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Untitled Linux Show 239: Terrible at Metaphors
01:30:25
Photoshop, Linux Phones, & NVMe
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- [00:00]
A
This week we're talking Photoshop. It finally runs on Linux. And then there's the next phone, maybe the phone that makes the Linux phone experience real. There's a Linux patch that gives us 15% better performance on NVMES. OpenSUSE's Merlin hits 1.0 and a lot more. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned.
- [00:22]
B
Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twit.
- [00:31]
A
This is the Untitled Linux show, episode 239, recorded Saturday, January 24th. Terrible at metaphors. Hey, folks, it is Saturday. A very snowy Saturday. Well, more like a sleety Saturday where I'm at in southwestern Oklahoma, Snowmageddon. They call it ice Ageddon, whatever, but it is. It's time to talk about Linux. Not necessarily the weather, but goodness, the weather is on several of our minds. We've got the whole gang here today. Rob and Ken and Jeff. Ken looks very small today. Maybe he's sitting on the shelf. That's what it is. He's not small, he's just further away. Welcome, guys. Good to have you all.
- [01:12]
C
Good to be here.
- [01:14]
D
I'm glad I'm here inside out of that snow.
- [01:17]
A
Yeah, you're. You're in the snow with me. Ken. Ken's not actually that far away from where I'm at geographically, and so when. When I have weather, he generally has about the same weather. And Rob, you're way up north, so you just always have snow.
- [01:27]
B
Yeah, and there's definitely been some cold weather here, too. It's been like around negative 20 Fahrenheit the last couple of nights. And I know a few days ago when it first started to get cold, I had to reboot my furnace.
- [01:42]
A
Wait, you would what?
- [01:43]
B
I woke up in the morning and the house is down about 54 degrees. Fortunately, the first thing I tried is I just went down next to the furnace. There's a little switch next to a fuse that's on. I just flipped it off, flipped it on, and it worked again. So it took a few hours to warm up, but even furnaces had to get rebooted sometimes.
- [02:05]
A
There you go. Reboot your furnace.
- [02:09]
C
Patch day. On furnace day.
- [02:11]
A
You know, as we get as. As things get more and more connected, that starts to become a thing. So, like your thermostat, if you have a smart thermostat at all, it's probably going to receive patches.
- [02:21]
B
It almost certainly hope.
- [02:23]
A
Well, yeah, ideally there's a. There's a. There's a sort of dichotomy there because, like, if it never gets Patches, but it's also never off, never all connected to the Internet, never online. Then who cares? On the other hand, if it's connected to the Internet, yeah, you really want to get security updates. I'm not sure which one is better. I kind of, I've had both, I like both.
- [02:44]
B
But there's no smarts in my furnace except for my thermostat. So I mean it's, it's at least 20 plus year old furnace. So I don't know.
- [02:55]
D
That's where you want basically two networks in your home. One for all the IoT devices that you don't want on the Internet and then the other one for everything that you want to have access to the Internet.
- [03:08]
B
And if you really want to, do you have client isolation for each one of the devices on that so they can't even talk to each other?
- [03:15]
A
Yeah, sometimes you need that too. All right, let's talk about, let's, let's Photoshop. Well, we're going to talk about Photoshop. Yeah. So this is Rob's story and I've seen this floating around too. Apparently there's some big news about Photoshop. What's, what's going on, Rob?
- [03:33]
B
So personally, I was a Photoshop user years ago, but personally I left Photoshop long before I even left Windows. The licensing was a pain and I just found that many open source solutions got the job done just as well for me, you know, I guess my use case was image editing for website design. So, you know, maybe there are some other use cases out there where open source doesn't work for them, but I, I have no clue what those are. I mean, you can edit an image. What, what, what else are you going to do with the image editor besides edit an image? If you can make it look any way you want it in open source, I don't know, maybe you can do a little easier in Photoshop, but whatever, you know, for some, the inability to run Photoshop, at least without a bunch of workarounds on Linux, has been a deal breaker for them. But just to be clear, this isn't and never was a Linux problem. It's always, it's always been an Adobe problem, you know, and them not caring enough about, you know, their users and wanting to be where their users want to be. So, you know, they just always want to, they don't want to invest in the Linux ecosystem. And like many other things, Linux, even though it isn't a Linux problem, Linux has found a way and became the solution. So recently here a developer who goes by the Name of Files Basement that's spelled P H I A L S Basement. So Files Basement has submitted a set of WINE patches that finally let the official Adobe Creative Cloud installer for Windows run on Linux. Which means you can install Adobe Photoshop 2021 and Photoshop 2025 directly into a WINE prefix instead of doing the old install in Windows and then copy over the files workaround that apparently existed for some time here. The you know and apparently this oh you were able to install it before 2018 but they changed their installer to rely on some some Windows thing so so the fixes address installer breakages tied to WINE in compatibilities around ms.xml3 and ms.HTML plus some JavaScript XML handling that Adobe's installers rely on. With the patched wine, the installer can complete it can complete and Photoshop can be launched in terms of real world results. So far they're saying the word is out there that Photoshop 2021 is reported to run butter smooth with one noted issue being drag and drop. And it's suggesting maybe that's actually a Wayland issue that needs to get fixed. But I don't know if I don't think they know yet. Stop blaming things to Wayland. But then Photoshop 2025 appears to be a little more hit and miss depending on the setup. So you know expectations should be measured. If you're going for it, maybe go for the 2021 version right now and don't upgrade yet. Right now these patches, they're not merged in the upstream WINE yet, but they were first submitted in Valve's downstream ecosystem. But the path forward is upstream acceptance first. Then if it lands it could later be ported back ported into a proton or ported back into Proton. If you want to try today you'll need to use the developers patched Wine build either by compiling Wine yourself or with the patches applied or grabbing pre built binaries from their GitHub. But there are bigger implications beyond just Photoshop. The developer has reported progress with Adobe's broader installers. You know with most Adobe apps installing while a couple like, you know, I'm not in the Adobe ecosystem so I never heard of these, I had to look these up to make sure they really were Adobe things. But a couple like Adobe XD D and Adobe Fresco I guess if you know what they are, if you use them, you know what they are. But I don't know. I don't feel like a supporting Adobe myself and you know anytime soon until they, you know, change their ways, they're Kind of one of those companies I'd rather not give any of my money to. But if you have a copy or some reason you want to support them, give it a try. I love to hear how it works for you. Or if you still don't want to run Photoshop, maybe later on in the show Ken can offer you another alternative solution that somebody maybe thinks is the best option.
- [08:33]
A
All right. Interesting that it finally works. I'm trying to remember once upon a time there were, and I thought it was Adobe products they were messing with like the Windows boot records for anti piracy measures. Was that Adobe? I can't remember.
- [08:51]
D
That sounds like something I remember reading Sony was doing.
- [08:54]
A
Well, I mean Sony was kind of the OG of that with their BMG rootkit.
- [09:01]
B
I don't recall anything like that, but.
- [09:04]
A
Somebody was. Maybe I'll find it during while somebody else is covering a story. But it's neat that Photoshop is now there and now working. And you know, a good portion of the professional world still relies on that piece of software. So it is a welcome thing, I'm sure for those professionals to be able to use it on their Linux systems.
- [09:24]
D
That it could afford to pay for it. That's why I went to gimp.
- [09:28]
A
Yeah, there you go. There's a reason that some of those alternatives are out there, but if you're making money with it, you probably can afford to pay for it. Jeff?
- [09:38]
C
Well, I was going to say it's one of those things where if you really are a power user, like you said, making money, the open source does not. It won't fulfill all the needs.
- [09:50]
A
I mean it depends upon what you're doing.
- [09:52]
B
Define all the needs. I was making money doing website design and GIMP worked just fine for all my image editing needs.
- [09:58]
A
There are certainly some things for photo editing that Photoshop is going to be the way to go when you get into things like digital art though, something like Krita or I forget the other name. There's a couple of those. No, not darktable. There's a couple of the drawing apps, the open source drawing apps that are like considered to be some of the best in the business. And so real, real professionals really do use those. GIMP is sort of on the edge compared to Photoshop because.
- [10:25]
B
Yeah, well, when I switched the standard, when I switched from Photoshop to gimp, yeah, everything wasn't the same. It didn't do it all the same. But I could make my images look how I wanted them to look and that's all I needed. I mean, what else do you have to do well.
- [10:40]
C
There's a lot of professionals though that say that there isn't a replacement for Photoshop or other. That sounds like a editing tools. That's like LTT has talked about in the past. They've tried to get off Adobe and they've tried to find other programs and they can't find anything that handles their workflow.
- [10:59]
D
It comes down to your workflow.
- [11:01]
A
It comes down to workflow. It also comes down to things like color grading is one of the ones because Adobe puts a lot of effort into making sure, you know, you can, you can, the, the colors on your monitor will match the colors on the paper. You know that, that sort of thing and that that's printing, printing but also like HDR upload to YouTube pushing, pushing video out to cinema. I mean not like the super professional workflows. There's just not a whole lot of support for, for some of those in, in these open source tools.
- [11:35]
C
And that's what I'm talking about as far as just the real heavy duty users that a lot of the stuff, and I've used the example of Excel, like Google Sheets, LibreOffice, a lot of that stuff. The worksheets work fine. But for example, in my professional life I have to use Excel and I can't even use the web version because it doesn't have all the tools I need. But I'm kind of more in an extreme user and that's the groups that might switch over to Linux now because I've heard a lot of different professionals talking about Photoshop or the Adobe Creative Cloud being one of the big blocks to actually doing the Linux conversion. And I've heard a lot of people say if I could run this on Linux I would switch.
- [12:26]
B
And you guys pick on me saying I'm the Windows guy. I think we had the Microsoft fanboy in the bottom right corner here.
- [12:35]
D
I think it's not so much a fanboy as a captive.
- [12:41]
A
Yeah, I think so. Well Jeff, you are sort of the expert when it comes to another topic and that's NVME drives. And you've got a story here that touches on these. What is new in Linux and NVMeS?
- [12:55]
C
Yeah, I might know a little bit about drives and storage and maybe have dabbled a little. But we talk about drive speed and efficiency on this show once in a while and most of the time it has to do with the hardware technology like getting a new PCIe generation or maybe different ways drive write speed can change because the underlying hardware changed. This time we're mixing it up A little and talking about getting up to 15% more performance out of your NVME interface by being smarter about which cores use the interface. As the number of cores goes up in modern CPUs, the engineers at intel saw an issue and decided to do something about it. So when multiple cores use the same NVME irq, an IRQ is an interrupt request. Basically it's the signal for the CPU to pause what it's doing because a piece of hardware has to handle an important task. I mean, it doesn't pause the entire cpu, just the interaction with the piece of hardware which raised the interrupt request. So the patch was proposed on the kernel mailing list with the following comment. As the CPU core counts increase, the number of NVMe IRQs may be smaller than the total number of CPUs. This is for. And they say CPUs but they really mean cores based on the context of what they do and some other nomenclature they use in here. But I'm just reading it as the quote stands. This forces multiple CPUs to share the same IRQ. If the IRQ affinity and the CPUs cluster do not align, a performance penalty can be observed in some platforms. This patch improves IRQ affinity by grouping CPUs by cluster within each NUMA domain, ensuring better locality between CPUs and their assigned NVMe IQs. Now this is going to be geared more to CPUs like a Xenon or an EPYC or other, you know, very high core count CPU or multiple CPUs. They did take an Intel Xeon E server and use the patch and they were able to find a 15% performance increase. So that's where the number came from. They didn't do a lot of benchmarking, so it could even help some consumer CPUs. But there's going to have to be more benchmarking in the future to see if that's the case or, you know, where the core count is enough to see this improvement. Because even if you've got more cores then you have IRQs, you still might not have the collision. So, you know, Michael even mentioned that he's. Michael Label at Phronix said that he was going to do some testing. When this actually lands in into the. As an official poll, it's not there yet, but it's. It just got proposed. This is, you know, and this, and this is also the case for multi CPU hardware. And we'll see, and if we'll see what effect it has on that where you can, you know have 128 cores in one chip and 128 in the other. You don't have near that many IRQs. So the. Like I said, the pull hasn't been accepted, but it will probably get. It probably will. And it's probably going to make its way into the 6.20 or the 7.0 kernel, depending on whether Linus decides to go 620 or 7. He normally doesn't like the 20s, he just jumps to the next whole number. Take a look at the article linked in the show Notes for more details and you can see links to the actual mailing list proposal. And we'll keep everyone updated when there are more benchmarks on different hardware and if it officially makes it into the next kernel.
- [16:43]
A
I think the real question that we have to ask ourselves is what happens 100 years from now when they're at looking at 19.20 for the kernel? What will they do? Will Torvald still be alive then? Probably not. But what do you do? 20.0 just sounds so wrong. Do they. Do they call it the. The 1 0.0 kernel?
- [17:06]
C
Maybe he just goes right to 21.
- [17:07]
A
I guess.
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C
Anyway, whatever he wants.
- [17:13]
A
Yes. It's neat to see these kind of improvements, even though, like you said, there's a decent chance that it's not going to do anything on our desktops. I don't see in any of the documentation here. Do you know, does this require more than one drive to be able to hit this as well?
- [17:32]
C
No, you can do it with one. So if you had multiple things going on at once, you could have the interrupts colliding or the cores colliding with the interrupts.
- [17:42]
A
Got it.
- [17:42]
C
Because they're fighting for the. Fighting for the drive.
- [17:44]
A
Basically. Yeah.
- [17:47]
C
And if you think about it, especially the way Intel's going, when they have their high power, medium power and low power cores, they're stuffing more cores in versus the AMD right now for the consumer. Not Pro Server, just a consumer. You got 16, but you know, there's rumors that that not this next generation, but the 11,000 series might change that they might be putting more cores on each Neuma node.
- [18:13]
A
Honestly, I'm not sure that my framework 16 here is not a consumer CPU and it's got 24 cores.
- [18:22]
C
Intel?
- [18:23]
A
No, AMD. It's the Ryzen AI 9.
- [18:26]
C
Oh, okay.
- [18:27]
A
24 core.
- [18:29]
C
There you go.
- [18:30]
A
So, and I don't know if that's enough to run into this particular problem, but definitely interesting to note that as you say, core counts are rising amd. AMD has led that for years now. And intel is sort of getting into the game as well.
- [18:45]
D
Are applications getting to the point where they can actually use multiple cores more now?
- [18:52]
A
Yes, slowly it is happening. It's kind of become the, the. Well, the reality of the situation that Moore's Law for single cores just doesn't work anymore. It's not worked for a long time. And so AMD and Intel have changed the game by doing multiple cores. I think consumers have also changed. At least my habits have changed. I've taken advantage of that by doing things like running more tabs and running more programs at the same time. And so that's going to make things better. Multi process as well.
- [19:23]
C
I would say the actual exception today would be if you had an application that did not use more than one core.
- [19:31]
A
Depending. I mean, depending upon what it is. Right. Like there's going to be some very simple things that.
- [19:36]
B
I don't think Nano needs more than.
- [19:37]
A
One core that doesn't need more than one core.
- [19:40]
C
But yeah.
- [19:43]
A
Talk about games, browsers, video editors, those are. Yeah, those are going to. Those are going to take advantage of multiple cores by default. The easy days.
- [19:51]
D
FFmpeg's already been playing around with trying to do multi core.
- [19:55]
A
You can already do multi core with.
- [19:56]
D
Ffmpeg as of at least version 8, if not earlier.
- [20:02]
A
It's supported it in one way or another for a very long time. I think what FFMPEG did with this done for the longest time is it'll split the video up into. You want to use eight cores, it'll split it up into eight different segments and assign each of those segments to a core and then splice everything together at the end.
- [20:22]
C
Yeah, anything with heavy compute. So like your FFmpeg, a lot of your compression decompression, you know, things like Handbrake, you know, where you're really crunching a lot. That's. Those are they jumped on early transcoding?
- [20:38]
B
Yeah, graphic editors, those two.
- [20:43]
A
All right. Speaking of graphic editors, Ken has a story about that that we're going to get to right after this. Not that window, that window, that tab.
- [20:57]
C
Rob is stealing the Segway.
- [21:01]
D
Well, Jonathan, this week Roland Teller wrote about his desktop experience with a promising desktop editor. I am talking about the convergent 2D editor, graphite. The latest release comes as a flat pack. Now, Graphite is aiming to be the blender of 2D editors, combining tools for vector graphics, animation, desktop publishing, raster graphics and image compositing all in one. Its vector tooling is the most mature of the many features listed on the project's roadmap now. Basic raster editing was also recently introduced, but it has not enabled B but by default in the desktop build. If you are looking to test graphite in its fullness, you will still have to use the browser version for now. According to Roland, basic vector editing feels fine and larger brushstrokes are fairly smooth. He encountered two minor issues when testing the desktop build. The first was double clicking the window does not trigger maximize and the second was running without disable UI acceleration results in a blank window on his system. Graphite is not yet ready for critical client work, but it is already solid enough to get a clear sense of what it will be capable of once it matures. I'm going to recommend reading Roland's article if you want more details of his experience with graphite.
- [22:39]
A
Interesting. Yet another vector editor, an animation engine. Interesting.
- [22:48]
D
More for the duty.
- [22:50]
B
Two dimensional graphics animation too though. That's fun.
- [22:57]
A
Yeah, Graphite art vector graphics and animation engine.
- [23:04]
C
That is cool.
- [23:05]
A
Yeah, that is very interesting.
- [23:09]
B
Last animation engine I remember using as Mario Paint.
- [23:14]
A
But we were talking at the beginning of the show. You've got things like Karita and what kind of device. Something 8088 based.
- [23:25]
B
Well, that would have been a Nintendo, but no, it's not really the last one. Just that's my first one I should say.
- [23:32]
A
Yeah, we spoke at the beginning of the show. Sketch Inkscape was the other vector editor I was trying to come up with. Creta and Inkscape, very different, but both both reasonably professional. Useful for professionals, put it that way.
- [23:51]
B
Etch A Sketch Animator was my first, I guess animating engine.
- [23:58]
D
And there's also VRML to X3D, 3D, LUT Maker, Curve viewer. There's a bunch of display cal.
- [24:10]
A
Yeah, there's a bunch of them out there, but not. Not all of them are widely used. All right, Rob, There is a thing that. That Linux geeks like us have been wanting for a long time and it's never quite arrived. It's been promised multiple times. Is this the one?
- [24:31]
B
Well, as long as it can run.
- [24:34]
D
Linux, I'll be happy.
- [24:36]
B
There's a number. There's a number of these that can run Linux. And yes, I have long been hoping for a Linux phone myself. And to be honest, I don't know that this is exactly the phone I have been looking for. But it. It has an interesting take on. On it, the things it's doing. It's. It's not only a Linux phone, but also an Android phone. It's not only an Android phone and a Linux phone, it's also a Windows phone. So it's a phone so great it took them 14 years to release it. Yes, this phone literally was announced 14 years ago in 2012.
- [25:22]
A
Hopefully the hardware is not from 2012 way back then.
- [25:26]
B
In 2012 the plan was to offer the Next Phone Nex phone with Ubuntu for Android as its sole os. That's more what I'd be looking for. Just Linux. Well, Ubuntu for Android, I guess. I don't know what that was exactly. Anyway, after doing whatever they have been doing for 14 years, they decided to do things a little different, including bringing back Windows phones. Next Computer has officially opened reservations for the Next phone and the pitch is one phone that could be your Android phone, your Linux phone, and even a Windows machine. I don't think it's that. I don't think the Windows side actually has phone features.
- [26:15]
A
But anyway, so not actually running Windows.
- [26:18]
B
Phone, not exactly running Windows Phone, so. So the three OS setups come with Android 16 being the main OS running a minimal bloat free setup they call Nexos. Boo. I want a Linux as the main OS. Come on guys, come on. I'm begging for years. Anyway, the next one, the one we're more interested in, is Debian, but it runs on top of Android as an app, but with GPU acceleration. So when you dock it to a monitor with keyboard and mouse, it's meant to feel like a real Linux desktop. So I am a little disappointed that Linux runs as an app. Kind of like WSL for Android I guess or something. But you know, I guess if it works or kind of seems like a native, like you're running native Linux, I guess it'd be okay. Anyway, the wild part, the part that Jeff would be really Interested in is Windows 11. Yes, Jeff, it can run Windows. It's a dual boot option, meaning you reboot, you know, if you don't run Android Linux, you reboot the system and you boot into Windows. Next says Windows also uses a custom grid style ui. So when you're using it on the phone screen or when you're using on the phone screen and then looks like regular Windows when you plug into an external display. Obviously not a Windows fanboy myself, but it is interesting to see Windows on a phone again. I've never, I've never had a Windows Phone. I've never, never even seen one. But I don't know, it's still not the Windows Phone app either. Anyway, back to Linux stuff or the rest of the phone stuff, anyway, the other features, interesting things is, is the docking. It, you know, becomes a PC part. This is what's known as a convergence phone. You know, the whole point is you can plug it into a display over USB C or hdmi, then add a keyboard and mouse, use like a desktop top workstation. And Next even mentions USB C hub as part of the package. Depending on the offer, you take the hardware. Solid. Not a flagship, but pretty good. Next phone is using the Qualcomm QCM6498 chip. Means nothing to me. But for those who might know, you might recognize it from the Fairphone 5. Apparently it's the same one there. And that being paired with 12 gigabits of RAM, quite a bit. You know, not too long ago, I didn't even have computers with that 256 gigs of gigabits of storage. Again, more. That's. That's more than my current phone is right now. Plus a micro SD expansion slot, which, you know, my current phone doesn't have that either, so. Sounds cool. But Next, being pretty upfront that this isn't trying to beat down modern flagship phones, they say it's aimed more like a secondary backup phone because. Because people have secondary backup phones. It's. I don't know that. More like a secondary backup phone that turns into a pocket PC when you need it. So I think of it more like a PC you could carry with you, I guess. But the Next phone is listed at $549, which is a little bit cheaper than say an iPhone 16e, which is like 599 with Verizon. I just happen to be doing some research this week, so outside of this whole story. So I know that number off the top of my head, but reservations, you can reserve it for $199 today. Refundable though, but you reserve today to lock in priority access and early bird pricing. And then the remainder, $350 plus shipping taxes, is due when it ships with a target window of Q3, 2026, which is this year. Q3 of this year. So we've waited 14 years already. What's a few more months?
- [30:39]
D
Hmm.
- [30:41]
A
It is interesting. And so I tell you, the first thing I ask myself is who are these guys? Have they actually made anything before? Are they just going to pocket a whole bunch of people's $199 and then they.
- [30:53]
D
I believe one of the articles mentioned that they did make a docking station for phones.
- [30:58]
A
They make something called the Next Dock, which I am looking into. It may Be it may be something very similar to the Crow view, basically a laptop without a CPU in it. Or you can think of it as a monitor with a keyboard. It appears to be something very similar to that.
- [31:19]
B
I don't know.
- [31:20]
C
I think the red eye mode on this phone is just your eyes from crying so much when it's Windows 11 and it's crashing.
- [31:31]
A
I will also say if they've opened it up and they've given you the option to install, to actually install Windows and boot into it, then you can very likely use that to also boot into a full fat Linux distro.
- [31:43]
B
Yes, as long as they can get the hardware stuff to work with Linux. As long as it's nothing weird. But if Windows works, it must.
- [31:53]
A
Yep. Isn't that a crazy place that we've come to that we say, well if Windows will work on this hardware, then of course Linux well but that's fairly.
- [32:01]
D
Accurate these days depending on how they've got the boot set up.
- [32:08]
C
I don't think the problem would be the boot and all that as much as it would be can it talk to the cellular radio and communicate properly?
- [32:17]
A
Yeah, there's going to be that too. Booting is going to be interesting. You know, are they like how vanilla of a Windows install are they going to put on this? Is it their own sort of custom hack on top of Windows to make it boot or are they doing a UEFI firmware? It's uefi then you could just boot Linux on it. It'll just work.
- [32:39]
D
But this is carrying on what Ubuntu or Canonical were trying to do about the same time.
- [32:46]
A
I mean there's been, there have been Linux phone efforts and like Fedora still had KDE has a Linux A phone interface. I think Fedora has a spin that's intended for it. I mean this stuff is out there. It's just never, it's never really caught on.
- [33:04]
D
Because of the hardware.
- [33:06]
A
Yeah, that's. That's exactly what it is.
- [33:08]
B
And there are phones out there and.
- [33:11]
A
For that matter there are, there are good phones that you can boot Linux on. Like some of the OnePlus phones there are, you know, I think a couple of them the kernel fully supports it just works. But again it's. You got to jump through the hoops to do the install. And so there's very few people that are actually out there doing it.
- [33:29]
B
And there are phones already out there. You know, I've brought many to the show that come pre installed with Linux. I think normally the problem is that the price for the hardware you get is way more than like. Well yeah, than a lot of flagship phones today. But this is, it's getting there, I think.
- [33:51]
A
So what's the over under that it's actually going to show up this year at that price?
- [33:57]
B
Oh yeah. There's a lot of variables with harder prices going on this year.
- [34:02]
A
I mean 12 gigs of RAM. How much did they say? $549. Does that even buy the 12 gigs of RAM right now?
- [34:11]
B
Yeah, that's hope they already bought the RAM ahead of time. Exactly, exactly.
- [34:17]
A
Oh goodness. All right, so up next, Jeff wants to talk about title. I don't even know what title is in this context. We're going to find out.
- [34:29]
D
Music client.
- [34:30]
A
Well, we're going to find out. We're going to do it right after.
- [34:31]
B
This New year, same extra value meals at McDonald's. So now get two snack wraps plus fries and a medium soft drink for just $8 for a limited time. Prices and participation may vary.
- [34:45]
A
Prices may be higher in Hawaii, Alaska and California.
- [34:47]
C
And for delivery. Tonearm has just hit beta and it's an unofficial Tidal client for Lytics. Now Tidal is a streaming music service which has been around since 2014 and its main feature is that it specializes in high fidelity, meaning high quality streaming such as flac24bit 192khz and some other. You know the reasons it's noteworthy is they say there's some, you know, there's some exclusive artist releases on the platform because it's kind of an artist owned platform, so. But usually people bring it up in the high quality music genres. Now there's a lot of pros and cons to platform but I'm not going to go into that. But if you're a person who's into music quality, you probably have at least heard of Tidal. You know, for all the audio files and bit perfect snobs out there like myself, you're probably at least aware of it. Tidal though doesn't have a Linux app, but they do have a really good API. So all that's needed is a client to tie into that API to start down the native client path. To sign in you get a little window with a QR code and a clickable link which signs you into your title account. Tonearm then takes over and you know, once you're authenticated, you're good to go. On flathub, they say you can play the tracks at the highest quality and you can explore using discovery discovery mixes. You know your go through your collection of music, you know it's all your whole collection's available to play. So it's acting like a true supported client. They do have support for personalized playlists and mixes. You can create playlists and search for information on the music and artists like you would on an official title application. The article linked in the Show Notes goes through though does say that you need to remember that this is a beta. So there's some little, little hiccups. You know, window sizing can be an issue and it won't shrink down to a small window, but you can hit play and then close the app and it'll continue to play in the background. So this is more, you know, like it's not the end of the world if when you're interacting with the app, if you're on a tiling desktop, that's where they kind of mentioned that you can have some problems where the tiling desktop wants to form fit it into a certain window shape and it just doesn't like to go there. So normally if you're not that critical on your window sizing, you won't have an issue. Looking at lyrics can be a little off as well. Now some songs will auto scroll the lyrics if available. Not every song this is a title title supported thing, but the highlighted lines will disappear out of view really quickly. So that's another kind of hiccup in the program. As mentioned before, one of the features of Tidal is being able to play high resolution music. But if you wanted to lower the resolution to save on some bandwidth or you're at some place that has a low speed connection then you know you can't get the full full fat speed. Well that isn't a feature yet like on the supported apps. Supported apps let you lower the resolution for whatever bandwidth reason you have. You can't do that with Tonearm. There's a few albums that have animated cover art which are currently not supported in Tone on Tonearm. And while I should mention that while Tonearm is free and open source, Tidal is not and there isn't a free tier to try out and play with. So if you're even interested, you have to pay to get into the lowest level of title to get ToneArmy. It's on Flathub and can be installed on your distribution of choice. Take a look at the article linked in the Show Notes for full details. And as they also mentioned, this is the third third Linux client. High Tide and Tidal HiFi are two others which are mentioned and they say the the site also has reviews on those applications as well. So lots of choices. Happy listening.
- [39:03]
A
Yeah. Boy, you, you search the Internet for title and you just immediately fall into this black hole of, of audio files, fighting over whether title is better than CDs and whether they do any digital signal processing and how pure is pure enough to have uncompressed audio. And it's like, oh my goodness, this is, this is more than, this is more than I wanted for this quick Google search. I was just, well, I was just looking for a simple question and nobody answered my question. But boy, they fought about everything else. Yeah.
- [39:34]
C
And well, and then you even get into the whole argument that you didn't mention of like, okay, say, say Tidal is bit perfect. Well, a lot of people don't have the headphones or the speakers or the earbuds to actually take advantage of the ears or the ears. Usually it's not the ears as much as it is. People are listening to cheaper headphones and you know, they're not using audiophile or at least really high level, high quality earphones.
- [40:06]
D
These are great for speech.
- [40:08]
B
Ken has the ears, not the ears.
- [40:13]
C
We'll see like mine. And these aren't super high end. I've got some Sennheiser headphones that I use, but my true critical listening is with my regular speakers.
- [40:26]
A
Yeah, yeah. One of the things that I would like to see on a place like this is uncompressed audio, not digital compression. I don't care so much about that. Like you should use flac and it's uncompressed, you can't hear it. I'm more interested in audio that's not had an audio compressor run through it quite so aggressively. That's what they do to get that wall of sound where everything is loud. It's like, no, no, no, no, no. Let's have a little nuance in our music. But there is some platform that sort of specializes in that. And that's what I was trying to figure out if that was Tidal that, that liked uncompressed as in no audio compressor music.
- [41:07]
C
No, it's well like HD Tracks is one and there's another one that I can't think of the name of. So just just to be clear, FLAC is compressed, but it's a lossless compression, so it bit perfect. What comes in is what comes out. Actually one of the reasons, because hearing wise, 16 bit, 14 kilohertz, your normal CD digitizing is better than what humans can hear. But when you hear people talking about, oh, this 24 bit, 96 kilohertz flac sounds better, it's the same thing that happens on vinyl where it's not the medium as much as it is, they go, oh, who's ever purchasing this is really caring about sound quality. So they actually master it much better versus the kind of packaged MP3 CD, run it through the sound compressor. They make sure that when you have, when you're buying one of those formats, they have the full dynamic range in there. So it's an effective. Oh, this. We're going to tailor it for the audience, not it's not the benefit of the format.
- [42:24]
A
Yeah, makes sense. Makes sense to me. All right, let's move on and let's talk about OpenSUSE. Ken, you've got the OpenSETA story. What is new there? What is Merlin and why did they spell it like that?
- [42:43]
D
Well, if y' all have been following us since the beginning of the year, you'll remember I mentioned Merlin the first week of this month or this year. But this week Bobby Borisov wrote about Merlin, the new package manager for OpenSUSE, reaching version 1.0. One of the most notable changes in the new release is the availability of community repositories for OpenSUSE Elite 16, which were previously missing on the server side, allowing users to inspect and manage packages from those repositories directly through the user interface. Sovereign behavior visibility has been improved. Now after running actions such as package update or distribution upgrade, the dependency resolver mode is now shown directly in the main window until changes are accepted. The timeline view of the zip History browser has been reworked into a hierarchical structure organized by year, month and day. Filtering capabilities have also been expanded, enabling users to narrow history views by package name or pattern repository removal events only, or repository changes such as additions, removals or URL updates. You can get more details by reading Bobby's article about what's been improved with Merlin.
- [44:19]
A
Yeah, interesting, interesting. So this is. This is just for. For. For GUI package management, right?
- [44:27]
B
Right.
- [44:27]
D
Similar to Synaptic package manager for app based systems. And the. Does Fedora have a graphic package manager?
- [44:39]
A
They probably do. I actually use Discover, which I think is a KDE package manager, but it talks, it talks with the, with DNF. It uses RPMs and all of that. So if I want, if I want to do something graphical, I go through Discover. I don't know if Fedora has another one or not, to be honest.
- [44:56]
B
I remember, Ken, you demoed this and I thought it looked just like Synaptic. I thought maybe it's a fork or something. It's just like it and a bit.
- [45:04]
D
Like yes, which is what opensuso was using. But they're trying to get away before it gets deprecated.
- [45:15]
A
Yeah, yeah, makes sense.
- [45:17]
B
You know, Ken, you did, you did have to correct yourself when you first said the first week of the month and said. Or first week of the year or first week of the month. First week of the year. It's the same. Yes, they both were accurate.
- [45:30]
A
They both work. Oh, that's funny. All right. Yeah, no, this is, this is interesting. I don't know that I'm ever going to run OpenSuse. It's just not, it's not my.
- [45:40]
D
Though if you remember when I did the demo, I mentioned that Merlin's going to be. They may have a version of it available for Fedora, so.
- [45:51]
A
Interesting.
- [45:52]
B
Why not?
- [45:53]
A
Jonathan, I am so used to Fedora.
- [45:58]
B
I like Gary Fedora.
- [45:59]
A
Like it's Fedora esque. In some ways it's gonna be. I would expect it to be more Red Hat esque. Fedora esque.
- [46:10]
B
It is. I mean they're all Red Hat based, like.
- [46:13]
C
Well, look at, look at me. I. I went from probably a decade plus on Debian slash Ubuntu ish stuff and now I'm over on the art side.
- [46:21]
D
Yeah, I bounce back and forth between Ubuntu and Thanks, Rob and Tumbleweed and to be honest, a lot of it's quite the same. Well, of course it helps using the same desktop.
- [46:33]
A
A lot of it is going to be quite the same. Yes.
- [46:35]
B
But my experience with open source, when I ran it for a while there was. It was very solid, stable. I felt like software availability like their. Their native repo was lacking compared to most others.
- [46:49]
D
Now one other thing that Jonathan's wife mentions, and I'll have to agree when I talk about it, except it's a different spelling. It always makes me think of Randall Schwartz because of his moniker that he used for getting emails.
- [47:08]
A
Merlin M E R L Y N. Yep, yep, that's. That's Fun Bus in the past. All right, let's talk then about.
- [47:19]
B
Well, yeah, let's talk about why Jeff moved away from Ubuntu.
- [47:26]
A
You think it was Snaps?
- [47:28]
B
No, not really.
- [47:30]
A
There's some interesting things going on in the Snap world. What is up there, Rob? It could be related, might be related.
- [47:37]
B
So I don't know people who listen in here who are. Have their ears on the community. Everybody hates Snaps. Not everybody, but, you know, but just for those of you who do, just when you thought you heard it all, you know, they're bloated canonical forces us to use them and I don't know what else but Everybody hates them. Well, I'm here today to help you add to that list. At least with one more reason to be at least a little wary of Snaps. And yes, one of my sources is from the blog of Snap aficionado himself, Alan Poppy. Snaps, in theory are a modern Linux packaging system, compressed cryptographically, science sandbox, and easy to roll back on paper. It all sounds great, but in practice, Canonical Snapstore has been dealing with relentless waves of scammers publishing malware lately, especially fake cryptocurrency wallet apps. And this isn't just annoying junkware, you know, these are, they're straight up theft tools. You know, the scam is simple. The fake wall looks legit, like Exodus Ledger Live or Trust Wallet. And once you install it, it asks for your wallet recovery phrase. If you type it in, it gets sent to the criminals and then the app throws an error. And by the time you realize what happened, your wallet is empty. Alan documents at least one confirmed case where a victim lost 490,000. I just wish I had that much to lose. But Canonical has tried to fight it. You know, there are filters, reviews, takedowns, but it's the classic security whack. A mole problem. And the scammers keep changing the tactics. You know, first they published convincing look alike or convincing looking fake apps with good screenshots and, and, and, and store pages. And when text filter started catching them, they switched to Unicord UDA code. Look alike characters swapping letters with similar looking symbols from other alphabets to sneak past the automated detection. Then came the bait and switch. Publish something harmless under a random name, get approved, and later push a second update that turns it into a fake wallet. But now things are really starting to escalate. The scammers aren't just creating new accounts anymore, they're taking over old trusted publisher accounts. They, they monitor the Snap store for publishers who used a domain name in their identity, like Cool project Tech. And, and if that domain expires, the scammers re register it. And once they control the domain, they trigger a password reset, take over the Snap publisher account and push malicious updates from a publisher that looks legitimate and established. You know, and this is one reason why I still own domains for old abandoned projects that I'm not even no longer doing anything with. I haven't touched in like a decade. I, I still keep renewing the domain every year. Domains are cheap and as long as you don't have hundreds of projects, eventually I'll let it go. You know, eventually no one's going to have A clue what Live Client 2 is. So that's the domain that I have and there's nothing there. So. Because, well now I just brought the name back and you people are going to remember for another decade. But anyway, Alan says he's already identified this happening with at least two domains, storewise tech and vague entertainment.com and he suspects there are more. The scary part, you know, undermines one of the only trust signals users had. You know, before they could at least be cautious about brand new publishers. Now a Snap you installed years ago could get a malicious update tomorrow if a publisher's account gets hijacked, you know, I guess or as we've seen libraries that they use get hijacked or something. So. So I guess so much for auto updates, huh? Auto updates are so good. But be careful. Alan built a tool called Snapscope that I talked about a few weeks ago, originally for sbobs and vulnerability scanning. But it also helped highlight just how widespread and persistent this malware problem is. Canonical likely needs stronger protections around publisher accounts, monitoring domains, requiring stronger verification for domain accounts and pushing or requiring two factor authentication. And for everyone listening, if you are a publisher, you know, remove, renew your domain and turn on two fa. You know, like I've done. If you're a user, be extremely cautious with crypto wallets and really any app store, especially you know, if it's has access or you're giving it access to some pretty, some data that could really be taken advantage of. You know, best not to install any wallet apps from the store at all. You know, get them directly from the official project site and because yeah, everybody hates snaps. So now you have another reason. But you know, like I said, it's a good idea to be cautious with anything you install. These issues have hit many app stores on all OSes. You know, Windows, Mac OS, Android, iOS, they've all had malicious stuff. You know, it's not just limited to Snaps or Linux, you know, gotta consider what access they have, information you have. It's just that right now the story behind Snaps is being brought to the forefront. So.
- [53:47]
A
Yeah, you know, the one that's really struggling with it is NPM and the packages there. That's probably the place that's having the worst time of malicious packages. But pretty much any place where individual users can upload stuff, you're gonna find malware inevitably.
- [54:05]
B
Yep, flat packs.
- [54:07]
A
Yep. It's quite a problem and not, not an obvious solution to it. You know, you've got obviously Microsoft is now the ones that own the, the npm, the package management system there. And they've not come up with a silver bullet to try to fix this because you what, you know, like it's, it's a, it's a immovable object and an unstoppable force, sort of. Because you want anybody to be able to write code and upload a package, but at the same time you don't want anybody to be able to upload malicious code and a malicious package. And it's like, how do you, how do you automatically tell which one is which? And sure, AI helps, but does not do a perfect job.
- [54:50]
D
So AI in a virtual environment.
- [54:55]
A
That'S not enough because it's not terribly difficult to detect that you're running inside a virtual environment. You have code that is obfuscated and it'll go, oh, this is a virtual environment. Don't do anything, don't do anything sketchy. This is a real end user computer. Now we do the sketchy stuff.
- [55:10]
B
Even if you run every single app application isolated in a virtual environment, whatever. So they can't touch anything else on your system. If it's a wallet app and you put in your credentials, well, you're expecting to send those credentials.
- [55:26]
D
I think I'll stick to a physical wallet then.
- [55:29]
B
Yeah. Well, maybe you'll be lucky to find Leo's crypto Bitcoin wallet.
- [55:37]
D
Well, he knows where his bitcoin wallet is. He just can't get into it.
- [55:43]
B
Right, right.
- [55:45]
D
So it's kind of hard to get your password when you can't even remember.
- [55:49]
B
Or Steve Gibson doesn't then he lose a wallet like 50 coins.
- [55:52]
D
He erased the wallet.
- [55:54]
B
Yeah.
- [55:55]
A
Yeah. Ouch.
- [55:58]
B
I think I'll stick to my regular wallet for now.
- [56:00]
A
Yeah. Yep.
- [56:02]
C
Actually though, when you're talking about snaps and the security on there, that's one of the reasons I actually got off Kubuntu was they, they were having so much internal security, it started messing with things like Firefox and the hardware decoding. So it like suddenly YouTube and a bunch of other things I were just having fits with because it, it could only software decode because of how they had the segregation set up in there. And I couldn't get it to work and I had a few other issues like that. So that's what made me jump to cashy because I said, you know, if I'm going to jump ship, I'm going to go something completely different.
- [56:44]
B
Love it.
- [56:45]
A
Yes. All right, so we've got, we've got a Vulcan update to talk about and we're going to do that after a brief break.
- [56:56]
C
The last story was about audio, so now we can get into video. Vulcan to be exact. Now I have two stories about Vulcan this week and the first one is Vulcan 1. 4.340 has been released. While not earth shattering, you know there's been some bugs. Fixed things like fix a fragment density map, Texel size calculation, Remove inaccurate unnecessary open close GOP definitions from video encode descriptions, remove redundant common draw views. You know many more fixes that I won't go through, but know that there are some code cleanup was done and bug squashing on top of that. The bigger items There are three new extensions, biggest one being vkextdescriptorheap. So this first one was worked on by Nvidia, amd, arm, Intel, Nintendo, Valve, Google, ton of others. Basically most of the technology industry had their fingers into this specific extension. So you know this was something everybody wanted. If you have that many different companies all working on this. This extension allows explicit management of descriptors and the memory used to store descriptors conceptualized as descriptor heaps. So descriptor heap memory can be accessed as any other memory, enabling management of descriptors on both CPUs and GPUs. So a descriptor is the main way you connect CPU data to the gpu. It can be thought of as a handle or pointer into a resource. It gets a lot deeper than that, but at a very high simple level. That description works. I read the documentation of it and it's like oh yeah, it gets deep. The article points out that this should be a big help with things like Steam Play and help with different companies, Vulcan drivers, Nvidia, amd, intel and it should increase things like Proton gaming performance. Another extension is for synchronized queues. This extension allows applications and game engines to opt into queues to be internally synchronized so that there's no need for externally synchronizing them. This addresses issues of software needing to synchronize access to queues. There's a shader extension which was brought forth by Nvidia and they also the funny thing is they actually list another extension, but it never actually made it to the git commit. So possibly an oops there. Hey, we got these four options. Oh, we only committed three of the chunks of code. So they said four extensions. In actuality we only got three. But take a look at the first article in the show notes for full details. A link to the commit, which has a lot more information now. The second article in the show notes goes over how the Kronos group has put forward their 26 Vulcan roadmap, or the milestones they wish to accomplish this year. Things like variable rate shading, shader clock queries, host image copies, computer shader derivatives, various swap chain improvements, higher descriptor and shader interface limits. I'm not going to go into great detail on what each of those are, but if you look at the show notes and take a look at the second link, you'll find the article with more information and they have like a link to the milestone document and all the details on the inner workings of each of the features, the requirements, you know, like software versions, things like that, how they're to be used, everything you want to know. And these are basically both of these articles. Anything that uses Vulcan to make, you know, is going to benefit from this and it's just going to make a better, faster experience. So, you know, I'll be honest, the future of Vulcan looks really good with such wide industry support. So I think there's only wonderful things coming in the coming year.
- [61:01]
A
Yeah, it is. It is surprised and delighted me to see the. The uptake of Vulcan and how many things use it and the crazy things people are doing with it. So, like all of the DirectX on Vulkan plugins, you can run the various generations of DirectX via Vulcan. The fact that it supports ray tracing, of course, just nutty, fun things that people are doing with Vulkan. It's a lot of fun to see.
- [61:34]
D
Yeah, you need a good infrastructure, don't you?
- [61:40]
A
What do you mean?
- [61:42]
D
For developing them.
- [61:44]
A
But what does, what does the infrastructure have to do with Vulcan? I don't understand. He's trying to. He's trying to make a segue and I'm trying to make it awkward. You can't segue yourself, Ken.
- [61:54]
B
Dang it, fired. Get out of here.
- [61:58]
C
And to step back before we go into the next story. So Vulcan is designed to work beside OpenGL. OpenGL is your very high level where you say, okay, OpenGL, draw a cube and it does it. Vulcan is the DirectX 12. And OpenGL is like DirectX 11, where Vulcan, you can't just say, draw a cube. You have to go in and say, okay, from this point to this point, I want a line. And here to here, it's much lower level.
- [62:28]
A
Right.
- [62:28]
D
So you give it the actual coordinates.
- [62:31]
C
Yeah, I mean it's. It works a little differently than that, but I mean, that's kind of the conceptual idea is that it's much like.
- [62:38]
B
A JPEG versus a png.
- [62:42]
C
Yeah.
- [62:43]
B
Or a vector graphic, maybe.
- [62:45]
A
Y' all are really bad at metaphors.
- [62:51]
B
Anyway. I wonder, I wonder how this would work on niche distros like Alpine Linux.
- [62:56]
A
There you go, Rob.
- [62:57]
D
That's great.
- [62:59]
A
Ken has the story talking about Alpine and their hosting troubles and how that got resolved.
- [63:07]
D
Yes, Jonathan. And this week Bobby Borisov and an old friend of Floss Weekly, Christine hall, wrote about the latest post from Alpine Linux. The post reminds us of the announcement that Equinix Metals Sunset would directly impact Alpine Linux hosting and mirroring and continuous CI infrastructure. The response to their request for new partners exceeded all expectations. According to Bobby, multiple organizations offered bandwidth, hardware and managed infrastructure. According to Christine, Alpine Linux is listing its newfound sponsors under two categories, Tier one, Mirror Sponsors and CI and Infrastructure Resource sponsors. The post states that with new sponsors in place, infrastructure migrations are now underway as components transition to their new hosting environments. Alpine Linux expects improvements, including reducing reliance on a single sponsor and increasing the resources available for mirrors CI and development. Both Bobby's and Christine's articles provide more details than I have on the history behind this opportunity to build a more redundant and future proof infrastructure for Alpine Linux security and dependability. How much do you remember about the history from when the Equinox Metals announced that it would be basically shutting down?
- [64:51]
A
Jonathan I remember that happening. It seems like this happened to a couple of different projects, but I remember that happening and Alpine basically said we don't know what we're going to do. And they put out this call for, you know, we need, essentially they needed new sponsors to be able to get the hardware to host and build on.
- [65:08]
D
Yeah, the projects that were paying for that infrastructure just found other sources that could pay for.
- [65:17]
A
Yeah, I mean that makes sense. It's not, you can, you can set it up if you got the budget to do it. There are, there are multiple different places that, you know, you can either pay for just a hosted solution like hey, I need a CI and okay, here you go, plug it right into GitHub. Or you can, you know, you can rent servers and build your own CI. It's harder when you don't have any money.
- [65:41]
D
Supported by donations like I said.
- [65:47]
A
And oftentimes is the exact same thing.
- [65:49]
B
And if you want to donate, I'll tell you at the end of the show where you can donate. Me.
- [65:57]
D
Oh, not Alpine Linux.
- [66:01]
B
They seem to be doing just fine these days.
- [66:04]
A
Yeah, it's good to see that they, that they got several sponsors. I like the fact that they have multiple sponsors now and not just a single one. So they've got, they've got multiple people that are providing mirrors. They've got multiple companies that are giving them CI builders and so they can spread that out. And now they're not, you know, they're not at the mercy of a single company.
- [66:21]
B
All their eggs aren't in one basket.
- [66:23]
A
Exactly.
- [66:24]
B
How's that for a metaphor, Jonathan?
- [66:26]
A
That's a better metaphor. That's better. Yeah, I like that one better.
- [66:32]
D
I like all the eggs in one basket.
- [66:34]
C
Loves cupcakes.
- [66:37]
D
Yeah, all the eggs in one basket is not good. Especially when you drop the basket.
- [66:43]
A
Indeed. Don't drop the basket.
- [66:45]
C
Just make an omelette.
- [66:46]
B
I'm sorry. When I go grocery shopping, I don't separate out my eggs and put them into different bags or baskets. So I just gamble every time.
- [66:55]
D
Do you put them in with your.
- [66:59]
C
Anyway, Billy's items?
- [67:03]
A
I don't think we need to talk about our grocery shopping cabinets. At least not during the show. We'll save that for the exciting post show content. Anyway, what's up next is command line tips and we're going to get to those right after this. Hey, everybody, it's Leo Laporte asking you, begging you, pleading with you. There are only a few days left to take our annual Twitch survey.
- [67:30]
B
This is the best way we have.
- [67:31]
C
Of knowing more about our audience.
- [67:34]
A
Help us out, let us know what.
- [67:35]
B
You like, what you don't like, who you are.
- [67:37]
A
Just fill out the survey. It's on our website. Should only take a few minutes. TWIT TV Survey 26 survey closes January 31st.
- [67:45]
B
So don't delay and thank you very much, we really appreciate it.
- [67:51]
A
All right, so Rob actually has the first command line tip and I've cheated and I already know what it is. I thought this is something I'd used before, but now looking at it, I've not. And I'm going to quickly install it while he is talking.
- [68:05]
B
All right, so let's get you Jonathan.
- [68:10]
A
Oh, well, you guys get to watch me install. Install a program. That's great. How about we go to Rob's camera?
- [68:18]
C
Those tricky buttons.
- [68:19]
A
Yeah, there's too many of them.
- [68:21]
B
All right, let's go for. So my command line tip of the week is something I found discovered is Cloud 4, Cloudflare, Dash Speed Dash CLI. If you Google that you should find on GitHub. Otherwise just go to the show notes and there's a link there and. And then you. You'll know you're getting to the right one. It's pretty easy to install so when I'm doing a speed test, I always prefer to do it on command line over web browser GUI whenever I can. And this is goes for Windows or Linux or anything just because sometimes the GUIs can cause especially on slower systems can cause things to slow down and and kind of not give you an accurate rating of your actual speed because other things kind of get in the way. I've seen it before so I prefer that and this one is a pretty nice one. So for those watching I ran this on on one of my Linux servers actually it's just a approximox container that I set up so nothing else is on here. So I ran it and it shows a nice little graph of what the test is when you're downloading. It has the average speed same for the uploads, has a latency, has some network information which I've blocked off my external IP4IP and then you can also tab over so I'm in the download tab. If I tab over here I can get to my history. So I've done two tests since I've looked this it with downloads being right around 864 pretty steady both tests Uploads fluctuate a little bit. Maybe somebody was using it, you know other stuff there there's and you tab again over to help gives you all the help which most of that help tab is actually on the dashboard in the bottom right corner the the shortcuts. So if I want to run this again I'm just going to do R to return the test and you could kind of see it in action. So if I do that it's just going to well start running the downloads there nice little graph being created as it, as it flows, you know, right up over there and when that's done, oh look at 873 while I'm also streaming to you guys so so Rob.
- [70:48]
A
I hate to break it to you, you need to probably not right now but you need to run this on the computer you're currently on because your connection has been terrible. All show.
- [71:01]
B
Well on here. My connection is just fine. I'll run it on my current computer but you know I always like to get the GUI out of there. It's probably not the act if there's a problem. It's probably not the actual network connection to my computer. It's probably something else between you and the isp. No, I mean obviously this is, this is this up here that I'm showing you is in my house. So it's between me and my ISP also it's just in the other room over there. It's probably something bottlenecking on my computer. Which, you know, it's always good when you're. Which is why when you're troubleshooting something, bonus tip here, Chunk things out, test it from here to here, here to here and you know, isolate where the problem is. Because just because a speed test isn't good on your computer doesn't mean it's your ISP's problem.
- [71:55]
A
That's true.
- [71:57]
D
All right, is there a client server situation that you can set up between two computers on your local network for doing a bandwidth test like that?
- [72:06]
B
Yes, I do have that running on, on somewhere. But anyway, yes, there's options.
- [72:16]
D
Have we covered that command line tip yet?
- [72:18]
B
I think we've covered the command.
- [72:21]
A
Yeah, I think we've covered IPERF before.
- [72:23]
B
Yeah. But there are, there are also probably several more like web based tools.
- [72:31]
A
All right Jeff, you've got a. Well it says here, slow update arch. That sounds more like a problem than a tip. So you're muted Jeff, and once you unmute yourself then we will get your command line tip.
- [72:45]
C
There you go, There we go. This is a quick one, but not sure if anybody knew about the Arch Linux archives or ALA as it's sometimes known. If you like Arch or a derivative and wanted to slow down the updates, maybe let them sit a little bit before you load them in, you can take a step back basically from the cutting edge and make it more like safety scissors. What you do is you can replace your regular Pacman mirrors with the archive ones and then you have a semi fixed release Arch distribution. So there's several versions in the archive. So you can choose monthly, weekly or even an exact date. So now it just time wise, not only, you know, holding the updates a little bit, but the updates are a little bit slower. You know, the archive mirrors aren't built for maximum speed, but you know, for example, if you wanted to keep a group of machines in exact sync for some reason, you could do it with this method. So I have a link in the show notes to the Arch wiki where they talk about how the archive is set up, they go into more details on the timestamps and which, which mirrors you want based on the date you want. And so if you want more controlled updates on an Arch or an Arch derived distribution, here you go.
- [74:11]
A
Very cool. You know, it's super useful every once in a while. It's not something you need all the time, but to be able to go back and get an old package. I found myself needing to do that a few times throughout the years. Whether it be to troubleshoot a kernel issue or because something needs exactly this to be able to run. It's always a pain and it's always nice to have a solution like that when you run into that.
- [74:34]
C
Yeah. And you can actually also update just specific programs out of the archives. So they talk about that as well. If you just said, like you said, I need LIBC version, whatever and you can go and pull that specific version in.
- [74:52]
A
Yep, yep, super useful.
- [74:54]
B
I. I want to interject the speed on my local computer here is actually getting slightly better than my VM also and I want to answer a question one person asked because I said I was running this on proxmox. They asked if you had to be in Proxmox. No, you can run this on any Linux computer. So it was Proxmonics.
- [75:14]
A
I got it installed while he was talking. I installed it with Cargo and so it's pretty easy to get going.
- [75:20]
C
And they also have packages pre built for a lot of distributions. On mine I just did a Pac man and installed it.
- [75:27]
A
Yep, yep. All right. I've got a command line tip that is sort of just for fun, although has an interesting little quirk to it that we're going to talk about. So the program is in Snake and I will say this is sort of important. I was able to install this using DNF right in Fedora. So it's in the Fedora package Repos and it is literally just Snake. Now it is very slow to start with and I don't know exactly why. You can go into the game settings and change your starting speed. There are of course a bunch of different options here. So you can change the speed. Made a kit a little bit more playable. And so I just, I thought this was fun to have a Snake game in the terminal, right. That, that is in and of itself a fun thing. But as I was messing around with this, getting ready for the show, I. I went here to level select and it's like, oh, you have no levels. Like oh, this sounds interesting. What are these levels in in Snake and it has some instructions here, you know, copy the default levels from this location. This location. I've not even tried that yet because I saw you can also download more levels from the website in snake.alexdantis.net I went to that website, I tried to go to that website and my. One of one of my browser extensions actually blocked it and said no, no, you can't go to this website. Let's see if I can get that to pull up. Actually if I tell it to open link. Let's see if I can. Yeah. So it tries to take me to. Let me. Let me show you what we've got here.
- [77:24]
B
Huh?
- [77:25]
A
Let me show you what we've got. You see this XML v4ICDSOAP1 online is blocked. So this is. This is what happened when I try to go to this website. The insnake.alexdantis.net is blocked. Oh, well, that's. That's interesting. Okay. It is in Snake and I know that I found the GitHub for this earlier. All right, let's pull this up. It is GitHub.com alexdantisnake and the first thing that I see is the last Update here was 12 years ago. So this is a fun little. It's a fun little game. You can run it in your terminal. As far as I can tell, the source code is clean, but it has not seen an update for 12 years, which would be fine. But that alexdantis.net URL has expired. Very much like what Rob was talking about earlier in the show. And it's not clear to me whether someone has gotten it and is trying to do something untoward.
- [78:37]
D
Nefarious.
- [78:38]
A
Nefarious with that URL or if that was just an attempt to go to one of those URL holding sites.
- [78:46]
B
It's on a blacklist. My firewall blocked it.
- [78:49]
C
Exactly.
- [78:50]
A
So it looks like someone was trying to run malware out of there at some point. So I don't know what exactly to make of this, but it's a very interesting warning that just because a package is in, in this case, the Fedora official list of packages, it doesn't mean that everything about it is safe. That that domain name, it has expired and is now potentially malicious. So a really interesting example of things to watch out for. I thought it was worthwhile to bring it to the show and a cool game. You can still install and enjoy the game, just don't go to the URL.
- [79:33]
D
So if you've got any bookmarks from 12 years ago, you may want to be careful with those choosing.
- [79:39]
A
Absolutely true. Yeah. I have seen domain names of things that I really used to enjoy. And then you try to go back to it and it's like, that is not what I thought was going to be there.
- [79:50]
B
I'm curious what's there. I'm going to find out at some point here.
- [79:54]
A
I did finally force it to let me go there and it just gave me a page with a single line of HTML that just said something like, the server failed to load.
- [80:08]
B
I'm going to dig into my firewall logs and see what. What it says, why it's blocked too. I'm curious.
- [80:13]
A
Yeah, absolutely. If it's blocked for malware or just for, you know, what have you. But yeah, that is the show. I'm going to let each of the guys get in the last word.
- [80:23]
D
Oh, you're not going to let me share my command line too?
- [80:25]
A
Did we skip Ken's? We did skip Ken's. I did not see when I first wrote this, mine was at the end. I'm not sure how my command line tip got above Ken's. Maybe I just skipped Ken and Ken switched them on me. But anyway, Ken does indeed have a command line tip and it sounds pretty. Pretty interesting to me, actually. So we're going to let him dive into that real quick.
- [80:49]
D
Let me go ahead and bring up my terminal. There we go. We were sharing pictures of our. The snow we got here earlier. But my command line tip today is Ascii Nima. It's a terminal session recorder. So I'm going to play back a recording I made of a terminal session. Let's try that again and get rid of that. Now, what it does is it allows you to record a session and then you can set it to playback all the commands you did at the terminal until you stop the recording.
- [81:43]
A
I would probably pronounce that something like S Kinema or S Cinema.
- [81:48]
D
The website actually has the. It's spelled out. It's ASCII NEMA numa or a S K E E then N U H then M E H for the MA.
- [82:10]
A
Comes with a pronunciation guide.
- [82:12]
C
Yep.
- [82:13]
D
And you. Now you see why.
- [82:16]
A
Yes, absolutely.
- [82:18]
D
And as you can see, it's still playing back the recording of what I did earlier with it. Basically, I just used it earlier to record. And it's got one more command to demonstrate, but so far it's been going through doing Eskimina without the anything after it. And there's the last command and. But let's go ahead and re. Stroll. Scroll back here. But I did. The first thing I did was asking the Nima. And it by itself, it gives you all this helpful information where it gives you what the different sub commands are for recording. For replaying a terminal session. You can even print out a terminal session. You can upload it to ascanima.org and you can manage your recordings on ascanima.org if you create an account to use that allows you to authorize that for the uploads. Otherwise, if you upload it, it's Kept there for seven days and then automatically deleted. Then it gives you some examples of using it to record your terminal. You can either record it and upload it automatically, or if you give it a file name, it'll save it to that local file name. You can use a dash T with the record to give it a title. And you can set the speed that it plays back at. And I had it go through and show the help for each of the sub commands so that you've got all these options where you can append to an existing recording. For example, you can set the column terminal columns and rows for recorded progress process that I've still got to play around with. And you can set it to take care of yes to all your prompts that you get, like for the upload confirmation. And then you with the playback you can set it to loop. Aren't you glad I didn't do that? Another option that I still want to play with is setting it to pause on markers. That way it'll automatically pause and you can. You can actually use the space bar to start and stop the playback. And you'll see at the very end it did an exit. I've got another one that demonstrates where you can actually add commands to the. On the same command that the asking Mina asking Nima command his own to echo. For example. This is a demonstration using ascanima. First we record a session using ascanima record put it the. In this case it was record to demo cast. Then you put semicolon to indicate that you want another command on the same line and that those commands were echoed for that first line, the second line, the third line, the fourth line followed by LS and then it ended. Then exit to end the recording.
- [86:03]
A
All right. It's a cool program. I have seen, like you said, I've seen various projects use this on like their GitHub page to show things off. In fact, I'm kind of thinking myself like how could we make use of that? Probably do that somewhere. But it is pretty nifty.
- [86:22]
D
Yep. Rob, on those times where you know, you might type mistype something, go through and type it until you get it right and save that perfect setting and just play it back.
- [86:39]
B
Yeah, I could do that. Oh, I could just record a video of it. Pre record it. On another note, I did look up that URL. Looks like it forwards to a different URL and then that was marked as spam.
- [86:52]
C
Ah, got it.
- [86:54]
A
So it's probably. It's probably just a domain parking lot, but still little sketchy. All right. Well, that is the show. We're gonna let the guys plug whatever they want to or get in the last word or tell us poetry or beg for money for coffee, whatever they want to do. Ken gets to go first and do you have anything for us to close out the show, sir?
- [87:17]
D
I just wanted to thank LA MJ for his feedback on last week episode. He'd mentioned that he thought hyper has a more natural sounding text to speech voice than he speak ng. Though with doing some research for trying to find some others, I'm finding espeakng still used as like the forgetting the phoneme file that can be used to feed into those other text to speech editors.
- [87:53]
A
Interesting. All right, very cool. And then Rob.
- [88:02]
B
All right, as I promised earlier, I was going to show you where you could donate to me or the other guys too. And I'll get to them and I will get to that as soon as I go through all my spiel. It's the very last thing. If you want to get more of me, you can find me my website, Robert P. Campbell.com and on my web page there, there's links to my LinkedIn, my Twitter, my blue sky, my Maston. And finally a place if you want to donate a coffee to me or if you want to donate to Jeff or Ken. Jonathan has his own site, so find that you can do that himself. But click on the little coffee cup. Donate coffee. If you want for somebody else, put their name on it and Jeff can attest I do pay up. Ken might say otherwise. I have not paid him yet.
- [88:59]
A
That's funny, right? And Jeff.
- [89:03]
C
Yeah. So if you want to connect with me, because I've had a few people that did, you can do it through LinkedIn. Connect to Rob and then you'll find me. If you go straight to me, I get so many that I usually just ignore them. But if it's. If you're connected to Rob, then I know it's a show user. And I've also had a lot of people reach out and supply some poetry. And if you want to do that, I would love it. It doesn't have to be in a specific format. Just send it all my way and I'll sort through it. Even if you think it's not his style.
- [89:38]
D
It is.
- [89:38]
C
It isn't. I'll take all submissions this week. I've got another poem. Roses are red, violets are blue. You can hide in the server room when they come looking for you. Have a great week, everybody.
- [89:55]
A
That's great. Lots of fun. All right, thank you guys. Each for being here. Always. Always a blast. Always enjoy it. If you want to find more of me, there is of course Hackaday and that is where Floss Weekly is at these days. We'd love to have you all come over there and follow Follow us for the other the sort of the sister show to this where we do interviews with the who's who in the open source world and that's a lot of fun as well. Other than that, just want to say thank you. We appreciate everyone that is here whether you watch or listen. Get us live or on the download and we'll be back next week on the Untitled Linux Show.
- [90:42]
D
New Year, New Me.
- [90:43]
A
Cute, but how about New Year, New Money?
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B
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A
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