jeff Geerling
I can't hear the word ahoy without thinking of the old Commodore magazine.
- [20:34]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, I'm trying to figure out why they want to get rid of QT5.
- [20:38]
Ken Starks
Is that because most of KD6 being based off of QT6?
- [20:44]
Jonathan Bennett
I think that's probably it, yeah.
- [20:45]
Jeff Geerling
QT5 is basically getting.
- [20:50]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, yeah.
- [20:53]
Rob Campbell
I remember when I was new.
- [20:57]
Ken Starks
Yep, I. I remember when QT was new.
- [21:01]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah. So what they're. They're moving to. Is it going to be Katie or. Excuse me, is it going to be QT based? The. The new welcome window? You probably said this and I was reading something else at the time.
- [21:14]
Ken Starks
No, that's going to call. If you have GNOME as your desktop, it's going to use gnome's tur, but it's going to be customized for open source.
- [21:23]
Jonathan Bennett
Right. It uses the ones already built into the desktops. Into the desktop environments, yeah. That makes sense. They'll get, they'll get updates for free. Very cool.
- [21:35]
Ken Starks
They just have to tweak every time. Every time it's updated.
- [21:40]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, a little bit.
- [21:42]
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- [24:13]
Jonathan Bennett
All right, well speaking of updates, there was another pretty big update for those of us that do video editing on Linux. At least the slice of us that use KDE's KD and Jeff has the story here and then I'm going to tag onto it because I've got some inside scoop. But Jeff, take it away and tell us what is new.
- [24:33]
Jeff Geerling
So there's a new release of KDENLive that came out Monday, August 18th and it's 25.0. The official announcement points out there are over 300 commits and they fixed more than 15 crashes. Now this release was based around making the editing experience more pleasant so there's no new huge features. This is a Polish release so I mean they tweak some things but it's not going to be like whoa, look what they added. This is smoothing the rough edges on the interface side of things. There's a redesign of the audio mixer. They made some of the changes so the levels and thresholds are much easier to see. There was some code cleanup and with that they were able to fix the high DPI display fractional scaling issues. The titler got some love in the form of an improved SVG and image support with the ability to move and resize items. They also added center resize with shift +drag and rename the pattern tab to the templates and move the templates drop down to under it. They added a time code widget with the ability to drag to seek in the titler and they fixed some issues when resizing images. When resizing images they fixed issues when resizing images. It would also move them so it's not going to move them anymore. Fix the titler selection on create Resized Object fixed an issue where the titler's panel width was consuming half the screen and save and restore panel width on reopening. So they fixed the thumbnail not updating in the timeline after you made a change. Subtitles and speech to text also were hit by making the subtitle edit widget resizable to adapt to lower resolutions. They fixed crash dropping media files on subtitle tracks. They fixed a layer name width so you won't have issues there anymore. Fixed subtitles showing up on the top layer rather than appearing on lower layers on project loading and even the whisper function disabled translation when the turbo mode is selected. And they fixed Vosk STT production producing bad subtitles. Now as you can see here, there's a lot of polish going into this release. I won't cover them all, but I will say Video Processing also received updates on rendering, encoding, decoding and transcoding. Their monitors has improvements for making sure the monitor tool is always the correct size and location to make sure what it displays is correctly updated along with being in front and behind the proper things. There was an issue there where it could either go too far back or too far forward based on what you were doing. Markers and guides along with the scope tool were changed so there was a whole bunch in there. Like I said, over 300. Take a look at the release announcement in the show notes. That's what the link in the show notes is, the official release announcement and there's a lot of A to B type of images which I can't do justice on here where they say okay, you know like for example the audio mix. So here's what the old one looks like, here's what the new one looks like, things like that. So definitely take a look and see, see, see the changes. And they do mention in the release how they're going to have a Caden Live Sprint which will be in Berlin, Germany and start on the 4th of September and can continue for a few days after that. They mentioned in there the seventh, but I don't know if that's the official end, or they. They talk about having a guest speaker and things like that. But they also said there are going to be more details on the event coming out soon, so keep an eye on that. And finally they also have a link to places where you can help out. So even if you can't program, you know, they need documentation, they need other support people. So don't think if you can't program, you can't help. So if you can help, and if you so desire, it'd be a good way to give back to the open source community.
- [28:36]
Jonathan Bennett
Absolutely. So I had an interview with Ferrier de Alblnauer, one of the not one of the programmers, but one of the artists that actually use it and is sort of part of the project as a result. And he kind of cued me in on a couple of interesting things that's going on here so soon. Some of this actually landed in this release. One is they've started plumbing in 10 bit support to be able to do HDR video editing there in kdenlive and they're also looking at trying to do GPU accelerated timeline view and they've got a little bit of that in there with the NVENC stuff landing. And then there's some other really interesting things that they sort of know that they want to do, like changing the way that video effects are keyed right now that's a bit awkward trying to mess with the way. So if you need to change a video effect the way it works over time, it's very awkward to do. It's very fiddly and they know that and they're going to try to fix that. So some interesting things that are starting to land that are coming probably in the next couple of releases if you want to check that out. I've also dropped the link to the Floss Weekly episode in the show notes.
- [29:54]
Rob Campbell
One of my favorite video editors, I believe, also had an update this week too that is shot cut, but I have not looked into any of the details so I don't know what they have. Probably AI. Everyone has AI.
- [30:07]
Jonathan Bennett
I don't know. Indeed, everyone has AI.
- [30:12]
Ken Starks
I'll go over my favorite video editor a little later.
- [30:18]
Jonathan Bennett
Ah, I'm trying to remember if ShotCut is one of the. One of the ones that I like. There's like there's three sort of leading open source video editors right now. ShotCut, KdenLive, and there's one more. I don't think that one's open source. DaVinci versatile.
- [30:34]
Rob Campbell
Oh sure.
- [30:37]
Jonathan Bennett
Is it open Cut? I don't know.
- [30:42]
Jeff Geerling
I'm sure somebody in the audience will know.
- [30:44]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, there is an open cut, but I don't know that that's the one I'm thinking of. Anyway, there's one of them that when I try to do an import of like an hour of video the the timeline just slows to a crawl and it is not usable. Kdenlive does very well with it though. It's one of the reasons why I.
- [31:05]
Ken Starks
Stick with have you tried using Blender's video editor yet?
- [31:09]
Jonathan Bennett
I've not. I know it has some support for that, but I don't think really the non linear editing like I do is quite what it's meant for. So.
- [31:24]
Ken Starks
Have you ever heard of Flowblade?
- [31:26]
Jonathan Bennett
I have, yeah, I have heard of Flowblade. I've not used it but I am aware that it exists.
- [31:33]
Jeff Geerling
I looked up and there was like 12 of them for Linux they said but right. The. The two already mentioned are the ones that popped into my head of that I, you know. A little more household name ShotCut, caden.
- [31:46]
Ken Starks
Live, open shot, avd, mux I've vaguely heard about. I haven't played with it. I'll have to play with Flowblade and Lightworks.
- [31:57]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah Avid Mux is not a non linear video editor. It is a video processing tool. It does not have a timeline but it this way you can do manipulations but it does not have a timeline to actually do video editing anyway. So we're talking about open source editors, not necessarily video editors. There is another one to consider and Rob. That's LibreOffice. I saw a headline this week about LibreOffice how they are abandoning something. Is this part of your notes?
- [32:36]
Rob Campbell
You'll have to tack that on because I'm not quite sure what you're talking about there.
- [32:41]
Jonathan Bennett
If you don't mention it, I'll be glad to do it. Tell us what you've got about LibreOffice and the next release.
- [32:47]
Rob Campbell
So I know lately I've been giving a lot of love to OnlyOffice on the show, but LibreOffice is still here and with its 25.8 happier release they're doing what they can to keep up with some of the great improvements. So the first things people are liking likely to notice is everything is much faster from application startup to scrolling large documents and file readings. I don't know, maybe. Maybe they drop something there. That's why it's faster. I. I really don't know what Jonathan was hinting at. Next thing on my list is benchmarks Ran by the Document foundation show that. Well, I mean this is more an expansion on that first part, but it shows that Writer and Calc, you know, the word processor and the spreadsheet tool open files 30% faster than before. And as for opening files, significant gains have been made in handling Microsoft Office files with the release. With this release, you know, example, the docx xlsx and the pptx documents are now processed with greater accuracy. LibreOffice 25.8 now add support for exporting PDF 2.0 files with AES 256 encryption, which is a requirement for 2.0, and combines PDF and PDF A versions into one drop down menu. In addition, there's a PDF export UI rearranged with form section combined new structure elements/em/strong/title added AF relationship for embedded files in hybrid mode, embedded ODF documents are marked as a source. So a number of other changes also too numerous to mention them, but a few of them here are Spell check is now better in multi language, now better supports multi language in spreadsheets, and there is enhanced support for screen readers and improved keyboard navigation. So some good accessibility features here. Calc also has 19 new functions. So you know, the basic one likes like equals sum and then you sum up stuff. Well, obviously it's had that for a long time, but there are 19 new ones that more secure. I kind of look through them. There's nothing I ever use, but you know, maybe you want to use them. There's toolbar changes, a new script, forged library service, and like I said, a lot more. But the biggest thing coming to LibreOffice that Jonathan is going to love is AI.
- [35:47]
Jonathan Bennett
Oh yay.
- [35:49]
Rob Campbell
All right, so this isn't actually part of the 25.8 release, but a plugin that has been made available this week, or I guess, I guess they call them extensions. So a new extension for Labor Office allows you to generate images right inside of a writer and impress without any subscription fees or account signups with the use of stable diffusion. So Igor Tamara, he's pretty new to Labor Office development, but he built this extension in only two weeks using the. He used the GIMP plugin as the foundation and then he adapted it to work with Labor Office. So just took that and went from there. You know. You guys think he used any AI to do this? Maybe a little. Maybe a little vibe coding could be. So the use case to use this, it's. It's pretty simple. Apparently you type the image you want, tweak some settings, pick a model and you know, through the Online group of volunteers lending their GPU power for free, known as the AI Horde. Boom. You have an image. So a lot of cool stuff. Labor Office is moving forward and personally I love the AIs stuff.
- [37:20]
Jonathan Bennett
Interesting. Yeah. Okay. So the thing that they are leaving behind is Windows 32 bit support and with that support for Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8 8.1.
- [37:39]
Rob Campbell
I mean that's unfortunate for some Windows users still use an old version of Windows. I know they exist.
- [37:49]
Jonathan Bennett
Yep, they sure do. It's probably time to leave it in the past though. Install Linux on that old box.
- [37:54]
Rob Campbell
Yeah, I don't have anything else to say.
- [37:56]
Ken Starks
So I guess you wouldn't be using the AI to generate a document and convert it to an epub.
- [38:04]
Rob Campbell
No, that is not part of that yet. Just images for that.
- [38:12]
Ken Starks
Go ahead, Jeff.
- [38:13]
Jeff Geerling
I was going to say I looked at some of the functions in Calc. There are some useful functions in there. So if you're kind of the person that would be programming a lot of stuff in like for example, using Vlookups and you're doing a lot of data manipulation in Excel type thing. So the calc functions are going to support a lot of that kind of stuff. So it's not a. If, if you're balancing your checkbook, it won't be of any use. But when you're picking and choosing data and you're kind of using your spreadsheets sort of like a database too, that's. They'll be. They'll be helpful.
- [38:47]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah.
- [38:48]
Rob Campbell
It wasn't Vlookup. Vlookup itself wasn't one of those, was it? No, just things that support it better.
- [38:54]
Jeff Geerling
Yeah, I'm using that as a level of instruction. So if you're like, I'm in Excel and I don't know what that is. Yeah. Then it's.
- [39:01]
Jonathan Bennett
These are not for you.
- [39:02]
Jeff Geerling
Yeah, it's not for you. It's for the kind of heavier duty coders in spreadsheet.
- [39:10]
Jonathan Bennett
I've heard of Vlookup. I don't remember what it does, but I've heard of it.
- [39:15]
Ken Starks
It looks up vertically through a database and finds a related item in the.
- [39:24]
Jonathan Bennett
And here I was thinking if you had an LED keyboard, it made your V key flash.
- [39:30]
Rob Campbell
For the most part. I'm just a equal sum kind of guy and don't use a whole lot of other ones, but sometimes I do. I don't. I don't know them by heart. I look them up. I've used Vlookup to create some more complicated spreadsheets, but I don't have them down by heart. I always have to look. It's like, how do I do this again?
- [39:46]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, yeah, yeah. My.
- [39:48]
Jeff Geerling
I live in Excel, so I do a lot of this kind of stuff.
- [39:51]
Rob Campbell
Hey, I'm.
- [39:52]
Jeff Geerling
You guys are talking about Rust programming and doing that. I'm like, I don't know what's going. But when something like this, I'm like, oh, yeah, I know what's going on.
- [39:58]
Rob Campbell
Hey, I'm in there a lot, too. But that doesn't mean. That doesn't necessarily mean you have to know the. All the functions.
- [40:07]
Ken Starks
I have used several of the obscure functions for doing a lot of database manipulation with Excel in The Past and LibreOffice Calc, essentially.
- [40:18]
Jonathan Bennett
You say that because Vlookup, now that I go and read about it, it's basically select where. Select this column, where that column is equal to. It's essentially the same thing as you would do in a database. Okay, Yes, I know, I get it.
- [40:31]
Jeff Geerling
Yeah. Except the really tricky part is when you're like, I got to add all these values that correspond to this other column or other row label, and there's multiples. So I can't just use, like, Vlookup, because I have to match several. Because Vlookup finds the first one. But there's other functions for that, too.
- [40:50]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah.
- [40:50]
Jeff Geerling
I'll leave that for the listener to go figure out how to figure out what they are and how to use multiple patterns in.
- [40:58]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah. At some point, Jeff, you should just be using a database and some Python code.
- [41:04]
Jeff Geerling
Yeah, that takes too long.
- [41:06]
Rob Campbell
Yeah. He prefers a little VB script in Excel.
- [41:10]
Jeff Geerling
Hey, I'm not above running in spreadsheets. LibreOffice has supported it for a long time and Office supports it now.
- [41:19]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah.
- [41:20]
Ken Starks
There is a database program that comes with LibreOffice.
- [41:27]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah. LibreOffice base, I think they call it.
- [41:29]
Ken Starks
Yeah.
- [41:29]
Jonathan Bennett
I've never fiddled with it. I know. It's an alternative to Microsoft Access, I think. Access, yeah.
- [41:36]
Rob Campbell
Which is another thing I'd rather never see again.
- [41:39]
Jonathan Bennett
Truth, Truth.
- [41:41]
Rob Campbell
Any access. Like, there came a point in my life where if I came across an Access database and someone else wasn't using, I exported it to a spreadsheet.
- [41:50]
Jonathan Bennett
Yep, yep.
- [41:52]
Jeff Geerling
And we're still using spreadsheets because there's a lot of data manipulation, a lot of. A lot of math and stuff and statistical analysis and whatnot.
- [42:00]
Ken Starks
What's really interesting is taking that and importing the outputs from those calculations into a document and then exporting that document to an epub.
- [42:15]
Jonathan Bennett
What is it with Ken and his epubs.
- [42:19]
Rob Campbell
Oh, because he wants to have that in the epub so he can read it in Caliber.
- [42:23]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, but we've got a story before we get to Caliber.
- [42:25]
Rob Campbell
There's something in Chrome he wants to skip that.
- [42:28]
Jonathan Bennett
We're not going to skip it, Ken. We're going to talk about Chrome next because there's a really big deal, something I've been covering for a very long time that we've talked about. But it is now landed and it looks like it's on the schedule for Chrome 141, which sometime around the end of next month, the end of September, it's going to be out, which means that you can probably beta drive it before then. You may be able to get it in the Canary builds already, and that is that there is now support landed in Chromium and Chrome for The Color Management V1, the Wayland HDR protocol. So Chrome is finally catching up to Firefox. It's been in Firefox for a while now. I've been enjoying it in Firefox for a while now, but I discovered just earlier today that about three days ago they finally pulled it. And we talked about this when the code was written about a month ago. It was unclear then, though, what the schedule was to making it live in the releases. And it is now on the schedule and again, end of September is when we should be able to get this. So if you're running something like, oh, KDE 6.4 and you're running Chrome 141, you will be able to get your HDR fix if you have a monitor that can actually do it. I finally, I talked Jeff into getting one of those. Jeff, you're going to be on the beta tester team for this, right?
- [43:57]
Jeff Geerling
Yeah, I'm running HDR right now.
- [44:00]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I can tell.
- [44:01]
Rob Campbell
You look different, more vibrant and colorful.
- [44:05]
Jonathan Bennett
That works. Rob, have you. Have you gone into Firefox and played around with, you know, pulling up HDR YouTube videos?
- [44:13]
Jeff Geerling
I haven't yet. I'm just pretty, pretty new on the monitor and still working on it. And it's one of those. It's not like a thousand nit monitor, right?
- [44:23]
Jonathan Bennett
So.
- [44:25]
Jeff Geerling
But it's definitely brighter and the colors pop more. And it's. It's my first OLED too, so it's.
- [44:29]
Rob Campbell
Like, oh, that too. That's. That would be. That's expensive. That was an expensive monitor, wasn't it? But can you export that to an ePub?
- [44:37]
Jeff Geerling
Yeah, I can, but it would take a lot of pages to print. Out. I got a 5k by 2k monitor, 45 inch.
- [44:47]
Jonathan Bennett
All right, all right Ken, we finally are ready for your epub story. What's going on with Calibre or Calibri, however you want to say it?
- [44:55]
Ken Starks
Well, this week we'll be covering a lot of improvements since I last talked about calibre version 8.4, which was way back on episode 202. This week Bobby Borisov and Marius Nestor wrote About caliber version 8.9 being released now. It brings 20 new features compared to 8.4. I am amazed at the new features Covid comes up with based on requests from all of us users. According to Bobby, one of the most notable changes is in the Annotations browser, which now displays a color swatch as in the results list. Marius writes about caliber 8.9 adding a submenu to the right click menu of the Fetch News button that shows recently downloaded news sources. Other features added after version 8.4 include adding support for the latest Tolino firmware, rewriting the back end used to run the Piper speech models so they no longer need an external binary. In the welcome wizard changes the default output format to AZW3 for kindles. It used to use the the Mobi format. It added an option to the Cobie driver to change how the Cobie display series numbers using the template. The best source for all the new features and bug fixes is the link to Caliber. What's new that I have linked in the show notes and I do recommend reading Bobby's and Marius articles to see what else they consider important.
- [46:37]
Jonathan Bennett
You said firmware. What firmware is that a reference to.
- [46:41]
Ken Starks
On the Kobo ebook readers?
- [46:47]
Jonathan Bennett
I'm trying to remember what those are.
- [46:52]
Ken Starks
Similar to Kindle or the Nuke ebook readers. It's the firmware on them. The Tolino is actually one of the Kobo ebook reader. Would you say versions or models?
- [47:11]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, version model. Either way works. Yeah. Very cool. I was not familiar with that particular reader. In my world there's only Kindle because I don't have any ebook readers at all and that's the only one that I'm familiar with.
- [47:28]
Ken Starks
And that's the Kindle app?
- [47:31]
Jonathan Bennett
No, the Kindle reader just because that's the one that the market knows so much about.
- [47:34]
Rob Campbell
It's.
- [47:35]
Jonathan Bennett
It's the one that's out there. So that's the one they're not familiar with.
- [47:37]
Rob Campbell
There was a time the Nook was right up there, is like which one's gonna win out? And well yeah, we know.
- [47:43]
Ken Starks
Still got a Nook that Powers up. It's just the touchscreen doesn't always respond to what you want it to do.
- [47:51]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah.
- [47:52]
Ken Starks
Which makes it hard to open books.
- [47:55]
Jonathan Bennett
I can imagine. Yeah. Gotta hook a mouse up to it. Yeah.
- [47:59]
Jeff Geerling
It just seemed like the Nook faded away. I don't remember any major issues.
- [48:04]
Ken Starks
The ebook reader itself. Did I still use the Nook app on my phone?
- [48:13]
Rob Campbell
Yeah, I think it was more of where the books came from because the Nook was Barnes and Noble and, and, and the Kindle's Amazon and Amazon is just way more widely available.
- [48:27]
Ken Starks
Yeah.
- [48:27]
Rob Campbell
There's also widely known.
- [48:30]
Ken Starks
Well, Noah Pulcher says he quite likes his Kobo Libra color. Haven't used any of those. I've been looking, shopping around because I'd like to find a good color E Ink reader for some of the digital comics I've got downloaded through Humble Bundle.
- [48:47]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah. Yeah. I've only recently gotten some E Ink devices and I've never messed around with the color E Ink. It's impressive like all that they've been able to do with that. It looks like, by the way that Nook tablets are still a thing and they're still pretty reasonably priced.
- [49:06]
Ken Starks
So they're Android based tablets running the Nook app.
- [49:10]
Rob Campbell
Yeah, I kind of thought I've seen it at the store though.
- [49:14]
Jonathan Bennett
Oh, I'm sure you can still see.
- [49:17]
Ken Starks
Him in Barnes and Noble.
- [49:18]
Rob Campbell
Yeah, that's what I mean. At the store.
- [49:20]
Jonathan Bennett
Very cool.
- [49:23]
Jeff Geerling
And side note, when you're talking about the colored comics, I did a command line tip probably a couple years ago on a reader for comic books for Linux.
- [49:35]
Jonathan Bennett
Have you installed your comic book reader in Cashios yet?
- [49:39]
Jeff Geerling
I have not. This is going to be a two. This is going to be a two parter.
- [49:44]
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- [51:02]
Jonathan Bennett
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- [51:11]
Jonathan Bennett
Well then, take it away with part one, sir.
- [51:14]
Jeff Geerling
Okay, so like I said, this is going to be a two part story. Now the second part is my journey installing Cashios on a laptop. And this first one, I just thought we'd get a little deeper into what Cashios really is. It's a little bit of its history background, that kind of stuff. You know, we've been talking about it a lot for the past few weeks, you know, especially since Clear Linux is shut down. It's basically now the performance front runner. It was always number two whenever Michael Erble at Pharonix would do any benchmarking, Clear was always the Clear winner and Cashy was always second. And it kind of left it was the gap between Clear's large lead and the rest of the pack. You know, the Ubuntu, the Fedoras, the, you know, they were kind of all pretty close. Cashy was the one that was a little kind of ahead, you know, noticeably ahead. And so I thought it was time we just dug, dug in a little deeper. Now the link in the show notes is from a recent article in phosphorus.com where they they basically dug into it for us. Now Cache OS is a pretty recent addition to the Linux roundup, versus some of the old names like Slackware and Debian. It was first released in 2021 by Peter Jung and Vlad Slav Nippola Godin. Sorry about that. And it's based out of Germany. The name Cashio S originated from the Cashy Scheduler, a CPU scheduler patch meant to improve desktop responsiveness that was developed by Jung. He later grew interested in creating an optimized Linux distribution for the X86 64 V3 systems. Now, notice I said 64 in there, there isn't a 32 bit version and the V3 means that the really old hardware is not going to run cache us, even if it is 64bit they also need to support the v3 instruction set. I won't go deep into this as we've covered this in past shows, but the version Numbering of CPUs is based on a core agreed upon, well mostly agreed upon set of instructions which each version level supports. In this case V3 is Intel Haswell which was released in 2013 and most would know it as the 4770 chips or newer are supported. The AMD side it would be the Excavator chips or newer and it was released in 2015 so that'd be like the Athlon X64 845 or better. Minimum hardware is going to include 3 gigabytes of RAM though 8 gigabytes is recommended and the same with storage. 30 gigabytes is the minimum but 50 is the recommended. There also needs to be an Internet connection. This is not set up to be an offline distribution. Cashios is based on Arch and like just like Arch it's a rolling release. So when you install you're getting a snapshot of the OS because that you know the the ISO that you download and then when you get online that's where you get it up to date. And the fundamentals kind of we touched on before is its optimized performance while maintaining simplicity. The default deck now the default desktop is kde. Now this could be a little confusing for people that are new. There's 15 other desktops such as Gnome XF CE i3, Wayfair, LXQT, Openbox, Cinnamon, Cosmic UK UI, LXDE Mate, Budgie, QTile, Hyperland and Sway. So those are all open. So when, when you're installing and you have an option of what to install desktop wise they all show up. You just pick the one you want. Right now Cashios is the number one spot on distro watch which is we say take that with a big grain of salt. It does say though that it's probably pretty popular since it's been number one for a while. So at least people are clicking on it, people are looking at it. Doesn't mean it's the most installed, it just means that it's got a lot of interest. At least it's catching eyes. Like I said before in benchmarking, it's really fast and only ever lost out to clear which is now no more. So cache is going to be your performance leader. Take a look at the article in the Show Notes for more details. And part two I will go into my experience putting cashy OS on a.
- [55:55]
Jonathan Bennett
Modern laptop ooh yeah, very interested in that. It's an interesting thing to see what Cashew's done. And I don't know if it's going to become a leading distro, but I think some of its best ideas will, of course, get gobbled up by the other distros. And so you'll see it in Ubuntu or Fedora or one of those in the coming years. So, yeah, interesting stuff.
- [56:25]
Jeff Geerling
And Ubuntu we've kind of talked about in the past is kind of playing around with. They were looking well, Fedora was too. Making V3 processors is the only, you know, that level. And up there was talk of getting rid of 32 bit altogether. They're a little more mainstream where cashies kind of went forward and said, no, we're putting the pedal to the metal and we're not supporting the old stuff. We're not trying to be a. A broad for everything kind of distribution. They're. They're like, okay, you gotta, you gotta be this high to ride, you know?
- [57:03]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah.
- [57:04]
Rob Campbell
You know, Jeff, nobody sold me on switching to a new distribution for a while. Well, somebody did buy me on switching to a new distribution for a little while, but nobody sold me on it. And I think you might be. I'm really kind of intrigued and interested to give this a shot.
- [57:23]
Ken Starks
So, Rob, I'd have to ask, would you go with the default shell or would you choose Fish or zsh?
- [57:32]
Rob Campbell
Default.
- [57:34]
Jonathan Bennett
Yep, Yep. It's really, it's really the only one there. The only one there is for us.
- [57:39]
Rob Campbell
Old, old folks, you know, I am, I'm interested. I've heard a lot of good things about Fish. I'm interested in giving it a shot someday, but I, I'm probably not interested in actually using that as my daily driver.
- [57:53]
Jeff Geerling
You'll have to change it up then, because it defaults to Fish. That's what I'm running right now. And I didn't, I didn't choose. It's just where it.
- [58:00]
Rob Campbell
Well, maybe I'll give it a shot then.
- [58:02]
Ken Starks
The article is wrong because it said it would default to bash.
- [58:06]
Jeff Geerling
Yeah, it's wrong. It. It's. Or maybe, maybe they changed it. But right now, mine, mine, mine went straight to Fish. But it still supports kind of what, you know, it's a little more colorful. And I think unless you're really into the. Into the terminal a lot, really doing some heavy lifting, I don't think you're really going to notice a difference other than like, oh, it's got some colors.
- [58:26]
Ken Starks
And what default email application, does it go with.
- [58:34]
Jeff Geerling
Whatever you want to load in?
- [58:36]
Jonathan Bennett
See, I was going to ask Rob if he had considered changing his default male host to maybe a Thunder Mail, because that's the story that he has about Thunderbird and their new professional services coming up.
- [58:50]
Rob Campbell
Yeah, it's definitely on my radar.
- [58:55]
Jeff Geerling
And I will say, as much as Steve Gibson and Leo hate the name, I think Thunder Mail is just cool. I don't care what they say.
- [59:02]
Rob Campbell
I kind of like, I like it better than Thunderbird.
- [59:05]
Ken Starks
Yeah, yeah. Thundermill and Lightning Bird. There's the combination.
- [59:09]
Jonathan Bennett
Oh, take it away, Rob.
- [59:13]
Rob Campbell
So, yeah, so some time ago we shared the announcement that Thunder Mail, Thunder Mail, a mail service from Thunderbird. Well, and then, and then Thunderbird Pro, backed by a suite of enhanced features both brought to us by Thunder and, you know, I hoped would eventually compete with Office 365.
- [59:38]
Ken Starks
So this was.
- [59:39]
Rob Campbell
This we brought to you, I don't know, several few months ago, a while. And you know, I've hoped for it to compete with 365. I still don't have any answers as to how it might compete with Office365, but there are more details starting to emerge, more things in the know. So here's what we know so far, some of the new details. So Mozilla Technologies says for users who opt in, the goal is for these services to be smoothly integrated into the Thunderbird app, providing a natural extension of the familiar experience they already enjoy, enhanced with additional capabilities they may be looking for. And the mail service plans to fully support imap, JMAP and smtp. So imap, smtp, those are common. You can use those in any mail client in the world. Jmap, JMAP was new to me. I had not heard about it, so I had to look that up. So JMAP is JSON Meta Application Protocol. So it's a set of open Internet standards designed for handling email. It was developed as an alternative to traditional email protocols like IMAP, SMTP, as well as proprietary email APIs such as Google's Gmail, Microsoft's Mappy, used by Outlook. So, you know, with these things, it sounds like maybe it's kind of targeting, you know, Office365, you know, if I'm, if I'm getting the right vibe correctly here. So, you know, maybe it's their hopes along with me. So to continue on, the included domains will be@thundermail.com andb pro, but custom domains will also be supported. So, you know, if this service product makes sense and I move over to them I. I've got my own custom domains I'll be bringing along for those wondering. Thunder Mail servers will be located in Germany and you know, from a privacy perspective, I think they're pretty, pretty well known for that. Maybe not the, not the, not the number one privacy country, but I think they're pretty good at that from what I've heard. I don't hear much, so. So, you know, it's a good start, but I'd kind of like to maybe see some more options in the future. I don't know. I'm fine with Germany, but I feel like some other people might like other options. So. Another thing. Thunderbird Appointment will be a service integration into Thunderbird, enabling users to create, plan and link to events like zoom calls, in person meetings, etc. When composing emails. No need to zip between different tabs or open emails. MZLA or Mozilla is investigating open standards like VPOL to allow distributed teams to edit and plan schedules. You know, something that typical calendar standards like ICAL doesn't support today, but with something like this, you know, it's more like Gmail or Office 365 comparable where you could have shared calendars, I presume and, and both edit them as a distributed team, as they say. Additional features in the pipeline are Thunderbird Assist. Here you go, Jonathan. Thunderbird Assist to add optional AI capabilities to Thunderbird, but only, at least the plan is to only be with the Thunderbird Pro and it's optional. Jonathan, I know you don't have to get it. I don't know what, what kind of AI capabilities. It's, it's, it's definitely early days, I think at least not much is out there, what it's gonna do. So the big question is we are all waiting for is when is it coming and how much does it cost?
- [64:05]
Jonathan Bennett
Is the question.
- [64:07]
Rob Campbell
Sorry, but I don't have that answer to that big question. But there is a waiting list you can sign up for today. And I'm not sure if I signed up before when I first heard this announcement, but if I did or if I didn't, I signed up again today. So I'm definitely on that waiting list. Maybe twice. I don't know I'm going to be there though. At least you know I'm going to be there if everything makes sense, if the cost makes sense and whatever the service offering turns out to be.
- [64:38]
Jonathan Bennett
Indeed.
- [64:39]
Ken Starks
Especially if it's only the cost of a cup of coffee.
- [64:42]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, it's good to have alternatives, right? That Google Workspace is not the Only thing that you can go to for, for sort of professional support.
- [64:51]
Ken Starks
Now I'm wondering if Thunderbird Appointments is a continuation of what was originally called the Lightning project.
- [65:01]
Jonathan Bennett
Not familiar with that.
- [65:02]
Jeff Geerling
I don't know what that is.
- [65:05]
Ken Starks
Let me give you a link. It was software that Mozilla came out with for basically doing a calendar that actually got permanently integrated into Thunderbird around 2020.
- [65:21]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, I was not familiar with that particular name, but yeah, I use the calendar stuff a little bit there inside of Thunderbird.
- [65:34]
Jeff Geerling
And you mentioned the servers in Germany. I can see two things going there. One is I saw a map of data security. I didn't dig into it so I don't know how good it was, but Germany was one of the higher rated countries for having, having good data, data security. And with several countries in Europe saying, hey, we're going to get rid of Microsoft, well, okay, we need it. We need a exchange style email, you know, something more professional and getting, getting away from, you know, they want to go open source. Makes sense. You know, hey, let's put it in Europe where a lot of people are going to want that faster time. And if it really catches on in other locations, you know, like in Asia or North America, then well, okay, we can add servers there too.
- [66:23]
Rob Campbell
You know, with this service, you know, you bring up, we bring up the Gmail, the G Suite, I guess or Google Work Spaces or whatever it is or Office365, you know, one, one key difference between those two services is the Gmail G suite, whatever it's, it's all cloud based. They don't actually have a physical Outlook like application for the desktop, which is I think one thing that, you know, Office 365 users really like. I think a lot of them tend to really like having that all look all tied together. Everything just syncs together. And this, you know, if it turns out right, is that because they got the cloud, the email servers, but they also have the email client that you can install. And even better that Microsoft doesn't even have is you could install it on Linux. You can install it anyway. Linux, Mac, Windows, I guess you could.
- [67:22]
Ken Starks
Say that's future proofing their clients.
- [67:27]
Jonathan Bennett
Sure. Yeah.
- [67:28]
Rob Campbell
And I'm one that's something that nobody else has.
- [67:32]
Jeff Geerling
Yeah, I'm one that I like an email program.
- [67:35]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah.
- [67:35]
Jeff Geerling
And even, even Outlook, I like the classic version because I got keyboard shortcuts. I can do so much more. I need to be able to tear through email at a furious rate. So I need keyboard shortcuts. I can't wait for A web page to kind of load. I gotta just, you know, I'm pumping through them. So I. Yeah, yep, yep. And any Fisher Price style email client.
- [68:03]
Jonathan Bennett
Is just not going to cut it.
- [68:05]
Jeff Geerling
That's what I call new Outlook.
- [68:07]
Jonathan Bennett
Fisher Price. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's pretty accurate. All right, well speaking of get through getting through things fast, I came across a very, very up to date Pharonics article about something that has just been posted to the Linux kernel mailing list and that is a kernel swap code overhaul. So this is a kairou song of Tencent who is doing patches for the swap table, the kernels swap cache and this was actually an idea that we first heard during a talk he gave back a while ago and it's part of the BPF like one of the time I think one of the times that they got together, you know, something like the Plumbers conference or what have you. But it integrates swap cache, swap maps and swap Allocator right in the kernel and it does a redesign of that code to of course make it more future proof but also do lower memory usage and higher performance. Well, that has landed. The first version of this patch has landed and apparently it results in somewhere between a 5 to 20% performance uplift in throughput or RPS or build time in the various benchmarks that they ran, which that's quite a bit. And so it's interesting that people are saying oh well, I don't use swapping at all. I'd have swapping turned off. This won't help me at all. And, and there are some interesting places where swap is used even though you don't think it's being used. You may not have a swap partition, but you may still have some swap happening using something like part of your memory being used for lzma like a compressed memory and so it'll swap memory in between ram between your compressed and your uncompressed ram or you know, you get some other things where you may have really fast NVME and so you want to set that up for some swap space. And so you know a very interesting sort of hopefully it'll make it to the kernel, hopefully this will actually survive and make it in but 6 to 7% in just in the in memory database of Redis Valky. That's quite a bit that is definitely up around the point where you can tell it's a difference. And then of course for some of these big companies that do this all day, every day, that's going to be a huge difference for them. But yeah, it's good to see these various portions of the kernel finally getting, you know, someone looking at it and going, okay, let's get rid of all the technical debt. Let's actually fix the things that we know about. Let's make this thing better. And so good. Good for them. Good for. Good for Kairo Song of Tencent for doing the work on this, and hopefully it'll land in a kernel version coming soon.
- [71:06]
Jeff Geerling
That would be very cool. And you can also have a swap file. That's one of the things that they recommend for speedup is you have a swap file that's on the same partition as your os.
- [71:16]
Rob Campbell
Right, right, right. I think the swap file is probably more common these days in a lot of distros.
- [71:22]
Ken Starks
No, it's the default with Ubuntu now.
- [71:25]
Jeff Geerling
Yeah, it's kind of the way that the separate partition is the old way to do it. It's. It's less used and it, it had to do with. When I remember looking into it, jumping to a different partition took a little longer. I mean, you know, few nanoseconds longer.
- [71:42]
Ken Starks
But it's one microsecond.
- [71:44]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, I mean, depends on how many times you're doing that. The kernel does things very, very quickly. And so it does a lot of them sometimes. And, you know, one microsecond here and a microsecond there. It does eventually add up.
- [71:56]
Jeff Geerling
Having it already on the drive you're on sped it up a little bit.
- [72:01]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah. Believe that.
- [72:04]
Ken Starks
The question I have then is how does that affect your SSDs aging when you're using a lot of swapping?
- [72:12]
Jonathan Bennett
I mean, modern SSDs have built into them now wear leveling, where they sort of detect that, oh, this is probably these. These blocks are probably switched. And so we're gonna, instead of writing on this block every time, we're gonna write on this block and then automatically remap it over here, and then automatically remap it over here. And so your swap just gets spread out across the entire drive. Jeff, how did I do?
- [72:35]
Jeff Geerling
Yeah, that's pretty good. It's.
- [72:37]
Jonathan Bennett
It.
- [72:38]
Jeff Geerling
There's wear leveling, there's a bunch of stuff that goes on. And the thing is, a lot of hard drives, they're slow enough, it's hard to hit the data lifetime of them, where SSDs are a lot faster. So you have much more of a possibility of hitting that. But usually SSDs are rated in terabytes per day for lifetime. So it's. Realistically, you're going to get so Many years out of it. I throw swap on SSDs for I don't know how, probably a decade now. And it's not been a problem.
- [73:11]
Jonathan Bennett
I remember when they first came out, it was a problem when I first got an ssd, When I first put an SSD in a customer's laptop, it was a problem then.
- [73:21]
Ken Starks
Yeah, Back when they were like 500 gigabytes.
- [73:23]
Jonathan Bennett
Maybe not even that big, not even that. I think it was 100 gigabyte SSD that I put in somebody's laptop. Then I had to go and update. They had to update the firmware on the SSD because it was causing blue screens inside of Windows. That was fun. That was a fun time. Like, how do you get firmware updated on your drive? They had some crazy CAC way to do it. It was great.
- [73:47]
Jeff Geerling
Yeah, they've got wear leveling, they've got different methods to change things. The technology's gotten better. There's. There's a lot of things that, you know, there's. There's error. Better error correction now. So if you lose a bit, it's not as big a deal as it used to be. So there's many things that the drives now are so much more reliable.
- [74:09]
Ken Starks
Yeah, I've heard of. I think it was a while ago I came across a how to article on how to set up ZRAM to use as a temporary folder and. Or a swap file.
- [74:27]
Jeff Geerling
Yeah, if you just throw in a lot of ram, you don't really need a swap file.
- [74:33]
Jonathan Bennett
So zram, I mentioned that briefly. Zram is compressed RAM blocks. That's where you're not storing just the raw bits inside ram, but you're actually running them through a compression utility and built into the kernel. And yeah, there are some really interesting things that you can do with that. You might want to use it if you're doing audio video conversion to be able to get that sped up.
- [74:58]
Ken Starks
And then you'd want to use my favorite tool for converting.
- [75:03]
Jonathan Bennett
What tool is that, Ken?
- [75:05]
Ken Starks
FFmpeg. There have been a lot of improvements. And Rob, you'll be glad to hear that one of the improvements is that Whisper Filter is finally here in the latest version of FFmpeg. Bobby Barself, Michael Arabelle and Marius Nestor all wrote About FFmpeg version 8.0, codenamed Huffman, being released yesterday. And I do mean yesterday, the 22nd of August. This release is one of the FFMPEG project's largest releases to date, according to Bobby. One of the headline additions is a new Whisper Filter. I just mentioned expanding FFmpeg's toolset for audio processing. According to Marius, FFmpeg 8.0 now enables TLS peer certificate certificate verification by default. According to Michael, it now depends on the. Net Wide Assembler or NASM instead of Yasm, and I'll let y' all figure out what Yasm is. On the security and maintenance front, this release drops support for the older OpenSSL versions below 1.1.0 and deprecates OpenMax encoders. FFmpeg version 8.0 also added a new class of decoders and encoders based on pure Vulkan Compute, implementing Compute shaders and working on any implementation of Vulkan 1.3. Enabling Vulkan decoding is sufficient to use these new decoders since they use the same hardware acceleration, you'll probably see that commonly referred to as Hwaccel. There's both an API and commands. The release notes talk about the project modernizing its infrastructure. The mailing list servers have been fully upgraded and they have recently started to accept contributions via a new forge available on code.ffmpeg.org running I hope I'm pronouncing this correctly. Forge Joe Instance I am looking forward to playing with these new features Once FFmpeg version 8.0 is available in Tumbleweed and Ubuntu Studio. I got a feeling Tumbleweed is going to get it first. Now there is a lot more covered in the articles by Bobby, Michael and Marius, so I do recommend following the links in the show notes to get all the details.
- [77:55]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, Whisper support is pretty cool. One thing, one question I've got and I think the answer is unfortunately that you cannot do this yet. But can you use this to get a transcript where it tells you which which speaker is which? Like if we were to run this this show through it, would it have Speaker 1 said this, Speaker 2 said this?
- [78:15]
Ken Starks
That's a good question. You probably have to provide some way to identify each speecher, some way for it to differentiate between the voices.
- [78:30]
Jonathan Bennett
A quick A quick Google shows that Whisper X is a version of Whisper that can do this. Huh.
- [78:36]
Rob Campbell
So the answer is yes, some you can.
- [78:39]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah.
- [78:40]
Ken Starks
But if you do want to get some more information, I've got a just posted a link in the discord about how Whisper and FFMPEG from the ffmpeg Dash users list where they're discussing using it.
- [79:03]
Jonathan Bennett
Yep, very cool.
- [79:04]
Ken Starks
It does mean installing your the model that you use separately.
- [79:09]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, that makes sense. I wonder how big those models are. This is something actually let me medium sized about yay big model size from.
- [79:23]
Ken Starks
Tiny, base, small, medium and large. Tiny is 75 megabits on one.
- [79:29]
Jonathan Bennett
It's not too bad.
- [79:30]
Ken Starks
The largest 2.9 gigabytes.
- [79:32]
Jonathan Bennett
That's actually still not terrible for AI models. Not terrible at all. Yeah.
- [79:38]
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- [82:09]
Jonathan Bennett
All right, so let's turn now to Jeff and get part two of The Cashios story, you actually, you went. You did more than just dive into it and read about it. You actually installed it somewhere.
- [82:20]
Jeff Geerling
I did.
- [82:21]
Rob Campbell
I gotta ask, before you start this, could you just not find enough stories? Like, I'll just put this one into two.
- [82:29]
Jeff Geerling
I didn't have enough. You took all the good ones, Rob. No, this was a bit of. A little bit of an adventure. And this is probably a lesson why some people might be turned off from Linux. So I was able to get past all this, but it wasn't quite as good. Grandma's going to have more of a problem now. If I had used a USB with only Cashios on it and I said, just take over everything, it probably would be a different story for the most part, but was a little bit of an adventure, so. All right, first I went into Windows and I turned off BitLocker because I knew I was going to have to resize the partition, so I needed it unencrypted. I don't know, maybe I didn't. But I didn't know if BitLocker was going to hurt or not. So I just turned off bitlocker and that took a couple minutes. And then it said, okay, yep, it's all encrypted, you're good to go. Then I went into, okay, ventoy. It's got a uefi, you know. Okay, put it in. I was using, I was using ventoy for this. I had my Cash EOS ISO on there, didn't like it. Okay, so now I need to go in and let me, let me turn off Secure Boot. It said it was uefi, but it didn't like it for some reason. So I turned off Secure Boot. Now it comes up and, oh, there's my cache EOS in the, in the list, you know, I can select that starts to load, bam, crashes, says no init found. I'm like, what the heck? Well, after some searching and googling, whatnot, when you're in Ventoy and you want to install Casheos, you need to hit in the main menu screen where you choose which ISO you want, you have to hit Control R, which drops you into Grub 2 mode. Now you still have a graphical user interface. It still looks basically the same other than it says it's in Grub two mode. Okay, so now I get in there and it boots right up and I get it connected to the Internet, you know, and I'm like, oh, okay, let me install it. And it said there's no candidate to no drive to install it on. I'm like, what the heck? So I open up, you know, G parted and K parted. They cannot see any other drive other than the usb. Well, after some more searching, I found that it says some people said, well, you need to turn off fastboot in bios. Which I did. Didn't help. Then I turned off there's a fastboot in Windows. And they said people would say, well, sometimes it would leave the drive in a mounted state. So other operating systems could not see it because of how Windows. Windows left it to speed things up. So I did that.
- [85:34]
Jonathan Bennett
There.
- [85:34]
Jeff Geerling
It's the Command. It was PowerShell, Space Admin, Space Dash, Power Config, slash H off. So that's supposed to turn all that off. Did not help. I still could not see the internal drive. Now I could boot to Windows just fine. So the BIOS would be like, oh, okay, let me boot right into it. But Cashios couldn't see it. After more searching, I found that intel rst, which is a high speed communications instead of ACHI drive communications. It's rst. You need to turn that off. Well, in this laptop, it's an, it's a Asus laptop, modern. I just bought it, you know, a couple months ago. There's no way to turn it off directly. If you search in through the bios, you might have to disable vmd, which is for RAID and Enterprise drive management, which. They're using it in this. But it's everything I found. Said, yeah, this is not for a regular laptop, you know, or consumer system. It's. It's for more enterprise configurations. So I turned that off. Then I was able to boot.
- [87:00]
Jonathan Bennett
I have a question for you.
- [87:02]
Jeff Geerling
Yes.
- [87:02]
Jonathan Bennett
Have you tried booting back into Windows since you turned that off?
- [87:06]
Jeff Geerling
I'm not there yet.
- [87:07]
Jonathan Bennett
Okay, you, you, you're way ahead of me. All right.
- [87:10]
Jeff Geerling
Yep, yep, yep. So then it went into Cashios and I'm like, oh, okay, let's see how this goes. So I didn't even. Normally I partition the drive and set up, you know, okay, here's my OS partition, here's my home partition. All, you know, I do all that stuff. Well, they had one resized to fit. I'd never seen this. So I'm like, oh, this is cachy feature. You just click on the partition and you graphically drag it to make however big you want your Linux partition to be. And I'm like, let's do that. That sounds cool. Because I mean, at worst it's, you know, I can either reload Windows or I just totally blowed Linux on everything. You know, but I wanted the dual boot. Let's, let's see if we can make this work. So I tried it booted, went right into Cashios. It was like beautiful. It worked good. Had my fish shell. When I wanted to update, I type update and it just, it's the same as the sudo space, app space, you know, update kind of thing. It just went, oh, update. Okay, done. I mean, it asked for my super user password, but made it simple. Okay, now let me go to Windows. It couldn't load Windows. I'm like, what the heck is going on? So then I thought, oh, did I did it totally trash Windows? And then, well, let me turn that VMD back on and try booting now. It boots into Windows with that on the Rst, but not into cache eos because cache EOS can't see the drive. So what you have to do now, this is kind of where I'm at. So both operating systems work depending on this type of drive communication. I need to reboot it again into Windows safe mode. So then it will take care of not needing rst. It can boot into the ACHI normal hard drive communications. I haven't got there quite yet, but because this took a lot longer than just a few minutes to describe it, there was a lot of searching and boot and let me try this and boot and back and forth, but that's everything I found. That's the, that's the solution. Because when you're in safe mode, then it can fix itself and boot into the correct. Into the older style or more universally known drive communication.
- [89:44]
Rob Campbell
Yeah, Windows tip of the day.
- [89:47]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, I asked that about Windows because I've fought with the intel rapid storage technology things before and I've gotten Windows into unrootable states and spent hours, hours and hours trying to fix it. And in some cases you just have to give up. I had one machine that. No, I still have one machine sitting over there in the corner waiting for me to do a Windows install on it that it's going to need, you know, the, the correct driver slipstream bin as a part of the Windows install process to get it to do anything because otherwise it just doesn't see it.
- [90:15]
Rob Campbell
Rapid storage technology, not rubbish storage technology.
- [90:18]
Jonathan Bennett
I mean, you know, whichever, Whichever works for you.
- [90:22]
Rob Campbell
Yeah.
- [90:24]
Jeff Geerling
I'm kind of more on the latter than the former right now, but I'm kind of surprised Linux doesn't talk. But I mean, I guess it can't even see the drive. Somehow it's connected into like the BIOS can see the difference, but Past that, it's like Windows has it locked down with the rst.
- [90:49]
Ken Starks
Do you have to remember if the secure birds turned on or off in your bios?
- [90:55]
Jeff Geerling
No, I turned the secure boot off.
- [90:58]
Jonathan Bennett
Okay.
- [90:59]
Jeff Geerling
No, I had to because Ventoy wouldn't fully boot even though it Ventoy was uefi. It complained about the keys and didn't.
- [91:09]
Ken Starks
And just. I just have to ask this, was it the latest version of Ventoy?
- [91:16]
Jeff Geerling
I'd have to look.
- [91:17]
Jonathan Bennett
I don't remember. That is something I have run into before is I have my famous story of having to boot into Windows on my laptop to get Linux to work again and that was because I put a new version of Fedora on Ventoy and not updated Ventoy to go with it.
- [91:35]
Ken Starks
The reason I ask is the version of Ventoy I've been using recently, actually, after I select the ISO to load, it goes to another screen where it prompts me to run it as normal. Use the Wim Boot or Grub2Boot.
- [91:53]
Jonathan Bennett
Oh yeah, it does give you some sometimes. It'll give you that.
- [91:56]
Jeff Geerling
Yeah, I didn't have it. I thought it was a pretty re. I want to say I thought I just put one on there. It was pretty recent, but.
- [92:04]
Jonathan Bennett
It was when they removed that feature and now it's hidden behind a keyboard shortcut.
- [92:11]
Ken Starks
Or.
- [92:11]
Jonathan Bennett
He'S on one of the versions where.
- [92:13]
Ken Starks
He did remove it and they're added it back in a later version.
- [92:16]
Jonathan Bennett
I have no idea. All right, well, let's get to some command line tips. Now that we've gone through the Cachio s drama and complained about Windows and Intel as we do around here, Rob's going to kick us off with the command line tips and you're going to talk about gnome. I am.
- [92:35]
Rob Campbell
I gotta bring back my love of GNOME to everybody. So over the years I've brought various GNOME extensions to, to, to. To the show and share them and you know, I, I'm pretty sure I've said, you know, I, I like Gnome, but I think vanilla Gnome is a little bit useless. You kind of need extensions really to make it customizable to fit your need. But you know, I've never really showed about, you know, the ways or how to get GNOME extensions. So the way I like to do it, there's a couple. But the way I like to do it is you just open your web browser to extensions.gnome.org and you can look at all the extensions there and once you set it up, you can install the extensions right from that page. So here, for those watching have not I have not done the integration yet. At the top you can see here says click here to install the browser extension. So if you do that, you can install that browser extension. And then if I refresh, it's going to, it's gonna, it's gonna allow me to use a web browser there. Well, actually it's not going to yet, because if I close this, open that back up and go to Extensions. Search for GNOME extensions. Now it says no such Native application. Org, GNOME Chrome, GNOME shell. So there's a couple ways to fix that. You could just install the, the Chrome extension. But what I do is this is where I run, where I install gnome-shell-extension. So it's as simple as doing a sudo apt install GNOME extension. So once you do that, then you have a couple ways to manage your extensions. One, if you open it up and do GNOME extensions, then you'll see that, that, you know that little pop up's not there and you know I can search through, pick what I want. Let's just say I want this first one here. All I gotta do is turn it on and it's going to install it. Now another way to manage it, if you go to Extensions, because what you also did is you install the extensions program app, whatever, you do that and it's going to open up a little extension manager so I can disable all extensions. I've only installed one extension on this one on this desktop so far, and it's on, I can just turn it off. There are system extensions, which I are, since this is Ubuntu, these are ones that I guess Ubuntu installed. But if you don't like the ones that Ubuntu installed or you want to enable some other ones, you can turn them off, turn them on and manage your extensions right from there. So that's how you can install and manage your GNOME extensions. And I'm going to start a little series here and show you some of my other favorite GNOME extensions and how they work in the upcoming weeks.
- [96:07]
Jonathan Bennett
Very cool. There are some fun GNOME extensions that I've played with on this laptop. Some of them I really like. All right, Ken, let's talk about Wire Plumber some more. So you need to unmute yourself, unless you've crashed Wire Plumber.
- [96:23]
Ken Starks
Not yet. I'm working on it.
- [96:26]
Jonathan Bennett
That's probably to come.
- [96:28]
Ken Starks
Had to get back to the Stream Deck page that had the mute button.
- [96:32]
Jeff Geerling
Oh yes.
- [96:34]
Ken Starks
But yes, we're going to be talking about Wire Plumber this week. I'm going to demonstrate using Wire Plumbers command WPCTL to control your volume. So here I am in the command line. I've got the sound systems settings up so you can see a visual indication since we won't be able to demonstrate with audio. But let me go ahead and give you a quick overview. The commands are going to be WP CTL get volume. If you put a dash H beside that, that give explains how to use it. And you just want to put the ID of the device you want to get volume from in the. For those of you all listening, I've also got the status of my wire plumber system and it's showing that my sync is a built in audio analog stereo ID number 50. So I just type that ID in and it gives me that the volume is one. Okay, now how do you set the volume? You're going to use WP CTL set dash volume again we're going to use the dash 8 to get help on how to use the command. There's obviously you're going to need the ID of the device, so that's going to be 50 again. Now one of the ways you can do that is by typing in the volume percentage you want to set it to. You can either do it as a say, for example 50%. And again for those of y' all listening, my sound system shows the line out being changed to 50%. You can also just type in 0.25 and that sets it again. Or you can do 50% plus to increase it to 75% or 0.25 minus or 24. Actually decreased it down to 51%. Now what's really handy, and I can see using this in a script, is how you can mute your device. It's going to be wbc, WP ctl, sit dash mute and you can just toggle the mute or you can put a 1 or 0 after the ID for the device that you're wanting to mute. So let's do here we're going to do ID50 again for my line out with one. And for those of you all listening, my sound system shows that I muted the device or I can do a zero. Now as I mentioned, you can toggle it by just typing toggle. And for those of y' all listening, I just did the wpctl sit mute 50 toggle twice and the sound system settings showed that the line out did get muted and then back on.
- [100:47]
Jonathan Bennett
Very cool.
- [100:49]
Ken Starks
And that is, I can see how this could be used, say for example with forcing your audio to not be muted in your boot up script Sometime after you've gotten up to your gui, tell it to set the mute to zero, just to force the audio out.
- [101:16]
Rob Campbell
You know what you need? You need to include some AI in there. They'll automatically unmute you when your mouth is moving.
- [101:24]
Jonathan Bennett
That's hilarious.
- [101:26]
Ken Starks
Are you sure you want that, Rob?
- [101:28]
Rob Campbell
No, probably not.
- [101:32]
Jonathan Bennett
All right, now, Jeff, what are you doing to your monitor again?
- [101:36]
Jeff Geerling
So, yeah, thanks, Rob. So this is for when. So I've got a. I've got an OLED monitor and brand new to me, and I want it in Power save quite a bit because I don't want to burn images in if I'm not actually using the monitor. Well, KDE has an issue and probably Nvidia in there too. Being the lone Team Green user on the board here, I found that sometimes if the computer sits for quite a while, the monitor goes into power save, but it won't come back awake. So it's in that kind of sleep mode that monitors get into, or just a black screen, but it's still on. It's not, it's not totally powered off, but it's in the low power mode. Normally, you know, you wiggle your mouse or something, hit the keyboard and it pops right up, wakes up, and away you go. Well, it wouldn't do that. And after doing a little searching, I found that that's something that's been around for at least a year in kde, mostly with Nvidia systems. But a workaround that I wound up finding and it works great for me. And this is going to be super simple is you drop to the console, this is your control alt, and hit like F3, and if you wait a moment, you'll see the console come up. You don't even have to log in, you just saw it. Okay, your monitor's awake and for whatever reason they say you got to hit control alt F2. It'll bring up pointer, and it's always in mine. It's always a pointer with a black screen. And then you hit control alt F1. That brings you back to your normal graphics window. And now everything's woke up and it's working great. So if you have a problem with your monitor not waking up, control alt f3 f2 f1, and you give it a few seconds between each one and it'll bring you back without no need to reboot your machine or anything like that.
- [103:45]
Rob Campbell
And I think the specific control alt F may depend on your distro. I've. I think I've seen distros that have like F6 is where your desktop is and stuff.
- [103:54]
Jonathan Bennett
F6 or F7. Yeah. I've seen this problem before too. And I have one monitor, the conventional monitor that I've got turned. It'll come right up when you go off a power save. It's the OLED that is not. I always sort of assumed that it's because I'm having to use a DisplayPort to HDMI adapter to be able to get HDMI 2.1 support. Because. Reasons anyway. And so my fix for that, actually, it's sort of a similar workaround, but instead of going to the console, I will just pull up the display manager on the working monitor and change the refresh. Refresh rate on the monitor that's not working and that will usually do it. So I'll bump it from 120Hz down to 100Hz, let the monitor come up, and then you can move it back and it'll be happy that way.
- [104:43]
Jeff Geerling
Oh, okay. I can see that. Yeah. I've only got one monitor though, so. But there's no HDMI converter in there. I'm DisplayPort all the way through, but I am going through a KVM switch.
- [104:55]
Jonathan Bennett
That could be part of it.
- [104:57]
Jeff Geerling
So maybe that's got something. It wasn't a big deal on my old monitor, which is a regular lcd, but the oled, it seems like it's. Now I am running the beta software, so I'm running backports. So I'm running some pretty cutting edge software. So I don't know whether I had an update in there that caused this or if it just happened to be the monitor. The OLED doesn't like the. It takes longer to wake up or something.
- [105:21]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, that's very possible. It's the oled. Yeah. Interesting stuff. All right, so last week I asked a question of the hive mind here, and I did get an answer. And I'm going to try to demonstrate exactly what we were talking about. Yeah, here we go.
- [105:43]
Ken Starks
So before you get started. Jonathan.
- [105:45]
Jonathan Bennett
Yes.
- [105:46]
Ken Starks
Could you do Control plus a couple of times?
- [105:49]
Jonathan Bennett
Oh, to make the text bigger.
- [105:52]
Ken Starks
Yes, please. My eyesight's not that good.
- [105:55]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah. All right, so this will probably work for us. Thank you for that. Okay. Yeah, that's great. So the entire question was, when you run ls, you get other programs in the terminal, you get colors, but when you then run something like LS and then you pipe it through grep or cat, you get black and white. Right. And there are times where it's really, really nice to be able to have the colors and so say we wanted to search for that nano pb, we do an ls and then grep for nano in the names, and you get this. It drains all of the colors, and then it does a highlight on the thing you searched for. Right? Which, okay, that's useful sometimes, but not necessarily what you want. And so I asked the hive mind and we sort of went on this adventure. And I've messed with this some this week to figure out what you do to fix this. And there is a command. It's actually part of the expect command, but it is a package as its own binary. It's unbuffer. And essentially this takes the output. It gives the tool its own, like, pseudo tty. So it sort of emulates that. It's spitting out directly to a terminal, and then it captures that output and then lets you pipe it around. And so use unbuffer. And I thought, okay, fine, unbuffer ls and you could pipe that through cat. This would be a great place to check it. Surely this will give me colors, right? No, it does not. Okay, well, why does it not? Well, it's because this is not an exact science. And every command works a little bit differently on how, like, they detect am I outputting to a buffer? Am I outputting directly to a tty? You know, should I have color or not? So with the. With the LS command, what you want to do is explicitly call out the dash dash color equals auto, and then you can pipe it around and you get your colors back. All right, so that is a useful one to know. And I will go ahead and show you the command that I was working with. It's a platform IO command. I was running the tests. And the annoying thing about this is if you don't use grep, and here I've got a dash V to invert, and if a line has skipped in it, I don't care. I don't want to see that. But at the same time, it's very, very nice to get the colors in here. And so, based on this unbuffer command and a couple other things, I was able finally to get my colors back. And you'll see, after things build, we'll get errors and the error messages will be in red again, which is really all I wanted. This is all I wanted in life. I did not want to have to scroll back up through about 100 lines of skipped tests, and I wanted to be able to get my error messages back in color. And of course, this will take a bit. There we go. Error messages in color. Something's not working. I can go fix it and I don't have to scroll up through a hundred skipped commands. Everything is right on the command line.
- [109:10]
Rob Campbell
Once again, good job, hive mind.
- [109:13]
Jonathan Bennett
Thank you to the hive mind for helping me figure that out. It's extremely helpful.
- [109:18]
Ken Starks
I noticed that there's a dash P that's used, I guess for when you're running pipe or use. It's basically use when you're using unbuffed for in a pipeline that it recommends to use the dash P flag.
- [109:38]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, I'm trying to remember what that. What exactly that does. I think that forces line buffering.
- [109:48]
Ken Starks
I think it's where you've got a pipe process where you're doing the process, piping it to whatever process that you want to unbuffer and then piping that into a third process. Right from the example they give.
- [110:05]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, I just, I don't remember exactly what the P. Okay. Dash P is for pipeline mode, where unbuffer reads from standard in and passes it to the command in the rest of the arguments. There you go. Pipeline mode. All right, now we know. And now you know how to get your colors where they're supposed to be. Even if you're using UNIX style command piping.
- [110:32]
Rob Campbell
The more you know.
- [110:34]
Ken Starks
And you know what, One bug comes with this program.
- [110:37]
Jonathan Bennett
What's that?
- [110:38]
Ken Starks
The man page is longer than the program. Sometimes that's the way according to the man page. Anyways.
- [110:45]
Jonathan Bennett
That's funny. All right, so that is the show. I'm gonna let each of the guys plug whatever they want to get some closing thoughts in if they have anything get the last word. Rob gets to go first.
- [110:59]
Rob Campbell
All right, everybody, if you want more of me, you can come find me@robertp Campbell.com on there. That's my webpage. You'll find links to my places you can connect and at my LinkedIn, my Twitter, my mast or my blue sky, my mastodon. Or if you really appreciate me, you can click on this little coffee cup and donate me a cup of coffee.
- [111:24]
Jonathan Bennett
Or. Or.
- [111:26]
Rob Campbell
Or more than one, you know, however many you want. Or if you really appreciate Jeff, I've paid him in advance for a couple, so you can donate a couple of him. So he doesn't owe me anymore, you know, you guys know how horrible it is to owe somebody. I hate owing people. I don't want to owe people anything. Jeff doesn't either. So right there you can help them out.
- [111:48]
Jonathan Bennett
Absolutely. All right, Ken, don't forget to unmute yourself.
- [111:56]
Ken Starks
Do what? But actually, mine is on the spur of the Moment. I'm going to recommend everybody checking out book Exploring Expect, a TCL based toolkit for automating interactive programs by Don Liebs and published by O'Reilly and Associates.
- [112:18]
Jonathan Bennett
Oh, very cool. Expect is. It's another one of those Swiss army chainsaws where you can do a lot with it but it is not trivial to understand your first time around. I've done a little bit of Expect scripting and yeah, it's challenging. Can be kind of like awk.
- [112:40]
Jeff Geerling
It's a language unto itself.
- [112:42]
Jonathan Bennett
I think it just about would be. Yeah, you use Expect like if you're going to. If you need a program to automatically. I think it was originally like Telnet style stuff, but you're like, you need to be able to interact with a Telnet port and so you need to be able to receive things and then send. Send commands, send text at the right time. You would use Expect to do that. And so essentially it'll say I expect to see these bytes come across the line when I see these bytes, then send this back. And yeah, it can get pretty detailed as far as what all it supports.
- [113:16]
Rob Campbell
That sounds like a little too much to expect, but.
- [113:20]
Jonathan Bennett
I'm sorry, Jeff.
- [113:21]
Ken Starks
Sounds like a future command line tip.
- [113:23]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah.
- [113:26]
Jeff Geerling
Okay. I don't really have anything today, so Poetry Corner, did you restart it or clear your cash and cookies? Did you really though? Thanks everybody. Have a great week.
- [113:42]
Jonathan Bennett
Did you really though?
- [113:43]
Rob Campbell
That's not a poem, that's just tech support.
- [113:46]
Jonathan Bennett
It's tech support in iambic pentameter. So it is a poem. All right, excellent. Thank you guys for being here. If you want to find more of me, there's of course Hackaday and we covered, we talked about in the show the two things I do at Hackaday that are really appropriate here and that is FOSS Weekly which we record on Tuesday and we put the article up on Wednesdays and then Friday mornings we have Security column and again we referenced both of those in the show today. We appreciate everybody that's here and appreciate the Twit for being the home of this show. And if you want to support Twit, you should check out Club Twit. It's not much more than the price of a cup of coffee per month and it gets you ad free access to ad free shows and behind the scenes looks, access to the Discord, all kinds of other stuff. Definitely worth taking a look at. We appreciate everybody that's here. This will get us live and on the download. And we will be back next week on the Untitled Linux Show.
- [114:42]
Progressive Insurance Announcer
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