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Untitled Linux Show 226: Ubuntu Friendly Fire
01:44:27
Xubuntu Hacked, Performance Wins, and Austria's Out!
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- [00:00]
Leo Laporte
This episode is brought to you by Cohesity. For security and IT professionals, resilience is not just a feature, it's a movement. Cohesity makes sure you're ready for the midnight alerts and morning reviews. With Cohesity, you can secure and protect your company's entire data estate with a single platform, reduce your risk from threat actors, and quickly respond and recover from destructive cyber attacks, strengthening your company's resilience. That's why Cohesity is trusted by 70% of the Global 500. Learn more@cohesity.com Resilience everywhere Morning Zoe.
- [00:32]
Ken Starks
Got donuts.
- [00:33]
Dana
Jeff Bridges why are you still living above our garage?
- [00:36]
Ken Starks
Well, I dig the mattress and I want to be in a T mobile commercial like you. Teach me. So Dana.
- [00:43]
Dana
Oh no, I'm not really prepared. I couldn't possibly at t mobile get the new iPhone 17 Pro on them. It's designed to be the most powerful iPhone yet and has the ultimate pro camera system.
- [00:55]
Ken Starks
Wow, impressive. Let me try. T Mobile is the best place to get iPhone 17 Pro because they've got the best network.
- [01:02]
Dana
Nice.
- [01:03]
Jonathan Bennett
Jeffrey, you heard them.
- [01:04]
Robert P. Campbell
T Mobile is the best place to get the new iPhone 17 Pro on us with eligible traded in any condition.
- [01:11]
Ken Starks
So what are we having for lunch?
- [01:12]
Dana
Dude, my work here is done.
- [01:15]
Jonathan Bennett
The 24 month bill credit is on.
- [01:16]
Jeffrey Tucker
Experience beyond for well qualified customers.
- [01:17]
Jonathan Bennett
Plus tax and 35 device connection charge. Credit send and balance due if you pay off earlier, Cancel Finance agreement. IPhone 17 Pro 256 gigs 1099.99 and new line minimum 100 plus a month plan with auto paypal taxes and fees required. Best mobile Network in the US based on analysis by Oklahoma Speed Test Intelligence Data 1H 2025 Visit t mobile.com AI.
- [01:32]
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- [02:02]
Jonathan Bennett
The headline news is that Xubuntu was hacked. You might want to watch out for that. Then we have a showdown. A shootout between Windows and Linux and the Ryzen 9 processors. No surprise which one comes out ahead there. There's updates to Clonezilla. We take a look at Mobian, which is Debian for the phone and Austria says goodbye. You don't want to Miss it. So stay tuned.
- [02:33]
Robert P. Campbell
Podcasts you love from people you Trust.
- [02:38]
Ken Starks
This is TWiT.
- [02:42]
Jonathan Bennett
This is the Untitled Linux Show. Episode 226, recorded Saturday, October 25th. Ubuntu friendly fire. Hey folks, it is Saturday and you know what that means. It's time for Linux and some geekery with open source news, some hardware stuff, some software stuff. We got some tips at the end. It's gonna be great. You don't wanna, you don't wanna miss it. Don't go anywhere. It's not just me. We've got the guys, the squad and yeah, it's gonna be, it's gonna be fun. It is getting close to Halloween and in celebration, I'll go ahead and plug this now in celebration of sort of the Halloween fall time season here at TWIT, we did a D&D one shot. We did that yesterday and had a lot of fun with that. It was my nemesis, Paul Thurot, the Windows guy. Leo was there. Micah Sargent was the dm. And then we had Paris and I forget his name. I can see him. He ran the Barbarian.
- [03:50]
Ken Starks
Micah Sergeant.
- [03:51]
Jonathan Bennett
No, the Barbarian. He ran a half horse orc. He ran a half orc barbarian called Helm. I don't remember the player's name, I only remember the character's name. D and D problems. Anyway, it was a lot of fun and like most one shots go, we got halfway through the adventure and so we are already talking about trying to find a day to finish that up. Just had to find a way for all of our schedules to once again coincide. But that was a blast and if you haven't gone and see it, you should go and check that out. So we've got some news stories. You guys have anything else you want to talk about before we start?
- [04:28]
Jeffrey Tucker
The news stories coming at you from KDE 6.5.
- [04:33]
Jonathan Bennett
Ooh, I'm not even there yet.
- [04:36]
Jeffrey Tucker
Filtering through out to the distribution. So watch your local updater for. You know, in a way it's a little disappointing because it's boring before, it still works now. You know, there's the login screen changed a little bit, but other than that it's. Everything's working. Nothing's nothing crazy or.
- [04:59]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's. It is. It's kind of a. Anticlimactic. Yes, anticlimactic sort of a deal. But that's a good problem to have. That's the sort of problem that you're really, you really want.
- [05:12]
Ken Starks
You don't want the excitement of stuff crashing.
- [05:14]
Jonathan Bennett
I mean sometimes you do, but not.
- [05:17]
Ken Starks
On a Production machine.
- [05:18]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah. Not. Not when you. Not when. That's not what you're especially going out for. Paul. Paul was the other player.
- [05:29]
Ken Starks
Thorat.
- [05:30]
Jonathan Bennett
No, Jacob Ward. I'm sorry, Jacob Ward was the other player. We had Paul Thurot. I came up with Paul Thurat because he's the Windows guy. I can remember that. Jacob Ward was the player that I couldn't remember.
- [05:44]
Robert P. Campbell
I've seen Paul Thurod in person. Really? 2016.
- [05:47]
Jonathan Bennett
Wow. Yes. Yes.
- [05:50]
Jeffrey Tucker
Jeff, I was just going to tell you this is a Linux show. No cussing.
- [05:57]
Jonathan Bennett
Indeed. All right, let's move on to speaking of being Linux. Let's move on to some Linux news. And there was kind of a big security thing. Rob's got the story here, but I was watching this too. It's not the sort of security news that we want to see, but. Rob, tell us about it.
- [06:13]
Robert P. Campbell
Yeah. So here is a cautionary tale to be careful over the past weekend last about a week ago now, around the time we were recording this last show, the official Zubin 2 or Xubin 2 as some of you may think of it as. But it's Zubin 2 website was compromised and briefly served up Windows malware to users who were trying to download the Linux distribution. Instead of the legitimate Zubin 2 torrent, the site offered a file called Zubin 2 safe dash download zip and when extracted the zip contain a windows executable and a fake terms of service text file. The Zubin 2 team reacted quickly and once they were notified they they were. They took down the affected download page and confirmed that the direct ISO downloads and checksums were never altered. Only the torrent link was replaced and it appears the malicious file was live for no more than a day or two. According to the snapshots from the Wayback Machine, the page looked normal on October 11, but by October 18 the fake zip had appeared. The good news is that the malware was designed for Windows, not Linux. And if you're following the typical directions on how to install Zoom into that involves downloading a ISO and put it on a USB and booting up to it. You you would have noticed something wasn't right when the link didn't even serve up an ISO. The malware reportedly tried to intercept cryptocurrency links copied to the clipboard. So anyone downloading from a Windows machine could have been at risk for but but for experienced Linux users, they likely spotted the warning warning signs pretty easily. A Windows Exe coming from a Linux distro site. It's a little sus right There. I know Ubuntu used to have EXE that allowed you in to install Ubuntu from Windows years ago, but that's not a thing anymore. Also, Zuba 2 lead Sean Davies said the team will accelerate efforts to replace their aging WordPress site with a static version. Team member Elizabeth Crumbach Joseph added that the issue came from a lapse in in their hosting environment and that the group is still in triage mode investigating how the turn link was hijacked. This incident also highlights an ongoing problem with website security in the open source projects like this. Even when the software itself is solid, the website behind it often relies on shared or outdated content systems like WordPress, where a single vulnerable plugin can open the doors to attackers. So for now, anyone who wants to safely download Zuba 2 can use the official Ubuntu CD image server. And again, there's no indication that any other Ubuntu flavors or infrastructure was affected.
- [09:26]
Jonathan Bennett
Indeed. Yeah, it's a little startling when something like this happens, because that could have been so much worse if it had been a more sophisticated actor that that got in there.
- [09:42]
Jeffrey Tucker
Right?
- [09:42]
Jonathan Bennett
Because I mean, imagine instead of just replacing it with a Windows executable, what if they replaced it with an ISO that was completely the same, except it ran a script on the resulting system.
- [10:00]
Robert P. Campbell
Yeah, that would have been smart, but let's not get the main idea.
- [10:03]
Jonathan Bennett
Well, yeah, so that is the blindingly obvious thing to do. I'm not giving anybody ideas. Anyone worth their salt would be able to figure that one out.
- [10:15]
Robert P. Campbell
The malicious actors are listening to our show right now being like, oh, why did I do that?
- [10:22]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, I'm sure.
- [10:25]
Jeffrey Tucker
They'Re probably thinking it was a Windows game or something. Didn't even think Linux.
- [10:30]
Jonathan Bennett
I would imagine that that's what it is. Whoever did it wasn't even aware of what they were fiddling with. But it does sort of make you stop and think like, what would it look like if there was a more sophisticated actor that did something like this? And we've seen a few things. There was the attack on npm. There's been a bunch of attacks on npm, but there was one about a month ago where the code that they injected actually went and looked for additional NPM tokens and it was a self replicating worm. I can't remember what they called it. It was a Dune reference. It was a reference to the worms in Doom. No, I'll find it for you. But what it was doing is it was looking for NPM tokens and it was attempting to insert its own code into additional packages libraries. Okay, so Shai Hulud is the term from Dune that refers to the giant worms in the Dune universe. And that is what that particular bit of malware was called. And then there was another one this week called Glassworm, at least that's what it's being referred to as. And it is similar. It is a worm inside of VS code extensions. And so when you download a compromised VS code extension, it will do the exact same thing. It will immediately go out and look for source code for other VM VS code extensions and attempt to insert itself into that and then upload it. And so these are the sorts of things that like, more sophisticated malware authors are doing. And it terrifies me whenever I hear of something like a Linux ISO got replaced. And in this case it was nothing. It was dumb. The thing they did with it was ridiculous. But there are some groups that are very sophisticated. They're doing stuff like this. Yeah, it'll be intriguing to see the first, like, really interesting attack against the Linux infrastructure.
- [12:46]
Robert P. Campbell
And I'm guessing, I'm guessing they attacked the, the turret link because that helped hide the source. You know, they didn't have to have a download server out there that they're feeding it out on, which makes me think maybe they are. They. They weren't somebody in some, I don't know, odd third world, odd whatever country that, that doesn't worry about hiding it. Somebody who actually did not want to, you know, any traces back to him?
- [13:14]
Jonathan Bennett
It's possible. Yeah. It's hard. It's hard to say.
- [13:18]
Robert P. Campbell
Some script kitty in. In somewhere in America. Yeah.
- [13:22]
Jeffrey Tucker
Oh, very.
- [13:22]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, very possible.
- [13:24]
Ken Starks
And from the timing of it, you can almost suspect that it might have been somebody trying to get some Windows users thinking about going to.
- [13:36]
Jonathan Bennett
That's possible that it was sort of related to the end of 10 thing. So maybe what these guys do is they just look for popular torrent links and then go try to attack those. I could imagine it being something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Hard to say. All right, so up next, Jeff is going to talk about a bit of a hardware shootout, a Windows vs Linux shootout. And we're going to let him jump on that right after this.
- [14:04]
Leo Laporte
Hey, everybody, it's Leo laporte. You know about Mac Break Weekly, right? You don't.
- [14:08]
Robert P. Campbell
Oh.
- [14:08]
Leo Laporte
If you're a Macintosh fan or you just want to keep up what's going on with Apple, this is the show for you. Every Tuesday, Andy Inocco, Alex Lindsey, Jason Snell and I get together and talk about the week's Apple News.
- [14:21]
Jonathan Bennett
It's an easy subscription.
- [14:22]
Leo Laporte
Just go to your favorite podcast client and search for Mac Break Weekly or visit our website Twit TV Mac mbw. You don't want to miss a week of Mac Break Weekly. This episode is brought to you by Cohesity. For security and IT professionals, Resilience is not just a feature, it's a movement. Cohesity makes sure you're ready for the midnight alerts and morning reviews. With Cohesity, you can secure and protect your company's entire data estate with a single platform, reduce your risk from threat actors, and quickly respond and recover from destructive cyber attacks, strengthening your company's resilience. That's why cohesity is trusted by 70% of the Global 500. Learn more at Cohesity this episode brought to you by Red Canary when cybersecurity threats hit fast, you need an MDR partner that moves faster. Red Canary delivers 24.7expert MDR support, total visibility and actionable insights. Plus it helps you detect four times more threats so you can stay ahead without burning out. Red Canary clears the noise and has your back every hour, every incident. Get the backup you deserve. Visit redcanary.com difference to learn more.
- [15:33]
Rubrik Ad Voice
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- [16:04]
Jeffrey Tucker
Since we've done a benchmark of Windows versus Linux, but Michael Arable over at Phronix has, you know, kind of scratched that itch for us. Now he did the benchmarking with an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X and a 9950X 3D. So this allowed each OS to see how they can take advantage of the cache and how the core scheduler works with the slowdown when you cross the pneumonodes. So for people that don't know, those are these are 16 core chips and there's a group of eight and a group of eight and then they communicate through to each other. But the group inside the group of eight has really fast communication and when you cross that boundary to the other eight, I mean it's still really fast, but it processor speeds you take a hit. So it's it's a little slower. So this, this is basically showing how they can handle chip topography. Now the Microsoft OS was Windows 1125H2 and you know, had all the patches and everything up, up to date. And on the Linux side it was Ubuntu 24.3 LTS and Ubuntu 25.10. From the 7th of September all the, you know, so from the 7th of September all the operating systems had all the patches and every everything. The rest of the hardware is on as Rock 8x870e Taichi motherboard, 2 sticks of 16 gigabyte DDR5 6000 speed G skill memory used AMD Radeon RX 9070 graphics card, a terabyte crucial T705NVME SSD and all the other hardware was, you know, was the same through the testing. The only things that changed was the os. All the hardware was identical. You know, unlike a lot of the previous benchmarks, there were no games in this set. It was all CPU based workloads. So various encoding tests, several rendering benchmarks, you know, just other CPU tests. So with these tests there was honestly looking at the results. There's very little difference between the X and the X3D chips as they were all very close. Now the Windows benchmark did favor the X3D cache enabled chips a little more, but the difference was really slight and I wouldn't swear it just wasn't in the statistical noise. Meaning that if you ran this test 100 times, you know, 50 times out of 100, maybe it would be the other way around. It's just so close. The test didn't have the resolution for it. Linux was almost identical and you know, the differences for Linux were definitely in statistical variation. They were just really, really tight. Now the big question, Windows versus Linux. And I know there are several out there that are going to say Ubuntu isn't the fastest distribution out there. But you know, these tests were to focus on the kernel more than anything and Michael wanted to see if the 6.17 kernel brought anything to the table or at the very least didn't have a large regression. The LTS and the more recent 25.10 were almost identical. So you know, keep in mind this was not the release version of 2510, so things could have gotten a little better. But based on these tests the kernel didn't regress, but it also didn't have a huge jump in the CPU performance, so very flat. So 2510 to 2404, the results were basically identical.
- [20:00]
Jonathan Bennett
Sort of as boring as you'd want them to be, right?
- [20:04]
Jeffrey Tucker
Yes, yes. You don't want any regressions. I mean it would be nice to have a little, hey, we picked up 5% or something. But it wasn't and like I said, this is very CPU for focus. So this was less about the entire distribution, more about the just the kernel and the schedulers on the kernel and how it handled the hardware. Now everything was just pretty flat until Windows was added. Yes, Linux was faster by 11 to 13% across the tests. In performance tests the rule of thumb is 10% is where you can really start to notice a difference. So while seat of the pants might not feel huge, but you will be able to tell a difference. So Windows is slower than Linux. And I'll be honest, I can't say as I'm surprised. I've used Windows in several different scenarios from work where it's required and I've been on other people's personal machines and I'll be honest, just my opinion. It feels like 11 is a lot slower and less responsive than Windows 10, but you know, Linux feels faster to me. But Windows seems like it went under a large regression when they went from 10 to 11, but I don't have data to back it up. That's just how it feels to me. You know, I also would have loved to seen a distribution which had a performance kernel, you know, performance built kernel. You know, like I said my switch to Cashy, they put some optimizations they build for you know, the, the newer higher level instruction sets. So but you know, historically we've done it on this show. It isn't normally a huge change but you know, might have spread a few more percentage points in there, might have been nice to go. Well now it's 15% faster, you know, 16%. Make that feather in our cap just a little bit bigger. One last thing of note, the cache aware patch for the Linux kernel that we, you know, that we've talked about was not in this build. So there's going to be a future benchmark or benchmarks because Michael's very thorough at this. So this could also give us more performance by even more optimized cache usage. So that was not in this set of tests. So take a look at the article linked in the show notes for full details on each benchmark so you can see what did good where and get all the details and give your thoughts on the discord of the Linux performance.
- [22:43]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, it's interesting to see that. I know with Windows 11 it's obviously going to be a little bit less. How shall we put it, less tolerant of low system performance and older processors. You sort of see that in the Microsoft requirements for running it. So I guess it sort of stands to reason that it's going to have performance problems as well across all of them.
- [23:10]
Jeffrey Tucker
Yeah.
- [23:10]
Jonathan Bennett
Interesting.
- [23:12]
Robert P. Campbell
How fast would Windows XP or 95 or 98 be if you get that to run on modern hardware?
- [23:17]
Jonathan Bennett
You know, it's actually really interesting. There are some videos out there of people running like Windows 95 on period hardware and just looking at how responsive it is compared to the vast majority of modern machines, it's like the videos are along the lines of this is what we had that they took from us. But it's seriously like you would click on something and immediately Windows would pop up and things would happen and it.
- [23:41]
Robert P. Campbell
Would set this up somewhere sometime.
- [23:42]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, absolutely. It'd be super fun. It is really interesting though to look at that and that yes, the old OSes really did run well and the new stuff in a lot of cases really is kind of terrible.
- [23:59]
Jeffrey Tucker
And for those on audio, what was that disk you held up, Rob?
- [24:02]
Robert P. Campbell
The Windows 98.
- [24:05]
Jeffrey Tucker
There you go. Well, and if you think about it, you know, they didn't have the features modern operating systems do, all that little feature and bling and it costs performance.
- [24:18]
Jonathan Bennett
It does add up. Absolutely.
- [24:19]
Jeffrey Tucker
It might be tiny, but you start putting, you know, a thousand of those in, pretty soon those tiny become in something noticeable.
- [24:28]
Robert P. Campbell
I mean, it's just like websites. You know, I, I've just, I've used to do a lot of websites 25 years ago and maybe a little bit here and there, but now, but you know, everything was slower like back then Internet speeds were slower. So you had to make them efficient and optimized to work with those speeds. Now you run one of those really basic pages from back then on on today's fast Internet and it's, you know, ridiculously fast. And it's, you know, just another way to think about how, how, you know, the operating systems had to be optimized to work for that old slow hardware.
- [25:06]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah.
- [25:06]
Ken Starks
And that's taken into account that you were running on slow storage devices, comparatively speaking. Yeah.
- [25:17]
Jeffrey Tucker
Oh yeah.
- [25:18]
Ken Starks
Floppy disks. The early hard drives weren't that fast really. In reading and writing one, one thing.
- [25:27]
Jeffrey Tucker
From the discord quickly says nothing is faster than XOR and OS based on historical benchmarks. Clear Linux, which is now defunct, was always pretty much the performance winner every time. Second has been Cash eos, which has taken a lot of Clear Linux's optimizations and applied them so it, it's I, I haven't seen Zorin come out on top. Not that it's a slouch but it per anymore cash he's kind of the, the crown champion.
- [26:03]
Robert P. Campbell
Yeah. After Ken. After Ken sharing last week about how Zorin had a new release. Apparently this time was one of their biggest, fastest downloads or whatever of one of their new releases. So I'm sure they appreciate that. Ken, it's all because of you.
- [26:20]
Ken Starks
Actually that was before me. Remember Bobby wrote about that last week as well.
- [26:25]
Robert P. Campbell
Was that before?
- [26:26]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, they had like a hundred thousand.
- [26:28]
Ken Starks
Downloads or something ridiculous within a 48 hour period.
- [26:31]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, yeah that seems right. And people have kind of latched onto that and said well this is obviously because of the end of Windows 10 which it might be, I don't know, it's hard to say. When you get a real weird result like that in your page hits your downloads there's always I always ask myself like are we actually going nuts and we're really that popular or did someone's bot accidentally download a 70,000 times and sometimes it's hard to actually know the difference.
- [27:01]
Robert P. Campbell
Thorin is one of the very commonly recommended ones for Windows users just because it's designed very Windows like interface and it has wine integrations.
- [27:12]
Ken Starks
So Jonathan, what are you going to recommend people using if they want to back up that old Windows system before they migrate to Linux?
- [27:22]
Jonathan Bennett
I know the answer you're fishing for.
- [27:24]
Jeffrey Tucker
Is Clonezilla and you don't get to segue yourself Ken, I mean I guess.
- [27:30]
Jonathan Bennett
He can try honestly go turn on OneDrive because it's free and just let it do it.
- [27:42]
Jeffrey Tucker
You know and I could and I'm not saying just, just to preface what I said before. Zorn is not a bad distribution. I just not the speed champion based on the benchmarks I've seen. But on the flip side I would not recommend CACHE for a new user, maybe your second one but you need to have at least dabbled in Linux a little bit before you jump in.
- [28:10]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, I would agree with that. I will stick by my recommendation of DO Fedora DO Ubuntu Brand new user. I think those I agree with the best.
- [28:22]
Ken Starks
All right, after you back up all that data.
- [28:24]
Jonathan Bennett
Okay, Ken is just dying to tell us about backups so we'll let him take it away.
- [28:32]
Ken Starks
Actually it's not so much about backups, it's just that Marius wrote about the latest release of my favorite Debian based free and open source bootable live system for cloning. Disk drives and partitions. I am talking of course about Clonezilla live version 3.3.0.33. According to Marius, it is powered by the Linux 6.16 kernel series, adds the UOAB option to the OCS SR and OCS live feed IMG tools to support selecting Clonezilla alias block device names in the text mode user interface, adds the ATD and CRON packages to the Live system, updates the OCS Live hook configuration file to force the loop module to be added to InItram FS and adds support for imaging MTD block and EMMC boot devices in expert mode. Clonezilla Live 3.3.0 33 also adds a new OCS block dev sorter tool that allows UDEV to create clonezilla Alias block devices in dev OCS disks slash. It also adds the OCS Command Screen Dash Sample tool, which can be used with the Run Again script, and adds the OCS Live Gen UBRD tool for merging an OCS zip file with a U boot enabled bootable RAW image. Mario also started said Starting with this release, the locale and key map selection were moved to the login shell, allowing FB Term, which is now used by default for locale and keymap selection to run in an interactive titty teletype display. If you want to find out what is under the hood then I recommend reading Marius's article to get those details.
- [31:03]
Jonathan Bennett
My goodness, what was the last time that you actually used Clonezilla? Ken.
- [31:11]
Ken Starks
It'S been a while. I need to use it to back up my studio 2504 before I try upgrading the Heartbear metal to 2510.
- [31:23]
Robert P. Campbell
I've been a fan of Clonezilla and used it a lot over like the last decade plus, but it's it's really not the best backup tool. It's maybe good if you, if you want to do an archive like if you just want to do an image archive of this and like stash it away, but it's really better. It's like like my use case has always been for migrating drive to drive or actually migrating one place to anything even drive to VM or whatever. But as a backup because it's does that full image it's I don't know, it's not doesn't seem like the best backup.
- [32:05]
Ken Starks
But yeah the last time that I actually used it was when I backed up the partition that I've got all my data on before moving it over to another partition to another drive.
- [32:22]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, it's great as a whole disk backup but that's really sort of its trick, as it were. I don't know that it makes a whole lot of sense to give it to somebody as a system backup otherwise, unless what you're wanting to do is get your whole disk backed up so that you can, you know, restore from. Either restore from disk or move to vm, Something like that.
- [32:47]
Robert P. Campbell
Yeah, for real regular backups. I mean, you kind of want something that has like versioning or, you know, incrementals, differentials or something like that. You know, whichever you want.
- [33:00]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, those are definitely nice, really simple.
- [33:02]
Jeffrey Tucker
Rsync.
- [33:04]
Jonathan Bennett
Rsync is actually not bad as a backup solution. And then there's a couple. Yeah, there's a couple of other programs that sort of do like Rsync does, but you know, they have support for different backends for daily backups.
- [33:21]
Ken Starks
I use a combination of Rsync and rclone Rsync to back up my document directory from one system to my file server. Basically it just duplicates the directory structure. And then I also use TAR to compress down some of my document directories and then I use rclone to back those up to my Google Drive. I've got at least one offset these.
- [33:59]
Robert P. Campbell
Days I use Proxmox backup PBS service system. I can't remember the S's I was using.
- [34:06]
Ken Starks
I want to say it was called Backup that comes with Linux.
- [34:14]
Jonathan Bennett
I could not tell you for sure that there was a just backup command.
- [34:19]
Ken Starks
Not a command, it was a program. You use it to configure so that you could use like an external drive and it would just schedule and do routine backups.
- [34:30]
Robert P. Campbell
I'm sure somebody took that beautiful single easy to remember command and made it theirs.
- [34:37]
Jonathan Bennett
But yeah, figure. All right, let's see, what do we have next? I believe Rob has the Asahi. So I suppose this answers the question of what distro should you run if you want to run on your M3 or M4 MacBook, right?
- [34:58]
Robert P. Campbell
Well, I don't know if I'd quite go that far yet, but it's coming. It's coming. Yeah. So the Asahi Linux team, or what is left of it, is back with another progress report and they've been busy bringing Apple Silicon even deeper into the Linux ecosystem. First on the kernel front, they continue to upstreaming patches into the Linux 6.7 and 6.6.17 and 6.18 kernels. The big milestone this cycle is that the SMSC core drivers have finally landed and that's been in discussion since 2022. It's a foundational piece of the Apple silicon, handling everything from GPIO to reboot control. This also lays the groundwork for WI Fi and Bluetooth support to go fully upstream. They've also merged the device tree for the M2 Pro Max and Ultra chips, along with the fix for Apple's Dart IOMMU and and they're still working on the USB patches. Those continue to get attention from across the kernel mailing list. Outside the but outside of the kernel, the M1N1 bootloader is starting to rust. The team has begun rewriting key safety critical components in Rust for better maintainability and correctness. They've already ported the Apple device tree handling code to Rust with no performance lost and future safety critical pieces will follow. They've also added a CI pipeline that keeps the UEFI installer bundle automatically up to date, ending the old two year gap between updates. And for gamers like myself, like Jeff, like a lot of you out there, they've gotten 64 bit Windows games running under Wine outside of the old MUVM environment. Hollow Knight and NIR Automata are up and running on the M1 Pro MacBooks with Gen 2 support for ARM64X and ARM64EC is still early, but this is a major proof of concept that native Apple silicon hardware can handle Windows games through Wine. Macs have have never really been great for gaming, you know, as they were alone, but maybe with the Sahi Linux they someday will be. They also continue to collaborate upstream, working directly with projects like Mesa pipewire, Wire and Wire Plumber. One standout this cycle is poly shared MESA module that emulates geometry and tessellation shaders on GPUs that lag native support not just for Apples but for other mobile GPUs like ARMS that could enable OpenGL and direct 3D compatibility across a wider range of devices. And they're even testing basic M3 support. Nice though it's still early. Right now it's literally just a blanking cursor. M1N1 can initialize cores and boot the kernel, but that's it for now. It's early, but it shows they they're already laying the groundwork for Apple's newer generation of chips. I think this covers the M4 too, working with the M3 if I if I understand that correctly. Finally the team has begun building Fedora Sahi remix dailies targeting Flora 43 with integration into KDE's Plasma Setup project or for a smoother first boot experience. Even after losing a couple of their most public figures, Asahi keeps Making huge steps forward. The kernel work keeps moving upstream, rust is bringing more safety into the boot chain and even gaming support is becoming a real possibility on Apple Silicon. So for a community driven project that started as a bold experiment, they're firmly shaping, they continue to firmly shape how Linux runs on Apple hardware.
- [39:28]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, it's, it's real fascinating that the gaming experience on Asahi is better than the gaming experience on Mac os.
- [39:40]
Robert P. Campbell
Yeah, that, that. I mean I always joke that that was kind of how it just is on Macs, assuming that we can someday.
- [39:49]
Ken Starks
That other operating system's even better than macOS as far as gaming.
- [39:54]
Jonathan Bennett
Well, the deal with Mac is that they made the decision to kill OpenGL support. That's really what did it. And they went all in on Metal, which is like the most Apple thing to do. Your OpenGL thing wasn't invented here, so we have to build our own thing because Apple has this terrible not invented here syndrome. And so I mean we've talked about this for a while that it was inevitably it was going to come the day that if you wanted to game on a Mac, you would have to install Asahi. And that day is sort of here.
- [40:24]
Robert P. Campbell
Yeah, there are games that in Steam I know of, I can't think of which ones right now, maybe arc, but that are native. They have native versions for Linux but not for Mac. So.
- [40:40]
Jeffrey Tucker
Well, and Mac kind of basically gave up on gaming for a while until there's a bit of a hubbub about it and then they went, well no, no, we're supporting gaming, we're all in, you know. But I want to say I don't remember exactly how it went. I'm not a huge Mac follower. But it was something like look, here's the books, you can program it yourself kind of thing. You know, it was, they didn't give the, the base coding and there was.
- [41:09]
Robert P. Campbell
Probably some thought behind the scenes.
- [41:11]
Ken Starks
Did they give the books away?
- [41:14]
Jonathan Bennett
No, of course not.
- [41:15]
Robert P. Campbell
There, there was probably some thoughts behind the scene that oh, gaming's all going consoles, nobody's playing PC gaming anymore. So I guess let's just not even worry about this and worry about computer stuff.
- [41:27]
Jeffrey Tucker
And I think, well, I don't even think they're thinking much of computer stuff anymore. They're all, all in on, I mean phones and tablets even.
- [41:35]
Robert P. Campbell
The rumor mill going around is that Xbox is pretty much just going to be on a computer in the future. I've heard a lot of stuff about that.
- [41:43]
Ken Starks
It makes it a lot easier.
- [41:45]
Robert P. Campbell
It's just going to be a computer. They sell and they have their Xbox software. It does, yeah.
- [41:50]
Ken Starks
I mean thank IBM for that too.
- [41:54]
Robert P. Campbell
They lose money on their consoles anyway is what I've always heard.
- [41:57]
Jeffrey Tucker
So initially they, they eventually start breaking even and make a little money through, through the roughly five year life cycle. But yeah, and honestly I, I have heard there's going to be a handheld. I've heard there's. They might do another box is a.
- [42:14]
Robert P. Campbell
Handheld now already, but it's not okay. It's not really an Xbox. It's. It's a Windows based handheld that runs some Xbox software which is maybe part of.
- [42:26]
Ken Starks
Made by a suit. Asus.
- [42:28]
Robert P. Campbell
Yeah, I think it's, I think it's the X Rog or something like that.
- [42:33]
Jeffrey Tucker
Well, and I don't, I don't think they're going to have enough like a computer with an Xbox even package. It wouldn't surprise me if it's, you know, it's going to be just oh look, it's Windows 11 and we have the Xbox experience. And it's just like.
- [42:49]
Robert P. Campbell
Well yeah, and I think we're license.
- [42:50]
Jeffrey Tucker
It's kind of a Microsoft Steam version.
- [42:55]
Robert P. Campbell
And I think others like Asus will make consoles that run the Xbox software and anybody will. Which actually kind of sounds awesome thinking about it. But comparatively to the current setup, I.
- [43:07]
Jonathan Bennett
Mean that does seem to be the direction that things are moving, which is pretty interesting to see.
- [43:16]
Ken Starks
Now if we could just get the same going with the smartphones.
- [43:22]
Robert P. Campbell
Well, if we could just get those running Linux instead of Windows on those consoles.
- [43:27]
Jeffrey Tucker
Well, I mean most handhelds are running Linux because it's faster. Yeah.
- [43:34]
Robert P. Campbell
But I imagine the Xbox ones that require the Xbox software may not. Or maybe they will in the future. Maybe they'll port that.
- [43:41]
Ken Starks
Well, with smartphones. We're running into the same issue we've got with trying to get Linux up on the newer versions of the Apple hardware. It's the ARM chips and the hardware basically.
- [44:01]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah.
- [44:01]
Ken Starks
In fact I'll touch on that a bit more when I get to my next starter.
- [44:07]
Robert P. Campbell
We've had a hard time getting Linux on any iPhones like ever.
- [44:11]
Jeffrey Tucker
Yeah, well, because the chips are not.
- [44:14]
Jonathan Bennett
Actually with the iPhone. The problem is not, it's not necessarily the lack of standardized chips. It is the closed bootloader. Back when Hector Martin was still part of Asahi, we talked to him about this particular issue on Floss Weekly. Back when, I think that was back when we were still a twit. And his comment then was, oh, I would love to be able to run Asahi on an iPhone or an iPad, but the bootloader was completely locked down. You'd have to have an exploit to be able to do it. And that's not what Asahi is particularly interested in. So, yeah, it's kind of a closed door for them for now.
- [44:50]
Ken Starks
They don't want to jailbreak the hardware, correct?
- [44:52]
Jonathan Bennett
Yep. That is not their thing. All right, so here in just a second, Jeff has for us a story about the multi kernel architecture on Linux. And we're going to go to that right after this.
- [45:05]
Leo Laporte
Hey everybody, Leo laporte here and I'm going to bug you one more time to join Club Twit. If you're not already a member, I want to encourage you to support what we do here at Twit. You know, 25% of our operating costs comes from membership in the club. That's a huge portion and it's growing all the time. That means we can do more, we can have more fun. You get a lot of benefits, ad free versions of all the shows. You get access to the Club Twit discord and special programming like the keynotes from Apple and Google and Microsoft and others that we don't stream otherwise in public. Please join the club. If you haven't done it yet, we'd love to have you find out more at TWiT TV Club TWiT and thank you so much.
- [45:52]
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- [46:53]
Ken Starks
Morning, Zoe. Got donuts.
- [46:55]
Dana
Jeff Bridges, why are you still living above our garage?
- [46:58]
Ken Starks
Well, I dig the mattress and I want to be in a T Mobile commercial like you teach me. So, Dana.
- [47:05]
Dana
Oh no, I'm not really prepared. I couldn't possibly at T Mobile get the new iPhone 17 Pro on them. It's designed to be the most powerful iPhone yet and has the ultimate Pro camera system.
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Impressive. Let me try. T Mobile is the best place to get iPhone 17 Pro because they've got the best network.
- [47:24]
Dana
Nice Jeffrey.
- [47:25]
Robert P. Campbell
You heard them.
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Ken Starks
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Robert P. Campbell
Get the new iPhone 17 Pro on us with eligible traded in any condition.
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Ken Starks
So what are we having for launch?
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Dana
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Jonathan Bennett
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- [48:24]
Jeffrey Tucker
We have more multi kernel patches at least requesting for comment which were posted on the Linux kernel mailing list. For those who have been watching this, you know that a month ago there was some initial patches posted for getting multi kernel running and you know, getting, getting that going and then but Then shortly after ByteDance proposed patches and they called their software Parker for multi kernel operation which is very similar to the first set of patches but the actual implementation is very different. Different. I'm not going to compare and contrast the two different methods as I don't have enough deep kernel knowledge to give a pros and cons argument on which should be the path forward. Just know there's a lot of work going on on thinking about running multiple kernels on a Linux system. Now some of you are probably wondering why would a person want to run multiple kernels on their system? And we're, we're talking about.
- [49:24]
Jonathan Bennett
Not, we're.
- [49:24]
Jeffrey Tucker
Not talking about switching kernels like say oh well I have an LTS kernel and I got the cutting edge kernel and I'll just boot into which one, you know, whichever one I want. It's running them all at the same time. So running multiple kernels in parallel and there's, there's, there's some advantages and Kong Wang explained in the Linux kernel mailing list and I'll him describe it Because I think he does a nice job of it, he says. This patch series introduces multi kernel architecture support, enabling multiple independent kernel instances to coexist and communicate on a single physical machine. Each kernel instance can run on a dedicated CPU core while sharing the underlying hardware resources and could be core or cors. So just clarification on my part there. The multi kernel architecture provides several key benefits. Improved fault isolations between different workloads. Enhanced security through kernel level separation. Better resource utilization than traditional VMs. Potential zero down kernel updates with Kho, which is kernel handover. Now the multi kernel idea is gaining more interest because of today's high core count CPUs. You know, and the thought is different cores could run on could. Different kernels could have different cores run on different. Let me start that over. Different kernels could run on different cores in the cpu. There we go. If you look at the article linked in the show notes, there's a nice diagram to help visualize Containers versus virtual machines versus multi kernel architecture. For those who are listening, the images are sets of blocks on top of each other to show the high level architecture. So going from the bottom up, the container starts with the hardware, on top of that is the kernel, then the OS and then a couple of container blocks with applications on top of the container blocks. So that would be your normal like Docker or something like that where you're running a container. The virtual machine setup again from the bottom up is hardware. And then you have the kernel and hypervisor and then you have the virtual machine on top of that. And then there's a couple different stacks of blocks which show both a kernel and os, then the application. So it could show you have an isolated kernel, OS and application running on the. On the lower level, larger blocks. And it's just to show how different kernels run on top of the hypervisor. Well, they also have the multi kernel solution. The base is the hardware with a kernel on top of that. Now here's where it gets a little different. On top of the kernel block there are two smaller stacks of blocks and they both go kernel, OS and then application. There's two layers of kernel, large one at the base which helps with the resource allocation, scheduling, keeping order on everything. And then the other kernels run on top of that kernel. It looks like the virtual machine model except the hypervisor layer is removed. This is still very, very high level. I mean this. But I'll be honest, I'm kind of excited to see where this could go. Is there has been mention of things like some cores and a kernel could be real time doing real time things while the other kernel and cores or kernels and cores could be doing normal workload type of things. It will be a while before we see this in practices. These patches are all at the request for comments stage. So this isn't even going into the pull directories or anything like that. This is still hey, here's what I patched. What does everybody think? And for those who are wondering, they do have in these patches there's an interface for physical memory allocations per instance, virtual memory allocations, an interface for managing the kernels instances, device tree kernel handover, you know the Kho framework for resource management and sharing. And so there, there is ways to control what gets access to what and you know I, we'll, we'll see where this goes. We'll keep an eye on it. I'm sure we're going to be, there's, there's a lot of interest in this so we'll, we'll keep an eye on this as this progresses. But on a personal note, I think this is going to become more important as Even consumer level CPUs game gain more cores. Intel has now got their low power cores, then they have efficiency cores and performance cores all in one physical package. And there have been leaks, rumors that the next generation of AMD chips will have 16 cores per Newman node instead of 8. So our regular instead of our Ryzen 7 9800x3D might have 16 cores. The next generation, maybe it's a rumor and then our normal 16 core chip would now go to a 32 core chip because they would have two of those clusters in there. We'll see. Like I said, that's just kind of rumors and leaks and we'll see what comes out of it. But we do know the server chips are gaining more and more cores, so being able to run different kernels could replace different machines as the hardware would allow it to run on one.
- [55:14]
Jonathan Bennett
I've seen similar ideas to this get proposed in years gone by. I remember one was sort of similar and that was being able to run an application in kernel mode to do something sort of similar to this. And that got shot down pretty quick by the kernel guys. I'm very interested to see if this is going to be well received or if this is the sort of thing.
- [55:43]
Jeffrey Tucker
That there's a little pushback on it but not like killing pushback there, you know. And part of the thing is there's so many different groups trying to push this forward. So I Think it's going to happen. Basically it's like a virtual machine that you don't have to run a hypervisor. And they talk about it's a little more efficient and better isolation and.
- [56:09]
Robert P. Campbell
Well, right now.
- [56:10]
Jeffrey Tucker
Oh, go ahead.
- [56:11]
Robert P. Campbell
I was just saying right now we have two implementations, basically. I think they're announced about a month ago and we talked about this on the show, that these two implementations were both announced like within days of each other. And I think one of the more interesting uses without, you know, I mentioned this last time too, but you know, with all the security concerns we have out there, you know, having a kernel being isolated for the security stack and then, you know, your other. A kernel for. For everything else or what however else you want to break your other stuff down. But like separating security from everything else. I think that to me seems like an interesting use case of it and almost have a.
- [56:55]
Ken Starks
Basically a wall between each core, basically so that each kernel would run on a core for whatever single application you're going to run on that core.
- [57:09]
Jeffrey Tucker
Yeah, you probably have at least a couple of them, a couple cores. But I mean you could, you could have a single core if you had something really lightweight and it was just kind of monitoring as, you know, something simple and like doing something OBS Studio.
- [57:25]
Jonathan Bennett
No, not like that.
- [57:27]
Jeffrey Tucker
But no, I, I actually thought of you can on this because if you had a machine say that, we'll say you got a new Ryzen chip and it's got 16 cores in it, you could, you could eliminate a bunch of your simpler machines doing things because you could say, oh, I want you run Ubuntu Studio. Well, I'm going to set this set of cores doing this. I'm going to have these other cores recording and doing OBS and sending things out. And I'm going to have this other set playing with audio stuff or whatever. And it would replace several smaller machines because now you have so many cores in one package and you have so much memory and everything in one setup now acts like several different machines.
- [58:15]
Ken Starks
Instead of having to have several different physical machines.
- [58:19]
Robert P. Campbell
Right.
- [58:22]
Ken Starks
We covered this all in one case because you have several virtual machines in that one case.
- [58:31]
Jeffrey Tucker
Yeah, and they do have cases that will handle two machines because sometimes you have your gaming people streaming. Well, they don't want to screw up their frame rate on their game. So they have a second smaller PC which is usually like an I IPX or something small that's just capturing video and restreaming it. It doesn't have to be super powerful. Well, now you could have a real time kernel doing that so you don't have any lags and drops. No matter what the game is doing, the game is then running on a regular kernel and you're playing along and your real time kernel on the hardware is doing its thing.
- [59:13]
Robert P. Campbell
One of the questions I had last time, and maybe with your update you got a little more about this, but do they have to be Linux kernels? Like in theory, could somebody set this up where one kernel is running Windows and you could have games, kind of Windows games intertwined with the full kernel. You know, obviously that you get some terms of service but.
- [59:39]
Jeffrey Tucker
Nope, it's all Linux kernel right now. I think if you could get it working, I'm sure you probably, you know, when they get the Linux part really ironed out, you probably could do do Windows. But there's no mention of it running as a.
- [60:01]
Ken Starks
On one of the.
- [60:04]
Jonathan Bennett
Well, yeah, but you can run wine. You can run wine. Anyways, it seems like a, a waste to run it with its own kernel. But the idea of using, of doing a Windows kernel, I bet you that'd be fiendishly difficult though it sounds like that would be very difficult to pull off.
- [60:20]
Ken Starks
But who knows with sharing all the peripheral devices that you've got connected to that system.
- [60:27]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, that would essentially be the hard part. Would essentially be the patches.
- [60:32]
Jeffrey Tucker
Yeah, and the patches that were posted was the Kong Wang patches. So he cleaned up some stuff that he actually had from the first round and they added a few more features. This is not the ByteDance code at all. This is, this is Kong Wang continuing on his work.
- [60:54]
Ken Starks
But I bet I can think of one OS that would not, probably would not take this multi kernel as one of its choices.
- [61:07]
Jonathan Bennett
What's that? Are you thinking of Debian.
- [61:11]
Ken Starks
Or the mobians version of Debian?
- [61:13]
Jonathan Bennett
See, he's doing it again.
- [61:16]
Robert P. Campbell
He's trying to segue himself before you segue. What could happen with the possibly with Windows loving Linux, maybe they could take it on and do that multi kernel. Maybe their future WSL is built with multi kernel technology and you can intertwine that any way you want.
- [61:39]
Jonathan Bennett
WSL has actually moved to using Hypervisor now, hasn't it?
- [61:43]
Robert P. Campbell
Yeah, that's what it's been using the whole time.
- [61:45]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, so it's actually not that big of a stretch. All right, so Ken is again itching to tell us about this. And this is something I'm real fascinated by too actually. This is Debian on phones. Mobian. I get the name now. Ken, take it away and tell us all about it.
- [62:06]
Ken Starks
Well, this week we actually are hearing from Liam proven about the latest version of an edition of Debian aimed at mobile devices, as I said, called Mobian. It is based on Debian 13 Trixie and available in two main variants, one with Phosh, that's GNOME's phone shell and one with KDE Plasma Mobile 6.3 just for you. Jeff. You can select from versions for the Pine Phone, Pine Phone Pro and Pine Tab. Now both sizes of Google's Pixel 3a, the OnePlus 6 and 6T and the I know I'm going to butcher this Xiaomi Poco F1. Now they all run the current version of kernel from Debian 13 which is version 6.12. There's also a version for the Purism Libram 5 phone that uses the older kernel 6.6. Liam also provides a little history on the PC industry and how the x86 PC world is unlike any other part of the computer market, especially the mobile handheld market. I'm going to recommend reading Liam's very informative article on why we can't just run Linux on all the phones out there.
- [63:38]
Jonathan Bennett
You can't run Linux on all the phones. Probably the same thing as we were talking about it a minute ago, some of them have blocked bootloaders and some of them just don't have support for the chips and the kernels.
- [63:48]
Jeffrey Tucker
And.
- [63:52]
Ken Starks
There'S so many differences between the hardware that's being used.
- [63:57]
Jonathan Bennett
Well, and so that's going to boil down to has somebody put together a working device training for that particular device, which is one of those things about ARM that just makes so many ARM devices a pain to try to support. You may have support for all of the individual bits of hardware on the board, but then you also have to have someone come along and make a working device tree to be able to boot Linux on it. And then you also have to have some way to know when you go to boot it that that's what's there. Which oftentimes means essentially compiling your own distro.
- [64:30]
Ken Starks
But we can really thank IBM for not squashing down on the cloning that was done when the IBM PC first came out. Because they wanted to sell more software.
- [64:41]
Jonathan Bennett
Right, right.
- [64:43]
Ken Starks
Because before then how many computers were that close together? Even those that were based on say, for example, the 6502 chip?
- [64:54]
Jonathan Bennett
No, they were all completely different. Yeah, I guess the IBM Personal PC was one of the first standards to be able to, you know, you can run the same software on multiple vendors.
- [65:04]
Ken Starks
Machines and it became a de facto standard because IBM, instead of squashing all the cloning that was being done when it first came out, said let them do it. It's other machines that can use our software.
- [65:18]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, yeah.
- [65:19]
Jeffrey Tucker
So they didn't think it was going to take off like it did.
- [65:22]
Robert P. Campbell
They were too far down a path and they've seen the history. I don't think we're going to get that standardized phone, probably not anytime soon.
- [65:33]
Jonathan Bennett
Well, there is, there is another company that would love, or at least in the past has thought that they would love to be the company, the distro for the Linux phone. And here in just a second, we're going to let Rob tell us what is up with Canonical.
- [65:48]
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- [66:21]
Robert P. Campbell
For Albertsons and Safeway. Now through November 4th. Shop the annual beauty event and save $5 when you spend $25 on select beauty products. Shop in store or online for items like Dove Body Wash, Native Body Wash, Cetaphil gentle skin cleanser, Dr. Squatch body wash, Neutrogena Hydro Boost Water Gel, Dial Liquid Hand Soap and Olay Body wash. And save $5 when you spend $25 or more. Offer ends November 4th. Restrictions apply. Offers may vary. Visit albertsons or safeway.com for more details. Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, has had a busy month and not all of it's been smooth sailing. We've already talked about how many of the major changes with the rollout of Ubuntu 2510 and like for example, how it now uses Rust core utils instead of the traditional GNU Core utils. So, you know, we've already talked about some of the problems that cause and, and you know, that's all part of Canonical's larger move toward modern memory safe system components written in Rust. You know, we've already shared some of the bugs and issues these major changes have created. Well, a new one has been discovered this week. A bug in Rust core utils has broken Ubuntu's unattended upgrade feature. Our previous discussions, you know, we were understanding when their changes broke some third party software and integrations that you know, they didn't necessarily think about or care about, but and we even had some, you know, conspiracy theories, but you know, when it breaks their own stuff that they made themselves oops. I guess it kind of rules out the malicious conspiracy theory though, that some of us had just a big oops there. But the unattended upgrades feature, obviously it's responsible for automatically installing security updates, and this bug causes it to just stop running altogether. The issue came from a difference in how the new Rust version of the Date R command reports timestamps. You know, it seemed like a minor change at first, but it turned out to break one of Ubuntu's most important background processes. You know, I mean, if you like security at least it's important. Canonical has marked it as a critical issue and is pushing out a fix. But users will need to manually run Apt Update and APT Upgrade once the patch package is released. That's the rough part. Now for the big picture side. Canonical isn't slowing down, it's it's doubling down on Ubuntu as a complete platform. At the Ubuntu Summit 25.10 and in a recent blog post, various things were announced. Canonical announced several major new initiatives. One is AI models as snaps, so you can now install optimized large language models directly from the Snap store. The first beta release includes models like Deep Seq, R1 and Quinn 2.5 VL optimized for intel and ARM64 systems. The idea is simple. Type type a command like pseudosnap installed deepseek R1 dash space dash dash beta and you get a pre tuned AI model ready to run locally on your hardware. So it's making AI a lot more accessible. Canonical says these AI snaps are open source and hardware aware, meaning they'll automatically take advantage of your system CPU or MPU for acceleration. Now support for Nvidia and AMD hardware isn't quite here yet, but it's on their radar and I'll be there. Along with that, Canonical launched the new Canonical Academy, a new certification program designed to validate real world Linux and Ubuntu skills. The first track focused on system administration with self paced exams covering the Linux terminal, Ubuntu desktop and Ubuntu servers. You know, at least their first track focused on this stuff. Participants who pass earn a digital badges to showcase their expertise, will expertise and will showcase their expertise. And while prices haven't been published yet, Canonical hinted that discount rates will apply during the beta phase, which means there will be prices. It's not free. I would maybe be interested in learning, getting some Canonical achievements, some badges, you know, kind of like gamifying it if the price wasn't too crazy. We'll see. You know, there's already other certifications on X + the. The L Pick or whatever. So I don't know if you give me at a fraction of cost something I could just wing on the side, maybe I'll just go through it. But also it's not going to be as relevant if it's cheap too. So it goes both ways. But it's not just Canonical's own tooling and things that are changing along with this. Another little side story is that the GIMP Snap. The Snap that the Snap Store version of the popular Open Source Image Editor is now officially maintained by the GIMP developers themselves. That means updates will roll out automatically through GIMP's own CI pipeline. And the Snap now matches the official GIMP releases, you know, exactly without. Without Canonical's previous extras like OpenVINO AI plugin. So I guess that's. There's good and bad there. You know, it's. It's nice when a developer maintains their own packages so you get it right from the source all up to date and no one has to step in and do anything.
- [72:21]
Ken Starks
But.
- [72:21]
Robert P. Campbell
But one of the nice benefits of a two universal package packaging is the extra stuff that sometimes gets bundled with it. So I guess we'll miss out on that. I don't know. I don't know that OpenVino is one that I'm interested, but I'm sure there's some plugins I like to see automatically there. Anyway, all this taken together shows Canonical and Ubuntu are making strong. Well, Canonical, you know, and, and their distro Ubuntu are making strong pushes to being the leaders of Linux and pushing the limits of what Linux can be.
- [72:56]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, lots of that.
- [73:00]
Robert P. Campbell
Lots of stuff going on there.
- [73:01]
Jonathan Bennett
There was a lot of stuff going on there.
- [73:03]
Ken Starks
Yeah. I'm really intrigued by the GIMP Snap.
- [73:09]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah.
- [73:11]
Ken Starks
See where the Ubuntu studio would find that an easier way to distribute it.
- [73:15]
Jonathan Bennett
It.
- [73:16]
Robert P. Campbell
Yeah, possibly. There already was a Snap before, but it was a Snap crafters, their. Their people that were snapping it up. So it's one less thing that they have to worry about doing. But I'm kind of interested in the LLM stuff. I've never really. I haven't dabbled with that. I'm not like Jeff. I haven't really used any of that stuff on my own equipment. I've used the cloud stuff like chat GPT. But if it's this easy to just set up, install it makes it a.
- [73:44]
Ken Starks
Little more accessible and subscribe to.
- [73:48]
Jonathan Bennett
Sure.
- [73:50]
Jeffrey Tucker
It's. Yeah, it's in my, my workflow. It's part of my job now. I use it every day.
- [73:58]
Jonathan Bennett
LLMs.
- [74:00]
Jeffrey Tucker
Yeah, well, LLMs and various agents.
- [74:05]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah.
- [74:06]
Ken Starks
Probably for documenting what you've been doing.
- [74:11]
Jeffrey Tucker
For lots of stuff I'm sure way beyond that.
- [74:13]
Robert P. Campbell
Yeah. He's using it for coding all. All those. All the process of stuff we're using. So.
- [74:20]
Jeffrey Tucker
No, it does make. I will say it is nice for when you have meetings. You record the meetings. It gets summaries and action items.
- [74:27]
Jonathan Bennett
That is extremely useful. Yes.
- [74:29]
Jeffrey Tucker
Then you can send it out. Yeah, there's a lot of cool stuff it does. The other stuff I can't even talk about.
- [74:36]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, sure.
- [74:37]
Ken Starks
Use it because he's cheating.
- [74:39]
Robert P. Campbell
He's using it to cheat on things.
- [74:43]
Ken Starks
It's like buying a Cliff Notes. Right?
- [74:46]
Jonathan Bennett
Sort of.
- [74:47]
Jeffrey Tucker
It's like having an assistant now read.
- [74:50]
Ken Starks
The Cliff Notes for you.
- [74:53]
Robert P. Campbell
It's having a scribe.
- [74:55]
Jeffrey Tucker
Yeah. Having a scribe.
- [74:57]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah. I'm super curious if somebody finds out what those certifications from Canonical are actually. What they cost. Yeah.
- [75:06]
Robert P. Campbell
They haven't been announced yet, but yeah.
- [75:08]
Jonathan Bennett
I'm probably far enough along in my career that I'm not going to invest in them. But I could see that being useful for someone that is not taking the exact career path that I have.
- [75:19]
Robert P. Campbell
I mean if they're cheap, I mean it probably will.
- [75:22]
Jeffrey Tucker
It's that much more you can put in. In your LinkedIn if they're reasonable.
- [75:25]
Robert P. Campbell
I would just, I would do it just for the heck of it. You know, even years ago when I was already into in. In it I on a whim I did the Microsoft Network fundamentals and the CompTIA IT fundamentals. Now this was already when I was in my career. These fundamentals are like very entry level but they were cheap and I got a student discount so they were really cheap. I'm like, ah, I didn't study for them. I just like I'm going to take them, see how I do. So I'd be willing to do that.
- [75:56]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah. I started studying for the CompTIA IT fundamentals at one point when I was very young and it was simple enough that I got fed up and walked away from it. I, I couldn't.
- [76:07]
Robert P. Campbell
Yeah, you shouldn't have to. You shouldn't have to study. I just took it. I, I can't remember one of these took. They took me like 20 minutes to do and it you know, no studying. It's simple. If, if you are in technology you should be able to pass the IT fundamentals without studying.
- [76:22]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah. Yeah. Good thing.
- [76:24]
Ken Starks
Well, Keith512 had a link to.
- [76:29]
Jeffrey Tucker
Bobby.
- [76:30]
Ken Starks
Barsol's article about it and apparently it's $100 just for one certification dealing with the Linux terminal.
- [76:42]
Jonathan Bennett
My, my wife is making fun of me talking about the. When I said when I was very young. This was before I met her. So yes I was very young. That was. I'm still young. I would like to say. I would like to back when you.
- [76:57]
Ken Starks
Were very young and single and naive.
- [77:01]
Jeffrey Tucker
I was going to say very young is kind of a matter of perspective.
- [77:05]
Ken Starks
It's relative.
- [77:07]
Jeffrey Tucker
You're still very young.
- [77:08]
Robert P. Campbell
$100 is not one of those cheap certifications I'm just going to do on a whim like the IT fundamentals. I think it cost me like 50 bucks with the student discount everything or less.
- [77:21]
Ken Starks
I'm sure your business will cover that for you. So they can write it all as a text.
- [77:26]
Robert P. Campbell
They would if I pass.
- [77:29]
Jonathan Bennett
That's funny.
- [77:30]
Jeffrey Tucker
Yeah there's a lot of educational pass or grade requirements for could see that having having your classes and education.
- [77:41]
Robert P. Campbell
Maybe. Maybe I am not as good at Linux as I think so I don't know if I want to take do it as a whim. A lot of tests, a lot of. A lot of certification. Certification exams have a lot of obscure tricky questions like you could be an expert in an area and they ask you the stupidest questions.
- [78:04]
Jeffrey Tucker
Some weird never hardly switch you've never used in tar. That's like. Well it really originally came from the VAX days but it still supports the blog.
- [78:18]
Ken Starks
Then you'll probably love my command line tip later.
- [78:22]
Jonathan Bennett
Sure.
- [78:23]
Robert P. Campbell
Well let's get moving so we can get to them soon.
- [78:25]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah. So Jeff has a story on digicam that I am interested to hear.
- [78:31]
Jeffrey Tucker
Yeah and it's been a while since we've talked about digicam. And for those that don't know it calls itself a digital asset manager and image editor. It can import and organize your photos, allow adding metadata. It can edit and post process the images and even batch process images. There's facial recognition and powerful advanced search tools to look through your images. This is, this image is pretty much a one stop shop for your digital image needs now I mean I'm not saying it's like Photoshop but I mean for you know your, your photos and whatnot. It's excellent. I, I personally you know I use it myself but I will admit I I only use a fraction of the power it has. You know, I'm still learning. And they have documentation and you can actually pay for tricks and tips where they really have a well written book to go through everything that, you know, all the cool stuff that you're like, oh, if you combine this with that, you can do this. But I digress back to the main topic of this segment. Version 8.8 has been released four months after the 8.7 release. It comes with enhancements to the image editor to do things like progressively blur the background behind a subject of the photo. The G Mic QT plugin is updated to version 3.6 which allows expanded image processing and improve the progress manager to use the native desktop notifications. There's increased stability under Wayland. Read that as bug fixes, there's improved color management, better focus point extraction for supported cameras. So basically you can pick out on supported cameras what was supposed to be the focus point of your image and then it helps with some of the tools for enhancements and things like that. There's a ton of bug fixes in it and they now support up to 61 languages. And it also has been upgraded to Support the QT 6.10 application framework work. So it's going to work better with Wayland. So because this is a point, you know, 0.7 to 0.8, it's not this, this is not a huge new feature, but you know, they kind of fine tune bug fix things like that. Take a look at the article linked in the show notes for all the details and things that I didn't cover. And the article also has a link to the official announcement which goes into even greater details on a lot of the image tools and enhancements and bugs that they actually squash. So take a look.
- [81:13]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, very cool. Let's see.
- [81:20]
Jeffrey Tucker
And I will say it is a powerful program.
- [81:25]
Jonathan Bennett
Digicam is the one that actually has like lens correction stuff built into it to where you can go in and say, I took. This is the camera I use, this is the lens I use. And it has a bit of magic to go in there and try to, try to do correction based on that. Like some really sophisticated stuff inside Digicam.
- [81:44]
Jeffrey Tucker
Well, like the facial recognition. I've had it find, you know, put it like say put in a picture of my son and it'll find pictures, you know, when he's say 16, it'll find pictures when he was a baby and they'll be like, oh yeah, this. And it's. And it's. Right, cool. It's pretty awesome.
- [82:03]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, that's, that's actually really nice to be able to do that locally and so you don't have to, you don't have to feed all that stuff up to somebody like Google because you could do that same thing with Google Images. But it is a, it is a little disconcerting. Yeah, it's a little creepy for Google Images to then be generating facial profiles of everyone that, you know, it's like, what else are they doing with that information?
- [82:26]
Robert P. Campbell
I mean, my Google Doorbell mixes up people all the time, so they don't even do it.
- [82:32]
Ken Starks
Well.
- [82:34]
Jeffrey Tucker
I was saying we're close to Halloween so we can say words like creepy and macabre and, you know, terrifying.
- [82:40]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, absolutely. All right, Ken, last story of the day. Let's talk about Austria. Creepy and macabre place. No, no, surely not.
- [82:53]
Ken Starks
Actually, no, they are more for doing free and open source software as their daily project. Because this week Christine hall wrote about some great news about open source adoption that came out of the next Cloud Enterprise Day Copenhagen 2025 event. Now, the Australian Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs, Energy and Tourism, or the abbreviation for the Australian way of saying that is BMWet is that BMWit? But they have made a major shift away from foreign owned and operated Clouds and proprietary SaaS services to a homegrown IT infrastructure centered on NextCloud along with Calabra, which runs on NextCloud and offers the LibreOffice productive productivity suite as a user hosted service. Now, according to Christine, the good news is that this isn't some pie in the sky plan that will see fruition in a future date. This one's already in the can. It's a done deal. Nextcloud Co Founder and Director of Communications Joshua Now I do apologize for I know I mispronounced that. I guess you could say mangled that, but he told Phosphorus, we're very excited about this case because it shows that with some courage you can get great results. Why is Austria doing this? According to Christine, the move is about digital sovereign sovereignty. Digital sovereignty has been a catchphrase in European discussions concerning the intersection of tech and jurisprudence for the last few years. Christine defines digital sovereignty as the idea that a country should be able to govern how data about its citizens is collected, stored and processed to create what is essentially a what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas approach to the information control. Austria's move was prompted by a risk analysis showing that that overseas cloud offers failed to meet the Ministry's privacy requirements. The project went from proof of concept to full deployment in about four months. According to Martin Ulram, BMW cio. An extensive information campaign, clear communications training and a gradual transition ensured high acceptance and a smooth process. By integrating the new solution into existing systems, we were able to modernize our digital service catalog and collaboration process without changing established workflows. Now, according to Christine, the part about integrating new solutions with existing systems might be key to this migration success. Some of BMW's existing license tech, notably. I hate saying this, but Microsoft Teams.
- [86:23]
Jonathan Bennett
Nobody likes teams. That's hilarious.
- [86:25]
Ken Starks
Remains in use even though it appears that the plan is to eventually phase those out as licenses expire. That sounds like a good plan to me for the time being. According to an article by nextcloud Senior Communications Manager Kim Poleman, nextcloud handles internal collaboration and secure data management while Teams remains available for external meetings. Christine's article also gives details about the Austrian military success in migrating to LibreOffice. I think we touched on that a couple of episodes back.
- [87:04]
Jonathan Bennett
We have several times, as well as.
- [87:07]
Ken Starks
What you may expect from other EU members. I recommend reading Christine's article because there's a lot more that I have not touched on.
- [87:18]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, yeah.
- [87:19]
Robert P. Campbell
This is at least our fourth story this year about some municipality going open source, moving away from Microsoft and you know, all the things like this. So it's. It just keeps on going.
- [87:31]
Jonathan Bennett
Yep. Yep.
- [87:33]
Jeffrey Tucker
Well, I see that in Europe. I see a lot of people around the world. I mean you're. And I think we've mentioned this before, you know, you get the people like linus Tech Tips, Jay's 2 cents. You know, gamers, Nexus, they're bringing up and doing Linux benchmarks and talking about Linux more. Now they're not focused. They're not. But it's now a topic they mention.
- [87:58]
Jonathan Bennett
It is broken into the public consciousness.
- [88:01]
Jeffrey Tucker
It's kind of hit mainstream.
- [88:03]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah. Yep.
- [88:04]
Jeffrey Tucker
Interest. It is interesting to see as mainstream as tech geeks are.
- [88:09]
Robert P. Campbell
You know what, maybe this exists. I want to see, you know how they always have youtubers or whatever streamer service they're on walking around with the mic and they ask somebody some, some question. I want to see them going around do you know what Linux is? And then shoving a mic in their face.
- [88:23]
Jonathan Bennett
That'd be fun.
- [88:24]
Robert P. Campbell
Just. Yeah. So. Hi.
- [88:27]
Ken Starks
Last name's Turvolds, right?
- [88:29]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah.
- [88:30]
Robert P. Campbell
So. So, so there's an idea, people. Go ahead and run with it. Send me a link so I can watch you. I want to see the answers.
- [88:36]
Jonathan Bennett
Oh, I thought you were going to say that you wanted some, some, some royalty money. If anybody used your idea I would.
- [88:42]
Robert P. Campbell
Love that too, but I know no one's going to do that. Just buy me a coffee at least if you like it and you take in.
- [88:47]
Jonathan Bennett
There you go.
- [88:48]
Jeffrey Tucker
Every hundred thousand is a coffee or something.
- [88:51]
Robert P. Campbell
Whatever, whatever. Just thank me, mention my name, whatever.
- [88:56]
Jonathan Bennett
Yep. All right. Up next, that's our. That is our news stories. Up next, we're going to talk about some tips and that'll come right after this.
- [89:03]
Dana
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- [90:04]
Ken Starks
Morning, Zoe. Got donuts.
- [90:06]
Dana
Jeff Bridges, why are you still living above our garage?
- [90:09]
Ken Starks
Well, I dig the mattress and I want to be in a T mobile commercial like you teach me. So Dana.
- [90:16]
Dana
Oh no, I'm not really prepared. I couldn't pop possibly at T Mobile get the new iPhone 17 Pro on them. It's designed to be the most powerful iPhone yet and has the ultimate pro camera system.
- [90:27]
Ken Starks
Wow, impressive. Let me try. T mobile is the best place to get iPhone 17 Pro because they've got the best network.
- [90:35]
Dana
Nice. Jeffrey, you heard them.
- [90:37]
Robert P. Campbell
T mobile is the best place to get the new iPhone 17 Pro on us with eligible traded in any condition.
- [90:44]
Ken Starks
So what do we have in of front?
- [90:45]
Dana
Dude, my work here is done.
- [90:47]
Jonathan Bennett
The 24 month credit is on experience.
- [90:49]
Jeffrey Tucker
Beyond for well qualified customers plus tax.
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Jonathan Bennett
And 35 device connection charge credits ended balance due. If you pay off earlier Cancel Finance agreement. IPhone 17 Pro 256 gigs $1099.99 and new line minimum 100 plus a month plan with auto pay plus taxes and fees required. Best mobile network in the US based on analysis by Ookla Speed Test Intelligence data 1H 2025 visit t mobile.com AI.
- [91:04]
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- [91:36]
Jonathan Bennett
Are going to let Rob talk about being lazy. This is a perfect tip for Rob.
- [91:43]
Robert P. Campbell
It really is. If you know me. Work smarter, not harder has always been my mantra. I've always gone by that. So my tip this week is a little app, it's fairly new called Lazy ssh. So hopefully you all know what SSH is by now, if you're using it, and if you are, if you have a lot of systems that you SSH into this system to manage, that might be what you're looking for. So for those watching here, I've already installed Lazy SSH on this system here. And so you just type Lazy ssh. You can alias that, I guess, to SSH if you wanted. That might cause problems. Just do Lazy SSH or LS SSH or whatever. Anyway, Lazy ssh, you open that up. So I already set up a few of my systems on here, playing around, you know, I got PI hole, ansible, shd 20, 25, and if I want to ssh to 1, I'm going to SSH to PI hole. I go there and I just hit enter and I don't have the key set up up on this one yet, so it's going to ask me for a password and boom, I'm in. I'm going to back out and go back to here. Now, if you're looking, it shows the basic settings on the side there, you know, all the things I put in there, it shows other things. Not at the bottom and on the, on the commands on the right, you know, I can do F report forward, X, stop it, C to copy it, G to ping it. So if I just hit G there, it's going to ping it and it showed at the bottom quickly, if you were paying attention, I'll do it again. I could refresh the list, add a new server, edit an entry. So if I were to add a server, you know, let me just edit this one. It shows the same for ad, but this one, if I edit it.
- [93:41]
Ken Starks
You.
- [93:42]
Robert P. Campbell
Have an alias, you know, whatever the name is you want, the host or the ip, a username, a port. If you have SSH keys, you could put that in there. You could tag it if you want different tags. Like if you have a lot of them and Then you want to tag them, to categorize them. You can put a tag in there and then you can save it. It's same thing to add a new one. But you know, if I edit it has some already in there. So yeah, just a nice little tool to organize all the different places you ssh into and make it quick and easy.
- [94:20]
Jeffrey Tucker
Great.
- [94:21]
Jonathan Bennett
Ssh, lazy ssh. I like it. I'll see if I can get that running on one of my machines.
- [94:27]
Robert P. Campbell
Yeah, so I guess one other quick thing about it is, you know it's new so you can either compile it, you can just grab the binaries. I guess that's about your options. I think I saw a Windows binary too, which I don't know.
- [94:44]
Jonathan Bennett
I'm sure it's available on some repo somewhere. Maybe somebody has a PPA for it or a home. Yeah, there you go. It's interesting now that you mentioned that the number of people that have started using Homebrew for installing stuff on Linux that's really picking up as a thing. So yeah, that's definitely.
- [95:02]
Ken Starks
Google even uses Homebrew for installing Gemini CLI on Linux.
- [95:07]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, yeah. Bunch of places. All right, Jeff is up next with a barrier. I don't know what that is at a firewall. I would guess it's a firewall.
- [95:17]
Jeffrey Tucker
Nope.
- [95:18]
Jonathan Bennett
And a couple things.
- [95:20]
Jeffrey Tucker
If you hear some loud noises, we got a thunderstorm. And if you lose me, we probably lost power.
- [95:26]
Jonathan Bennett
Understood.
- [95:26]
Jeffrey Tucker
Just a heads up. And Barrier, this is one that Rob knows about. So it is not any kind of security software. It's barrier is a KVM type of software. It'll allow a single keyboard and mouse to control multiple computers. But it's all done in software. Now Barrier needs to be installed on every machine you want to use remotely and it won't switch video, so it's not. It's only keyboard mouse. To use it, you move your mouse to the edge of the screen, hit a special key and then you can select which machine you want to control. Barrier will let you use your keyboard and mouse from one computer to control just several machines, whatever you want. And clipboard sharing is supported. That's basically it. It's a very basic should work type of program. Not a lot of bells and whistles. They they specifically talk about. It's built to have this one basic function and that's. That's what it is. I will say it's been a couple years since the last update, so I'm not sure if that means the project isn't being worked on or they Met their goal and it. And it just works and they're done there. There has been activity in the past year. It's just not a release. So it could be the latter. You know they just working it does what we want. We're. We're done until something major changes. If you want though, take a look at Barrier if you're wanting a non hardware KVM and give it a shot.
- [97:04]
Jonathan Bennett
So Barrier.
- [97:06]
Robert P. Campbell
I would like to expand on that a little bit though too.
- [97:09]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, there's some interesting history here Rob. You can, you can.
- [97:13]
Robert P. Campbell
Well so I mean originally like I used a program like this, the. A closed source program called Synergy 15 years ago. So this is essentially open source version of that. Now though your. The way you used it it, the way you describe there sounds different from how I described or how I've used it. Like I would have my Linux computer, my one or two monitors for that right next to it a Windows computer with a monitor and then I've even had like a laptop, like a Mac laptop next to that, all running it. And when I get to the edge I've never had to push a key. It just worked like these were all one system. I scroll off one monitor and right onto the next off my Linux monitor and right onto a Windows monitor like seamlessly. And that's how I've always used it. So it almost. So like even side by side a Linux and a Windows computer acted, you know, use one keyboard, one mouse acted like they were a single computer.
- [98:18]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah. So Barrier is a fork of Desk Flow and Deskflow is the upstream open source project that is behind Synergy. So they are all sort of related. Synergy changed their funding model essentially to where if you want to run like Synergy proper, you get to pay some money for that. Although it is still based on the open source project. And I'm guessing when that funding model changed is when Barrier got forked. But yeah, it's interesting to see and to their credit on the Desk Flow repo, there's even a question here, it says does this work with similar projects? And it says yes, all of these downstream forks do continue to work. Synergy input, Leap, Barrier, it has network compatibility with all of those forks, which is pretty cool. Like good for them for making that work work.
- [99:18]
Robert P. Campbell
Yeah, I did not know that they were all actually based on the same code.
- [99:23]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah.
- [99:23]
Ken Starks
So would it work on Chromebook?
- [99:26]
Jeffrey Tucker
Probably.
- [99:27]
Jonathan Bennett
It'd probably be possible, yeah.
- [99:29]
Ken Starks
Or at least from within the Linux terminal on it.
- [99:32]
Jonathan Bennett
From within one of the VMs for sure.
- [99:36]
Jeffrey Tucker
Now they have distro a list of distro specific packages.
- [99:40]
Jonathan Bennett
I wonder if Wayland causes problems for this.
- [99:44]
Robert P. Campbell
Yeah, it's actually been a little while since I've used it.
- [99:46]
Jonathan Bennett
I bet Wayland would cause problems for this just because of the. The additional security hardening that Wayland does.
- [99:53]
Jeffrey Tucker
All right, Ken, I was going to say they, they do mention Wayland is, is not, not fully working yet.
- [100:03]
Jonathan Bennett
It's coming. Still working on it. Yeah. I'm not surprised. Ken, let's talk about echoing and printing. Printing stuff to the command line. How do you do it?
- [100:15]
Ken Starks
By more than happy to tell you about this, especially since we have never formally covered printing to standard output or even to files in any of our. Our previous tips in any kind of great measure. But let me go ahead and bring up a terminal here and I'm going to demonstrate. Well, we all know about Echo. You just type Echo followed by whatever you want to print, right?
- [100:51]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah.
- [100:57]
Ken Starks
And what's the simplest thing to do? Echo, hello, World. For those of y' all listening, I've got my terminal up. Let's go ahead and make, make this all a bit bigger so everybody can see it. How's that?
- [101:11]
Jonathan Bennett
That'll work.
- [101:15]
Ken Starks
And I just typed Echo and then in quotes, hello, world with a space before the H and hello. And that gave us that. Now, in the past, we have included the command echo when displaying how another command may change data without ever covering some of its options or alternative commands that have more control or formatting on how the data is displayed. What kind of formatting can you do with the echo command? Do you. Do you know offhand, Jonathan?
- [101:51]
Jonathan Bennett
I don't know of any, actually. There might be some, but it's. I've never looked.
- [101:56]
Ken Starks
You can use a dash. I want to say lowercase e so it doesn't. So like if, say, for example, you typed hello backslash T, what do you think's gonna happen?
- [102:18]
Jonathan Bennett
So the slash T. The slash T is one way to re to represent a tab command, a tab character.
- [102:25]
Ken Starks
But with Echo doesn't treat it that way, does it?
- [102:28]
Jonathan Bennett
Apparently not. Ah, so the dash E tells it to what, expand the. The stuff inside.
- [102:36]
Ken Starks
Right. And if you don't want it to expand, you can use dash N.
- [102:48]
Robert P. Campbell
Or.
- [102:48]
Ken Starks
Not at dash n dash capital E. And there it just tells it not to.
- [102:58]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah.
- [102:59]
Ken Starks
Now, there is another command that I want to touch on, and that is printf.
- [103:05]
Jonathan Bennett
That one will be very familiar to all of our C and C programmers.
- [103:11]
Ken Starks
I hope so, because I don't want to try to explain all of this.
- [103:17]
Jonathan Bennett
Printf, the level 0 debug go.
- [103:22]
Ken Starks
Yep. And with a printf, you can do formatting, you can do put in tabs. You can designate how long you want a string to be and whether to lift or right align it. For example, with the command I've got here is printf. Then in quotes, slash V or backslash V's backslash T percent D with a dash space percent two 0s backslash N, then end quotes. Then I'm following that with one space. Hello, space. Two space, world space, three space. Done. What do you think that's going to print?
- [104:21]
Jonathan Bennett
Percent D is a digit. The dash may get. The dash may just come through as a dash. I'm not sure what the percent 20s does. Maybe a string.
- [104:37]
Ken Starks
What's percent S?
- [104:39]
Jonathan Bennett
Percent S is going to be string. So maybe a string 20 characters wide.
- [104:43]
Ken Starks
Yep. And it will. Right. Align it.
- [104:47]
Robert P. Campbell
Aha.
- [104:50]
Ken Starks
So if we take that 20L, for those of y' all listening, the first time I did it, it had right below the line that I entered it in, you have a blank line. Then you have the one. It looks like it's tabbed over, followed by a dash. And then I'll let y' all count the. All the spaces in between that dash and the. Hello. But it should come out to about six. Yes. Seven to 15 spaces. Then hello. Yeah, then you've got the same for 2 dash world 3 dash done with a line in between because I've got the slash visa vertical tab.
- [105:45]
Jonathan Bennett
Got it.
- [105:47]
Ken Starks
Now, here's what's really nice is you can put all that into a. Into a single variable.
- [106:09]
Jonathan Bennett
Oh, and they just do a instead of. You can tell printf. Yeah, yeah. You can tell printf to just print the variable.
- [106:22]
Ken Starks
Yep.
- [106:27]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah. Use dollar sign.
- [106:29]
Jeffrey Tucker
Cool.
- [106:31]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah. Printf is super useful on the command line. You can do a. It's really powerful. You can do a lot with the same. Same in C. Right. It's used very often in C and C programming for a reason. But for doing structured output on the command line, it is super cool. Yeah.
- [106:52]
Ken Starks
So if you're writing a script where you know somebody's going to be expecting information on the fan command line, or even if you are using a graphics user interface, you may still find this handy for formatting it before sending it into that graphics user interface.
- [107:12]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah. Honestly, I didn't know printf would. If you gave it more inputs than you have placeholders, I did not know it would just repeat the string. That's. That's pretty cool. I didn't know that was thing you.
- [107:27]
Ken Starks
Could actually take and set Up a for next loop to have it read in each line of a file and then use the printf to set up to print out that very format line.
- [107:42]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, very cool. I like that a lot. All right, I have a command for you. This is actually just a bit of fun. I've spent way too much time messing with this today. Actually, we're going to capture the entire screen here. Yeah. So I have Cataclysm, and specifically, this is Cataclysm dda. Dark Days Ahead. And this is a game that you can play on the command line.
- [108:20]
Jeffrey Tucker
Oh, that's cool.
- [108:21]
Jonathan Bennett
You can play it over SSH even. And it's sort of a hybrid between something like Dwarf Fortress and Rogue. So, you know, it's got a version here that. Here I'll turn off the safe mode. It's got a version here that is completely terminal base. This is literally running on the terminal. And so I can run around. I'm about to be attacked by a zombie. I don't know if I'm. I have a steel chain. I'll probably be fine. Let's get after this zombie. We're gonna attack it. I did 14 damage. I did 16 damage, but it did bite my left hand. I did another. This chain is great. 13 damage. 17 damage. The last enemy holding you collapses. I believe I have beat the zombie. Let's see if it's got anything interesting on it. It's got a bikini top and a cigarette pack. It has a friendship bracelet. Nothing terribly great here, though. So no loot from this zombie. So this is the ASCII mode. There is another. This is fairly recent. Inside of the Cataclysm project, they have a tiles mode. And when you first launch it, it looks about the same. Start a fresh game. When it comes up, though, you'll see that this is a little different. This version is not running in the terminal. This actually brought up its own window. And it does take just a moment for this to chew through and set everything up, because I told it to do a new game, and so we're actually generating a new world. But here it's actually got tiles. And this game is pretty cool because it does also have a dynamic lighting system. So when you open up windows, you get sight lines and you get light inside. Zoom back out and show you. So then you get to see, you know, a radius that you can see. Open up some more windows here. There's another one. Boom. More light inside of here. And it is sort of a zombie survival mixed with a roguelite sort of game. It's really interesting and like I said, I've spent more time than I intended to today fiddling around with this, but it's really cool. It is open source and like I said, there is the version of it that does run completely in the command line, so you can SSH into a server and play this if you want to. It's really. It's pretty cool. And I've got a link off to the website which from there has links to where to get the game. Yeah, Cataclysm.
- [111:06]
Jeffrey Tucker
Yeah, Briggs said. Reminds me of old BBS games that I was thinking the exact same thing. Or like some of the old muds.
- [111:14]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, I don't think they have multiplayer built into it, but yeah, it is kind of that MUD feeling reminiscent of. Yes, Yep, for sure. For sure. All right, well, hey, that is the show. Those are our command line tips. I'm going to let each of the guys get in the last word if they want to. We'll let Rob kick us off with that. What you have for us, Rob?
- [111:38]
Robert P. Campbell
All right, just my usual. Nothing special here. If you want to find more of me, you can find information and links at my website. Website is Robert P. Campbell.com and on there near the top you can find links to my LinkedIn, my Twitter, my Blue sky, my Mastodon, and a place to donate coffees to me or leave a note if you want to donate to the other guys too. And I will make sure to get that to them.
- [112:09]
Jonathan Bennett
Interesting. All right, so up next we have Jeff. And Jeff might just have some poetry for us if we're lucky.
- [112:20]
Jeffrey Tucker
I do. I don't have anything else to cover, so. Another poetry corner. This. This is about something as as well. So as you can tell, we kind of got a theme going here. Inside many laptops you'll discover this hardware for video chat lovers, but with much malware creeping hackers might use for peeping. To be safe this thing, you should cover front facing cameras.
- [112:46]
Jonathan Bennett
Yeah, absolutely.
- [112:48]
Jeffrey Tucker
Have a great week, everybody.
- [112:51]
Jonathan Bennett
All right. And Ken.
- [112:54]
Ken Starks
Despite Halloween coming up, I'm going to still recommend, or maybe because Halloween's coming up, that you do backup backup and don't let it burn.
- [113:09]
Jonathan Bennett
Good stuff. All right, thank you guys for being here. Appreciate it has been fun as always. If you want to find more of me, there is of course hackaday. That's where Floss Weekly lives these days. That's where my security column goes live on Fridays. You should also go check out where I was on the Twit DND special. We recorded that just yesterday. And for those that are a part of Club Twit. You know where to go to get that. And we had a lot of fun with that. Hopefully part two coming up soon. Sooner or later. We were all definitely game for it. So we'll see when we can get that done. Thank you everybody for being here. Those that watch and listen, those that get us live and on the download, and we will see you next week on the Untitled Linux Show.
- [114:02]
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