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Untitled Linux Show 243: Only a Few Things Crashed
01:39:57
Intel is Back, Matrix is Out, and AI is Speeding up the Kernel
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- [00:00]
A
This week we're talking about immutable gen 2 and lots of AI. KDE releases 6.6 and we do a live upgrade right in the middle of the show. Blender 5.1, pipewire 1.6 and the kernel 6.19.3 is out. Stay tuned to find out why that one matters.
- [00:22]
B
Podcasts you love from people you Trust. This is TWiT.
- [00:31]
A
This is the Untitled Linux Show. Episode 243, recorded Saturday, February 21st. Only a few things crashed. Hey folks, it is Saturday and you know what that means. It's time to get geeky with Linux. It is time for the Untitled Linux Show. I'm your host, Jonathan Bennett and we have a a wonderful and talented panel of co hosts trying something different. For the intro we've got Rob and Ken and Jeff. Welcome guys, to each of you. We're gonna have some fun today.
- [01:02]
C
Hello.
- [01:03]
D
Because it's greetings and salutations.
- [01:06]
A
Yeah, yeah, I was channeling, channeling some of the old Floss weekly stuff, like I said, working to, working to shake it up a little bit. It's been an interesting week for me as a couple of my kids, including the youngest, who's way too young for this, has come down sick. So I'm trying to avoid it myself. So far, nothing more than just a little bit of sinus pressure and doing okay other than that.
- [01:26]
D
That's how it starts.
- [01:28]
A
Yeah, I know, I'm, I'm prepared for it. But hey, at least I'll get the show out of the way and it'll be, you know, it'll be the rest of the weekend or next week before I really come down with it. Well, Rob, before the show was bragging that he knows that he's not gonna get sick because he doesn't have any friends and doesn't go anywhere.
- [01:48]
B
Yeah, what a sad, sad situation to be in on your birthday.
- [01:52]
A
Indeed. But he also has the first story for us, which ironically is about digital sovereignty. This is what he does when he stays home all day. He finds stuff like this. Rob, take it away. What is Red Hat up to?
- [02:06]
B
So we've talked about digital sovereignty quite a bit on the show over the past year or so, mainly with many European countries looking to break their softer dependence on the United States. Or companies, corporations, software companies like Microsoft here in the United States. Well, Red Hat has created a self service web tool called the Digital Sovereignty Readiness Assessment and they've open sourced it so you could use their publicly available tool or self host it yourself. If you use their tool, you get a sales Pitch at the end. Well, it's a button at the end where you can request a consult. You know, if for those watching, it's sit right in my background where it says request a consultation. So you get that. But if you self host it, you don't have that Red Hat branding or that button. And I don't know, maybe you could update it and sell your own service and you know, consult or whatever. But so anyway, I keep referring to this as a tool, but really it's just a questionnaire that gives you a percentage and a breakdown at the end, you know, in about 10 to 15 minutes. I don't think it felt like it took that long. I think I filled the thing on five to eight minutes. But you answer 21 questions or multiple choice across seven domains, things like data sovereignty, operational sovereignty assurance, open source strategy and executive oversight and more. Then you get a scored on a four stage maturity scale. Foundation developing, strategic avoidance. I didn't show that breakdown. Um, but yeah, what you see behind me, I took it, I was, I was kind of filling it out. Somewhat accurate too myself in a way, but I was also just kind of going quick through it and not really thinking a whole lot about it. So I don't know how close that 62% really is. So yeah, I gave that, I gave that a shot. This is the hosted one. As you can see, it has all the branding. Um, and yeah. So how is your digital sovereignty and are you ready to break free from the grasps of Silicon Valley?
- [04:45]
A
So when you first were talking about that, you said you could host your own and sell your own. My brain filled in the rest of that. You could host it yourself and sell your own soul.
- [04:56]
B
Thankfully, no consultation. You know, if you want to help, you know, you don't want Red Hat to be the only one helping businesses become more digitally sovereign. You know, you can set up yourself.
- [05:08]
A
Can we, can we break that, that buzzword down into real English? Like what are you actually talking about?
- [05:14]
B
Digital sovereignty.
- [05:16]
A
What is that?
- [05:18]
B
Well, digital, you know what that means
- [05:23]
A
having to do with numbers?
- [05:24]
B
Technically speaking, yeah. You know, I should have looked up the word to get a good definition on this. But the way I see it as being in control of your own data. That's my quick breakdown of the word of sovereignty or digital sovereignty.
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A
So how much of your stuff is hosted at, you know, Amazon S3? Do you have your own servers? Are you in control of your, your own computers? Or is some, is some big tech business actually?
- [05:57]
B
And some of those questions are, I mean, not necessarily is some Big tech. Tech business. But they ask if you can easily move that to another one and are you in control of where that data is? Like, can I make sure all my data stays within the U.S. or you know, whatever, wherever I want it to be, you know, so. So some of the questions in there break it down to are you not. Not necessarily are you not using them, but are you in control of. Of that? And can you break away at any time too? So it doesn't necessarily close the door completely to that. Because, I mean, Red Hat sells cloud services. They want to. They don't want to shut the door to that.
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A
Indeed.
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C
And how many total questions did you answer?
- [06:48]
B
I think it's about 21.
- [06:50]
A
Yeah, it looks like I could just barely make it out there on his screen. And it's of 21.
- [06:56]
B
Yeah, 13 to 21 is what I got. I don't know.
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A
Good.
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B
What they considered to be.
- [07:04]
C
I just quickly ran through it and said I don't know to all of them. Guess what? You think I got 50% 0 of 21 points?
- [07:15]
A
Okay.
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C
And it says your organization is in the early stages of digital sovereignty.
- [07:22]
A
What a nice way to put that.
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C
Opportunities exist to strengthen the capabilities across multiple domains and reduce dependencies on external providers.
- [07:34]
B
So basically an I don't know is just as good as answering a no or whatever the negative is, because in real reality it's. Is it. Is it a no or maybe there. Maybe you're just not the right guy to fill out that form.
- [07:49]
A
I mean, that is, that is. That is possible. All right.
- [07:53]
D
Probably larger problems in your IT department.
- [07:57]
B
Yeah, well, you know, if you have a big enough IT department, you. You're not. It may not be one person answering all these questions. It's also like, do you have a box budget for I camera? Basically, do you have a budget for digital sovereignty? Do you have a actual policy on. I don't remember the word, but basically digital sovereignty and, and things like that.
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C
And you know, I may backing up
- [08:25]
B
if I'm like the IT guy. I may know how all of our data is controlled, but I don't know, maybe my manager is the one to ask about a budget or policy. But then again, I guess as the IT guy, they probably should let me know what I have a budget to do.
- [08:42]
D
Yeah, but we don't want Floyd in Shipping and Receiving to fill this out, you know.
- [08:47]
A
Indeed. All right, so Jeff has a story here about Plasma 6.6, which is interesting because while he talks about it, I'm going to install it because it's out in Fedora 43 and I'm going to be real brave and we're going to do a live update on the laptop that we're doing the show from. So Jeff, you take it away and I'm going to install some packages and we'll hope we don't regret this.
- [09:09]
D
Nice. Well, I'm currently running it right now, so it was really smooth, so I have high hopes. Jonathan so we've talked a lot about in the past about 6.6 coming out, but the date has finally come and KDE Plasma 6.6 is released. So 6.6 brings bug fixes, new features and a lot of stuff to make the KDE desktop even more polished. One of the first things that you'll encounter, and you might not know, is it the PLA is, is the Plasma Login manager. Now that you probably don't realize it because that's because the new login manager looks pretty much the same as sddm, so you're not really going to notice a whole lot of change. But the new managers made to better support multiple monitors, HDR keyboard layout, switching so it can be done from the login manager and not going into the full desktop before having to change, change your keyboard layout. The new manager does only support System D, which did cause some ruffling of feathers from the Kaos Linux people who said they're not going to have KDE as their default desktop because they feel they're being forced into System D. Well, that caused KDE to reply and they said the new Plasma Login Manager is one of half a dozen or even more managers out there that can boot into plasma and no one's being forced anywhere. They said if you don't like System D, just use one of the other options that doesn't use it. They're, they're not encouraging, they're not saying you should, they're saying you can. And that's as far as they took it. So they, they did want to stress there's still a lot of different options out there if you don't like System D. But now that we've loaded into the desktop, we used whatever bootloader we needed and you decided you want to change your theme and play around and now you've got the perfect setup, you got everything set the way you want it. Well, 6.6, you can now save that as your own personal theme so you don't have to go and rearrange or anything like that. You can now take all those settings you have and just go. Yep, here's My theme. So if you change anything, break anything, which is, you know, KDE is fun to play with, so I highly encourage people to play. You just load that same theme and you're back where you were now. They've also improved the smoothness of animations for those out there who are running monitors with a refresh rate higher than 60 hertz. So now in moving windows, seeing composting effects and all that kind of things, the graphical magic, it should look much better and smoother because they've made improvements now. There's also several improvements with window edges, line separators, you know, a ton of different visual adjustments which can be made and looks beautiful. I'm not. I'm. I'm not going into all of them because there is a lot. With 6.6, they've also reduced the memory that KDE takes by about 100 megabytes by unloading unneeded wallpapers, which are not being used. So it shrinks it down a little bit more. Not that KDE is heavyweight anymore. That was many major versions ago, but people always want lighter and smaller. Well, KDE is still going in that direction now. If you have an ambient light sensor on your equipment, it can now be used automatically, meaning it will make the screen brighter in bright rooms and dim when you're in darker environments, kind of like a lot of phones, for example, will do. For those of us who sometimes stream our screen, there's now the ability to hide a screen from the screen capture. So you can right click on the title bar, select more actions, and you can find the Hide from screencast button. So you select that, and then if you're sharing your screen, it won't show up like on, say, you're using obs or something like that. That screen that you selected won't show up on your broadcast. The window manager will now have the correct scaling when connecting to an external monitor or TV when the resolution is different. So, like you plug your laptop or whatever into your 4K TV, it's. It's going to have correct scaling now. But if it still needs to be different because something's not right, there's a tool called K Screen doctor and you can create a custom mode for that display device which is not working directly. So you can manually set it up so it's however you want it, and then it'll always load that whenever you connect that device. Now, in System Monitor, if you have more than one gpu, it's now possible to monitor them independently at the same time, so you can watch the Temperature and the load and all that stuff for each GPU you have. So like you might have a discrete GPU and an internal to your CPU integrated gpu. So now you can, if you have them doing different work, you can see what, see what kind of load and heat and all that they're going that they have. There's also the ability in the process window to set the CPU scheduler and I O scheduler for a specific task and define the priority in each scheduler. So not only can you say you know what you want, you know, first in, first out, normal, you know, max performance, that kind of thing, there's also a basically niceness level that you can set there as well. So that way if there's something that's very important, you need to come first no matter what, maybe it's recording or something. Now it's possible with a few clicks in the system monitor that you can really make sure that that's got highest priority no matter what. It's also possible to choose the columns which you see in the process tabs. So when you're seeing all your processes, you can select something called Command and then you can filter and see what's running under a certain path like User Bin. So if you got everything running and you go, well, I wonder what's in User Bin that's running right now? You can filter to that and see just what programs are running out of that. Now this is such a small amount of what has changed in 6.6 and this is not covering the huge amount of bugs that they squashed. I mean there's a ton of them. So take a look at the video in the, in the show notes for more details of the changes. But even, even there they talk about they have not covered everything, but 6.6 is I think, a wonderful release.
- [15:46]
A
Yeah, it's. So I did do the install. I have had a couple of things tell me it's crashed since I did the install, but nothing that I can see. It gave me a nice little pop up that says Plasma has been updated to 6.6. KDE Contributors has spent the last four months hard at work on this release. We hope you enjoy using Plasma as much as we enjoyed making it. And then they've got a little make a donation widget and a couple other things. But yeah, the welcome center pop up. So it's there.
- [16:17]
B
That's how safe it is.
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A
Yeah, only a couple of things crashed upgrade and production.
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C
You had to manually update to KDE6.6 after updating to Fedora 43.
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A
I mean. Yes, because I've updated Fedora 43 a little while ago and 6.6 just now came out. I just. I just ran DNF upgrade.
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D
I just ran a regular update and got it. Yeah.
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A
Are you. What I should know this, Jeff. What. What distro are you running these days? Cache.
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D
OS cache.
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A
That makes sense.
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D
So. So it's. It's art. So it. It's.
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A
I also pretty.
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D
Pretty fast.
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A
Yeah, yeah yeah.
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C
One of the show. I'll boot reboot into OpenSUSE and see if that's up to date on KDE 6.6.
- [17:08]
A
I would bet OpenSUSE it would take a little bit longer to pull it in would be my guess. Tumbleweed though Tumbleweed might be faster. I do need to play a run with this and see what it takes to get the new KDE login manager working. I think that's going to be interesting. Some of the things that they'll do with that in the future. I'd installed already went ahead and grabbed it but I'll have to reboot and then do some other fiddling to make it the one that actually comes up and does stuff.
- [17:33]
B
I saw a really nice. Never mind. That wasn't a KDE theme.
- [17:37]
D
Well, I was going to say I think it should come up naturally in 6.6.
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A
So that runs before KDE runs. That's going to be controlled by your distro.
- [17:53]
D
Oh okay. Mine went to the new one and
- [17:59]
A
they may have had a script in there to have it do that. So you can use. Let's see, SDDM is the one that I'm using now. Cause that's what's default in Fedora. That's the simple desktop display manager. There's also gdm which is the GNOME Display Manager. There's been a couple of other ones I don't remember the name of in the past. This is a new one. I know I've always had to go in and manually. I don't remember if you run something like alternatives or if it's just disabling the one service and enabling the other. Different distros may handle that a little bit differently. But there's going to be a. There's going to be a way to go in there and manually tell your computer which display manager you want it to use. I think we just discovered what my command line tip is going to be for next week.
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D
Yeah, but see I'm running cache, so it's running systemd, it's running Wayland. So they pretty much assume yeah, you're going to get the New plasma login manager.
- [18:55]
A
Yeah, I've done this a couple of times because I know one of the reasons I changed it last time is because KDE had better support for SDDM and I wanted to do things like theme it rather than just use the default used to be really ugly background and all of that stuff. I bet with the new KDE one I don't know if you could do it yet, but probably eventually they'll support using those. Well, it's essentially screensavers. It's also the lock screen background. You can also put them in KDE. You can put them on your desktop background too.
- [19:27]
C
3D backgrounds?
- [19:28]
A
Well, no, just animated backgrounds. Like they can be 3D but I would imagine that they'll eventually make that work for the login manager too so that you can get your, your fun, your fun moving backgrounds when you first
- [19:41]
D
and it wouldn't surprise me because, because of all the updates they made to that one just to handle, you know, the scaling, the different resolutions and different monitors, the hdr, the, you know, bunch of stuff like that.
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C
To what ray tracing?
- [19:58]
A
It's not going to be a kitty, Ethan.
- [20:00]
C
Yeah, not directly, but Ken is trying
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A
to segue Ken, this, this segue went off the rails. The battery ran out on the Segway and the mall cop fell on his face.
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C
But getting into my command line too.
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A
But we will let Ken take it over because he's got some news about Blender and there is indeed a tracing angle to that story. So take it away, sir.
- [20:28]
C
Yes, Jonathan, I'll go ahead and talk about Marcus Nestor writing about my favorite opera open source and cross platform 3D graphic software. Yes, Blender that released better beta version 5.1 this week. Now Blender 5.1 promises to enable hardware ray tracing by default for for AMD GPUs through HIP RT or HIP RT. Now in Blender 5.1 the evaluation performance of the animation system sees a boost and the Vulcan OpenXR graphics binding has been rewritten. Now trying to reuse the Vulcan instance of Blender, resulting in major speed ups. Now in Blender 5.1's real time render engine, EEVEE materials are compiled faster by precompiling GPU pipelines. At the same time, GPU shaders compile faster on all platforms due to the pre processing of the shader sources. According to Marcus, Blender 5.1 promises to improve font filling for 3D text objects. Add support for lasso box circle selection in the curve scope mode. Add support for snapping. That's with the control key and precision, which is the shift key, while using bevel and add support for adjusting vertex slide settings. Now there's a whole bunch more, but I'm going to recommend that you read Marcus's article getting more of those details.
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A
Yeah, very, very cool to see Blender continuing to progress. It's one of those super, super neat bits of open source software that a lot of big companies are behind and it's cool to see. And it's also neat to see them turning on ray tracing in AMD that, that has matured a lot in the latest release of like Mesa and all of those things.
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D
Yeah, it's huge. They've, they've been really, AMD's really been leaning hard into the ray tracing slash compute lately this last last few months. I, I really like that they're catching
- [22:58]
C
up and I can't wait until Blender does do a final release of the version 5.1 because then I can pull up the video that's going to display everything that can do there you go through it.
- [23:12]
A
Yeah, that'll be neat. Let's include that in show notes at some point. All right, well, coming up next we're going to talk about Gen 2 going atomic. But first we're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back.
- [23:28]
B
All right, so I'll be honest, I've never even heard of Sabian Linux, something I'm going to talk about a bit here until I read about what is going on and some of the history behind behind all this. And additionally, I've never managed to get Gen2 up and running either. I started but you know, it's not because I don't like the idea, it seems awesome, but because all the steps to compile the entire system by hand just kind of got overwhelming when I, when I thought about attempting it though strangely I have completed Linux from scratch. But you know, the thing is, I think only because those, the step by step directions for Linux from scratch are kind of amazing and I didn't think the gen 2 ones were as clear to me. So I, I kind of gave up part with you. I'm like, I don't feel like doing this, it's too much. But anyway, those who don't know, Gen 2 is famous for its build it yourself approach. You compile software from source, tune things the way you want and end up with a system that can be incredibly customizable. It's a build it yourself like arch, but going a step further and actually compiling everything yourself too. Not quite as far as Linux from Scratch, but I thought the directions were better. But anyway, the obvious downside is setup can be intimidating as I was intimidated if I'm intimidated or maybe I was just lazy, I don't know. You know, compiling packages can take forever, especially when you're just trying to get a working desktop, you know. And that's where Sabion Linux used to come in. It was a Gentoo based distro designed to make Gentoo feel approachable mainly by offering pre built packages through a tool called Entropy. In other words, you could get the Gentoo vibe without signing up for hours of compilation and troubleshooting. Though I kind of wonder a little bit, what is the point of Gen 2, you know, if. If you don't have your own compiled optimizations in place. It's kind of just like any other distro. But moving on, Sabion wrapped up in 2019, but now that original developer Fabio. I practiced this before. Fabio Erciliani. There we go. Is working on something new. An experimental Gentoo based called Matrix os. Matrix OS is described as emerge once, deploy everywhere. So instead of compiling on every machine, you build packages once and distribute binaries so your second setup isn't a full repeat of your first. And on top of that, as Jonathan already hinted at the beginning of this segment, Matrix OS is immutable and atomic. It uses ostree for upgrades, meaning updates apply as a complete unit, either succeeds fully or it doesn't touch your system at all. The base system is read only, which helps prevent the kind of accidental breakage that happens when you're experimenting, which is, you know, kind of to be expected when you're compiling your own stuff, unless you really have to.
- [27:10]
A
It's kind of an experiment.
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B
It's also aiming at modern it just works priorities, you know, updated graphics, support for AMD and Nvidia gaming tools like Steam Preloaded and GNOME Desktop. That looks familiar with the Windows style taskbar across the bottom. Nah, I don't want my system look like Windows, but whatever. I'm sure you could change it. Of course you can. I don't even need to say I'm sure it's Linux you can, but that's the default. There are several installation flavors. Bedrock, Gnome and Server, and images for both real hardware and virtual machines. Now the developer is up front saying this is a hobby project for home labs, not production. Now I imagine if you go through the process and set it up and then all of a sudden you know, the project goes away, I imagine you could kind of just keep running going as a Gen 2 system after that, I don't know. I haven't been able to dig that deep into it. Don't have it installed yet. But yeah, something. Something I would like to do because, you know, for someone like me who's bounced off Gen2's complexity more than once, Matrix OS feels like a way for me to finally get djed to running at least a Gen 2 base system, you know, with the power of Gen 2, without the endless setup complexities. And you know, as I said, there's even a setup for VM so I could, you know, whip it up there and see what happens.
- [28:53]
A
Yeah, when you said, when you said Sabion. Sabion. I first thought of Sabaton and got a little excited and realized that you were not talking about the group.
- [29:06]
B
No, I was.
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A
Sorry to rock out.
- [29:09]
D
I'm kind of with you. It just seems like an odd choice to go, I'm going to make this distribution based on Gen 2.
- [29:17]
B
I mean it. I don't know, I'd have to try it out to really know. But is it that different from all these distributions now being based on Arch? Maybe it is, maybe it is.
- [29:27]
A
I don't know.
- [29:28]
B
I'd have to really dig in and see.
- [29:30]
C
Well, gen 2 and arch base.
- [29:33]
A
No, no, arches. Gen 2 base.
- [29:36]
D
Gen 2 is independent. But the whole thing with gen 2 is. And I, I got it running, I got gen 2 running and then I promptly went, I'm going to do something else because it was, it was a long task to get it and all the. But, but I mean the whole thing was like the customization of it and it's kind of like. Like you said, it's almost like a Linux from scratch. I mean it. Not quite that far, but it's very customized and it just seems like if you're just like, well, here's an immutable. It's not really the whole thing though.
- [30:11]
B
Yeah, I mean I think you still compile, so I don't know. But yeah, I mean that's kind of the benefit of gentoo is being able to compile with the flags to be very optimized to get those milliseconds of speed compared to everybody else. You know, there was a distribution back, I think this was like 20, 25 years ago. It's probably maybe where Gen 2 got its name, but I remember one called Source Linux where you also compiled everything except I think I feel like I set it up long time ago. I feel like that was more automatic than Gen 2. Like Gen 2, you kind of had to do it all more manual. I feel like, I feel like I just pushed a button in Source Linux and then it actually just compiled everything that had Checkbox, but I don't remember. That was a long time ago before Jonathan was even, you know, tying his shoes.
- [31:13]
A
You're not that old, Rob. Well, my goodness.
- [31:16]
D
Well, and I'll agree with you. Gen 2. It's. The directions are like. You're really like okay, I'm supposed to. Well wait a minute. What is, you know, not, not entirely smooth. It's. It's something that you better have a couple years under your belt before you try it or.
- [31:32]
B
Yeah, Linux, Linux from scratch is like run this command. It tells you exactly where Gen 2 is. Like okay, now, now compile this stuff. You know, you could use this flag or this flag or you know, whatever, just whatever fits your need. It's like, well, I don't know if
- [31:47]
D
it's my need or here's four common options. Pick one of these and go and wait. What, what is.
- [31:54]
C
I'm making decisions here.
- [31:57]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [31:58]
C
Where.
- [31:58]
B
That's where. Like you know, at least to get the base of Linux from scratch, it was very step by step, run this command exactly like this. Now do this. It was exactly telling you what to do. So if anyone wants to try it. It's time consuming but it tells you exactly what to do at least.
- [32:17]
A
Linux from scratch.
- [32:18]
B
Yeah, Linux from scratch.
- [32:20]
A
I, yeah, I actually I've encouraged people to do that before if they really want to understand how compiling in Linux works. It's a great process to step through
- [32:30]
C
using OS Tree as an upgrade system work.
- [32:34]
A
That's pretty, that's pretty typical for immutable Linuxes. They, they do that. It's, it's.
- [32:41]
C
I, yeah, I've heard us talk about, you know, a B. Yeah.
- [32:47]
A
This is essentially what it does where it's got a root image and you just swap from run root image to the other. And ostree is the tech that makes that happen.
- [32:55]
B
Yeah. So with, with this, I don't know if you still kind of compile it everything like old fashioned Gen 2 and it compiles it to you know, your B and then it tries to switch over and if it doesn't come up it reverts back to your A and you have to do it all again. So I, I think maybe it's still, you know, Gen 2 like that, but you got that AB there. I think.
- [33:17]
A
I mean that would be cool. I could see the point of that.
- [33:20]
B
Yeah.
- [33:21]
A
Because there's a decent chance that Compiling everything yourself is going to break it.
- [33:25]
B
So that's my theory because it did talk about it still talked about compiling. You know, I guess the interesting part is where the emerge once, you know, set it up once and, and then you reuse your same binaries on a new system when you set it up over there. So then you're not compiling, compiling them again. You're using the same binaries you already compiled. But I don't know, I guess I gotta try it.
- [33:50]
A
You gotta try it, man.
- [33:52]
C
And then hire gaming developers.
- [33:56]
A
So Jeff, let's take a minute here and talk about Intel. We have worked hard at covering the fall from grace of intel over the past few months and it sounds like they're doing some work to try to undo some of that damage. What, what is intel up to that we're, I think a little excited about this time around.
- [34:20]
D
Yeah, and you know, I've been probably one of their harshest critic critics. I've pounded on them pretty well for a while now. And you know, you justifiably so maybe or not, depending on your proclivities but you know, you can't, you can't deny the past couple of years have been rather rough for Intel. You know, they've taken a beating on several fronts and they've made some major cutbacks. I mean they've had to lay a lot of people off. They've shut down large chunks of sites, if not totally shutting down certain sites. You know, I'm not going to give any thoughts on why or, you know, any, any theory on anything, but basically one of the effects that the cutbacks have had is there was a loss of talent in the open source and there have been several projects that have been abandoned. You know, Clear Linux is an example and you know, probably one of the best well known ones. You know, when we're talking about speeding things up during benchmarking, Clear was always the top, the top performer. You know, not trying to, for a pun or any, you know, clever wording or anything, but it was the clear winner. It just, you know, now it wasn't built for the average user to play. It was more for databases, experimentation, that kind of thing. But it was really fast, but they had to just stop working on it. Now this story though is about how intel is picking up some people for Linux 6 to be specific. So intel posted these positions. So anyone listening to this who thinks they have the programming skills needed should look at the job postings. Now the jobs are in various roles. There's of course compute, you know, AI and, but they're also hiring to work on the graphical stack and work on things like Proton and making gaming better for Linux. Now they're, they're looking for people who are already familiar with Linux Gate graphical stack and experience with MESA and you know, the DRM kernel drivers. And you know, the fact that Wine and Proton are called out specifically in the job postings are, these are good signs. So you know, saying focusing on gaming isn't speculation or filling in the blanks, it's it's basically in the job description. Now they do have preferred qualifications such as, you know, knowing C or C project development. They like to see previous experience with open source software. The more you know about Linux system architecture and device driver model, the better. Something that will really help land the job is if you had previous contributions to 3D driver developments such as Vulkan, OpenGL and you know, as we talked about the Mesa 3D project. So if you've already contributed there, that's a leg up. They're also hiring a couple of senior middleware development engineers and they'll be more compute focused so the CPU side of things will get love along with the gpu. And finally they're also hiring a senior cloud software development engineer so they can focus on CPUs and GPUs in the data center environment. So this role is also expected in OC or C. Have experience with parallel programming and other specialized knowledge for that kind of environment.
- [37:43]
B
Environment.
- [37:44]
D
These jobs are looking for 5 plus years of experience and other qualifications. So these are going to be hit the ground running type of roles. These are not entry level, these are serious coders. They're going to expect a lot from the people who they hire. Now I'm sure a lot of our audience can work at this level, but I just want to set the kind of the basic understanding that, you know, these aren't entries, these aren't low level jobs, this isn't oh, I'll get a job and they'll train me up or no, they expect, you know, what you're doing on day one. So. But if you're, you know, for those people that are pretty experienced with this, have a lot of knowledge at this, you know, you're like, I do this in my sleep, this could be a new career for you. So if it sounds like something you might want to try and you know, maybe you're going to, you want to change roles, you're tired where you're at, you know, for whatever reason, here's your chance. Take a look at the article linked in the show notes, it has links to the official job postings, each one so everyone can get the full details, all the requirements and all the normal stuff you need to know in an application like that. So good luck with the job application.
- [38:51]
A
This is really interesting. They want three GPU developers and each of them are Linux specific, Linux gaming specific. That's just fascinating to me.
- [39:12]
D
Well, I mean, if you think about it, there's a lot of that that overlaps with AI, even not specifically. And the more, the more compute and stuff they really want to also. And now, okay, they lost several developers now there was several that had been there a long time and had left and I don't know as they were purposely going to get cut as much as they kind of went, oh, I
- [39:41]
C
don't, it's time to leave.
- [39:42]
D
Well, there was kind of that. You kind of have that, do I take a package now or do I take my chances and stay and then maybe get cut without the package? So sometimes you can have people that do that, especially if you see people with, you know, 10, 15 years experience that, oh, I'm getting out of here, you know, and some could be like, oh, either I have a new role, I got tired of my old one, or this could be the springboard to retirement. You know, it's hard to say, but it left gaps. And they weren't, because we talked about this before, they weren't specifically on the, we're cutting this. It was kind of this, oh, developer so and so left. I don't know the specifics, I don't, but it, but it had a little bit of a feel like that. And I, I've been in those large organizations when things are bad and they're kind of cutting stuff, sometimes you go, maybe I'm just going to take the package. I, I've known people that have. Even if they were probably going to be safe just because they were, they were nervous and things. But yeah, this definitely is focused and I think, you know, and it's kind of unwritten. But who's, who's doing a lot of the major buying decisions and who's doing a lot of these server enterprise stuff, computer geeks, people that play games, people that, you know, do a lot of stuff like that and if they can go, hey, we want to be known for this, especially if you're thinking this could be a good opportunity to get ahead when the AI bubble pops, if it pops, or whatever that looks like, we're hedging our bet and we're going to be in other enterprises I think
- [41:26]
A
of this a little differently. I think somebody at intel said that we're really tired of everything Valve does having AMD processors and AMD stuff in it.
- [41:37]
D
Yeah, and not only valve, Xbox, PlayStation, you. And you can't tell me, you know. Well, you know, there's not huge margin. Well, when you're selling, you know, 5, 10 million plus of these things, there's
- [41:54]
B
something small margins add up.
- [41:56]
A
Yeah, you can, you can lose a little bit of money on each of them and you'll make it up in the difference volume.
- [42:04]
B
Right.
- [42:06]
D
And then things are coded for your processor that's good for other kinds of sales. You know, look at what. There's a big bragging factor with that and there's a lot of big contracts that they're missing out on.
- [42:19]
A
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Interesting stuff. All right, we're going to take another quick break and then Ken's going to come back and tell us about the newest Pipewire release right after this.
- [42:33]
C
Well, Jonathan, this week will hear from Bobby Barsolf, Michael Larabelle and Marcus Nestor. They all wrote about an update to the open source server for handling audio, video streams and hardware on Linux based operating systems. Yes, I'm talking about Pipewire. In this case it's version 1.6. It introduces numerous new features and improvements. Some of the highlights include support for capability params to negotiate capabilities on a link before format and buffer negotiation now while dropping support for old V version 0 clients. According to Bobby, Marcus and Michael Hypewire 1.6 ships an LDAC decoder for Bluetooth audio and uses Span DSP to help hide packet loss. According to Bobby, another major change is raising the maximum channel count to 128. And according to Marcus, PipeWire 1.6's filter graph system now includes new FFMPEG and Onyx plugins. Now I'm going to recommend that you Definitely read all three articles if you do want more details about Pipewire 1.6.
- [43:56]
A
Very cool. Love to, love to hear the new stuff going on there. That's a, that's a, that's a stable release, but a new, I guess, minor version release. Probably going to be a bit before things like Ubuntu pick that one up and then people actually get it in their machines.
- [44:16]
C
I'm thinking that Ubuntu 2604 will have it, I hope.
- [44:23]
A
Yeah.
- [44:24]
C
Now I did recently update my OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and it's still running 1.5.8.
- [44:35]
D
Now is Pipewire. Do they have the video all sorted out now or is it still a little rough?
- [44:44]
A
It exists in pipewire. One of the real problems is permissions for other programs to be able to use it. So I keep an eye on pipewire support in OBS and that bug has gotten some comments on it recently, but that's all been essentially the OBS folks are waiting for. XDG Portals I think is the name of that project which. That is essentially the permissions thing that when you go to share a, you know, you share a tab or share a screen, you get that pop up box that says which would you like to share? Like that's Portals. And there needs to be better support in that for doing pipewire sharing. A lot of new computers actually their video Cameras are not V4L2 video cameras like the webcam in modern laptops. They use a pipewire plugin because that's the direction everything is going and they're going to or.
- [45:43]
C
And supported by support for Lib Camera.
- [45:46]
A
Lib Camera? Yeah, Lib cameras. Lib Camera does not provide, I don't think at all. I don't think it provides v4, whatever the name is. I've lost it. I've lost it. It's flitted out of my mind.
- [45:59]
C
But the V4L2.
- [46:01]
A
Yes, that's the one. I don't think Lib Camera has support for that. It's all, it's all, it's all pipewire. So like the, the basic support for doing video stuff in pipewire is there. It's working. It's working rather well. It's just now everybody's working on all of the periphery code to support that framework.
- [46:16]
D
Yeah.
- [46:17]
A
Yep. The stuff around it.
- [46:18]
D
Okay. Because. Because I'm. Yeah. I would love to have OBS handle pipewire so I can get rid of this loop.
- [46:25]
C
You mean pipewire handle obs?
- [46:29]
A
You want OBS to be able to talk pipewire. Yeah.
- [46:32]
B
And it won't both ways.
- [46:34]
A
Yes.
- [46:35]
D
They've got some experimental, but it just, it doesn't work very good.
- [46:39]
C
OBS has been able to use pipewire for video input into obs. But it. But it's with the virtual camera that you run into the issue. Right.
- [46:52]
A
So like in obs, generally if you do a screen capture on a Wayland system that's going to use pipewire to do it. Yeah.
- [47:00]
D
The output right now camera that we want right now I have to do the video loopback device for output from obs. There is an output for pipewire but it doesn't work so well. I get, you know, five frames a second or something like that.
- [47:18]
B
It's.
- [47:18]
C
Oh, that Good.
- [47:21]
B
Yeah, I think I remember that.
- [47:23]
D
Yeah.
- [47:25]
A
Yes. Yeah, that's exactly what it was like. All right, let's see. Rob. I think it's Rob next. Rob, you want to talk about AI?
- [47:37]
B
Yeah, I think it is.
- [47:39]
A
For whatever reason, we have a spate of AI stuff to talk about real quick. Let's see. I think we need to take one more break here too. So we're going to let Rob talk about AI and speeding up Linux right after this.
- [47:56]
B
So Jonathan here on our panel here is always dogging on AI, always talking bad about the contributions AI can't make and struggling to see how AI actually helps serious engineers. But Jeff gets it. We know Jeff gets it. This week we got a perfect example for Jonathan from deep inside the Linux ecosystem, courtesy of Yenzoxpo, a major maintainer in the storage world and lead developer behind IO Ring. IO Ring being a high performance asynchronous input output interface in the Linux kernel. OXBO was chasing down some weird slowdowns And QE moves EMU's AHCI SCSI path when using AIO equals IO ring. The symptom was kind of brutal. Tests in a VM would randomly time out on AHCI devices, while the same test on Vertio, BLK or NVME would finish in about, you know, a second. So he did what any modern developer does when they hit, you know, hit a wall, an event loop mays he pulled in AI, specifically Claude, you know, the anthropics model to help him reason through what was happening. And according to Axe Boat, it, it genuinely helped him better grasp the various event loops in his own code that he maintains. And the wild part, the fix that delivers the huge improvement is basically one line of code plus some comments. But that doesn't count. That one line prevents peephole function from taking an accidental nap up to 500 milliseconds while there's an I O waiting to be submitted. The result, Oxbow says it can literally yield a 50 to 80 times improvement for Ira Ring on idle systems. That patch series is on its way to Q into QEMU already though a funny side note the Jonathan may appreciate is Claude apparently also helped wreck the VMS virtual disc, but then it did help recover also. So in a quote this is from Twitter as actually a response that he did to his initial quote about this big fix quote this took a while. One funny side quest was Claude deciding it should check if my parentheses destructive reproducer was also slow on vert IO-blk then proceeding to blow away/dev/vda and concluded that yeah, Verdeo Dash bulk was fine and, and then to continue on when confront. This is another reply. When confronted with this it just said, you know, Claude says quote, double quote, whatever, yes, I did do that. He then, you know, at least it admits when it's wrong anyway. He then asked it to fix up VDA as it blew away the first 128 megabytes of it and, and it did. So, you know, it helped break things but it helped fix things. So you know, it's still not ready to just blindly trust it. But AI has now helped make, you know, one of the things in Linux much faster. So you always have to be careful how you use it. But there are definitely use cases. I've actually some of my own little personal projects recently. I've put my code into it and I, I asked it to optimize and there are some of my somewhat personal, they're not public on the web code that like pulls some reports and does various things like that that I have internally and I cut seconds or actually I think I cut minutes off of some of them because it's. I've got some that are pulling a lot of like API requests to develop this report basically. And I know there was one of them. I think it used to take six minutes and AI helped me cut it down to somewhere around two minutes I think. So yeah, I did just let it make the code for me but I plugged in was like what can I do to make this more efficient? And it pointed out spots that I had that yeah, you're calling this API over and over and over again when you could just do something like this and make it one much quicker call and things like that. So yeah, it can be helpful. Sorry for the doubters
- [53:50]
A
speaking, at least for myself, I think it's obvious that AI can be helpful. I don't think that's the contention that most people make. I will give you a counterexample. You talked about Claude trashed the disk on this VM where somebody was working on the project that I spent all day working in Meshtastic. We had somebody open a bunch of portal requests and we asked him about one of them. Like you know, gave him feedback, reviewed it, gave him feedback. So this doesn't make any sense. I don't think this is the direction we're going to go. And his comment was I didn't realize that Claude opened this PR for me.
- [54:25]
B
I think you told us about that one last week.
- [54:27]
A
Yeah, I may have, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [54:29]
B
There's things like that. But, and, and okay, you're not as big of a AI denier. There are, there are some major ad deniers that think it's not worth touching at all. You know, I, I read them out on the Internet and I'm like, all right, you know, that's fine. You know, my, I could be the efficient one in the world and you can lag behind.
- [54:53]
C
Yeah, it's a wolf. Don't want to touch it at all. They don't want to give all their information away.
- [54:59]
A
Well, for me, it's not even that I don't mind using it. I just, I don't want to have to put the work in for all of the other yahoos that are using it. So I had this, this thought.
- [55:09]
B
Isn't that kind of anti Open source? I mean, it's not what open source is about, putting the work for other people?
- [55:14]
A
No. All right, so here's the thing. This is Fairly important and GitHub put out a blog post about this just recently. I'll try to get a copy of that, a link to that and put it in the show notes. In GitHub's blog post they talked about friction and having the right amount of friction. And essentially what they were saying is it's so hard to write code that there's sort of this inherent. It inherently balances towards getting better pull requests just because it takes work to write code and make it to pull request. With AI and AI agents, things like Claude, it becomes so easy to open a pull request and to write the code to open the pull request that basically anybody can do it. It removes all, all of that friction to contributing to open source projects. And guess what? Open source projects has figured out, and that is you don't want everybody in the world making pull requests to your project. That's a bad thing because you then have to wade through all of those. And even if the, even if the AI agents get better and better and they write better code, that still doesn't fix the problem entirely because there still has to be a guiding hand behind it saying, this is the new feature I want you to write. Not every new feature belongs in that code base. The way I put it. I was on another interview the other day where I was being interviewed. The way I put it there was we inverted the balance here between writing code and reviewing pull requests. And it has now become so easy to write code that we have a, a dearth. The, the, there's a dearth of people that can do, do valid reviews of all of this. And so now the people that were running the project, now all the, all they're doing, in some cases all day is trying to review and keep up with these AI pull requests. And so you've seen, you've seen some really funny things happen. Like there's at least one open source project, we talked about this here a couple weeks ago, that has just. They've closed down. Only existing contributors to the project can make pull requests. A bunch of, A bunch of them have come out and said, we don't want any AI pull requests at all. It's. It's real interesting to see.
- [57:38]
D
Well, and I think, I think too much of that is you go, oh, I'm going to make this thing and it's going to be great. I'm going to send it in. But like you said, with the friction, there's not the, oh, let me merge it myself, let me test it, let me see what's going on. Let me, you know, at least do a little due diligence. And I think you get a lot of. I'm just going to throw it in.
- [57:57]
C
And, and in some cases it's not so much about the pull rig, Chris, but it's about proprietary IO IA AI integrations with some platforms.
- [58:11]
A
You know, sometimes that is a thing in, in the respect that if it's too easy for the AI to integrate. So, like, think about the kernel, for instance. They, they've established trust among their maintainers. One of the ways that they've done that is they have this somewhat esoteric process for sending in patches. You gotta use email, for goodness sake. Nobody uses email anymore. You have to have your signed off line, right? And all of this. And so they just have this really easy metric. And when someone sends a pull request in and it's not signed off by a real person, they can just immediately throw it out and they don't have to worry about.
- [58:48]
B
That's wild. But it's starting to make sense again, this day and age. You know, for a while they're like, why are they stuck in the past? Like, oh, now they had something. It's like the I'm not a robot checkbox.
- [59:04]
C
But that did pass on a link into the Discord Chat about an article where Gento's talking about moving from GitHub to another platform.
- [59:19]
A
Oh, interesting.
- [59:20]
B
Away from that. I saw, I saw that. You know, that reminds me though, can AI now actually pass the. I'm not a robot. I would think it should be able to actually.
- [59:31]
A
The Turing Test. Can LLMs pass the Turing Test?
- [59:34]
B
Well, no, not. I mean, not. Not the Turing Test. You know, just the. You know, when you sign in, or the check.
- [59:39]
A
Oh, oh, oh.
- [59:40]
B
Where you pick the images.
- [59:42]
A
Can AI defeat captchas now?
- [59:43]
B
Or is it recaptcha or whatever they call it?
- [59:47]
A
I don't remember what the R and the E stand for in recaptcha. In some cases, yes. It depends upon how sophisticated the captcha is and how much of a trick question.
- [59:55]
B
It's where you got to check all the boxes that have a stoplight in it.
- [60:01]
D
Yeah. See, I tell people, you have to look at AI like, okay, you've got a junior, fresh out of school, engineer, programmer, whatever, and they are super excited and jacked, and they're going to change the world. And I've had it where AI has done some very complex data analysis for me, and it's been wonderful, but I've also had it where, hey, please make this table of data look nice for a presentation. And it starts going, oh, I'm. Yeah, I'm just one. I just wanted. I just want the fonts and everything like that to look nice. And it starts going, oh, I'm going to filter and I'm going to do this. And I'm like, no, don't touch the data. I just want graphical presentation niceness, you know? And so you got to watch what it does, because sometimes it. Look, I'm gonna help.
- [60:57]
A
I'm gonna.
- [60:58]
D
I'm gonna be helping. Yeah.
- [61:00]
B
And it's like, stop.
- [61:03]
C
I guess a better analogy is AI is to coding, just like the Swiss army knife is to whatever you use a Swiss army knife for anyway.
- [61:14]
A
No, AI is like a toddler holding a Swiss army knife.
- [61:17]
B
I. I think of it more as I'm the junior, and AI is that. That. That guy who thinks they know everything when. I mean, they do know a lot of things, but even when they don't know something, they'll still pretend that they do. So I'm just consulting with them. I'm going to do the work, but I'm going to know that sometimes they're just full of it, and I'm going to go find a result somewhere else if they can't help me.
- [61:50]
C
Sometimes being able to know the name of the matron for the Vulcans doesn't help.
- [62:01]
A
Indeed. All right, Ken, you want to pick it up here? You had a. A tip. A review, actually, that falls well into this AI topic. Yes.
- [62:13]
C
Be more than happy to. Well, I'm going to go ahead and switch to my screen. Is that big enough for everybody to
- [62:19]
A
see that's not too bad.
- [62:21]
C
Okay, well I'm going to be covering a quick review of a application that allows you to do run your your AI locally. It's called GPT for All. I actually installed it so it's not even in my path. So I have to go down here and then it's. You've got a listing of all the files and directories that it installed right here. One One of the directories is Bin which is where the actual executable is located. So when I run that it brings up this and it takes you to the home screen where it says welcome to GPT4 all you've got the option where you can start chatting chat with your local files basically that lets you select the local documents you want to use as reference mock information and you can explore and download different AI models. Here's some of the ones that you can select. I've got two that I've actually downloaded. One is Regional. The other one is llama 3.8b that has to do with weight. If you're not that concerned about trying to keep it everything locally, you can go in and configure it to go with three of the remote providers and then you've got a custom option. So if you wanted to you could even configure for one of the custom remote providers. Then you can even use Hugging Face and. Where you can search for download and download models from there. Now they don't give any guarantee that these will work and some the ones I've actually got downloaded is Regional 1. It's based on the Quin 2.5 coder and the llama 3 and this is one of the ones from Hungy Face. It doesn't work when I try it but once you get that set up and I've got added local docs I've set up the folder where my bash scripts are stored folder where I've started converting the man pages to actual text files that it can read. And then my E my caliber library for all the other information that I've got as well as a folder where I've got notes that I've made for my cell phone doing things. So let's go in here and do a chat. Here's a demonstration of what I did. I just said generate 10 lines of random data can containing names and addresses using the llama 38B and it created that. And if I go here I can it'll give you the option. It's got the Reasoner set up as default. I can go in and select Master library. Yeah. You got any questions for.
- [65:54]
A
Tell me about Sabbay on Linux?
- [66:00]
C
And it probably won't find anything since I don't think I've got that in my local docs and I'm trying to remember how to spell Sabian.
- [66:07]
A
S, A, B, A Y, O, N. I think.
- [66:15]
D
This will be good. We'll see what it does if it doesn't know the answer.
- [66:18]
B
Yeah, make stuff up. That's. That's what AI does.
- [66:24]
D
It does it on purpose.
- [66:27]
B
Sabion Linux is a Linux distro based on the Linux kernel.
- [66:36]
A
How fast or slow is it on your machine? That is the question.
- [66:40]
C
Yes. It's going to be running a while here.
- [66:45]
D
That one core does pretty good.
- [66:49]
C
While it's doing that you can make some changes that would help to speed it up. Right now it's just got it set up with a default of four CPU threads for inference and embedding. You can enable a local abi. It does increase the resource usage but that would allow you to have a API server that you could use with other systems like with VS code, you know and you can actually go in and change the model settings as well to help with setting context or to guide the behavior of a particular model. And then it's got the templates
- [67:39]
A
and of course has it figured out the answer to our query yet? To find information about Savion Linux let's search for its official website and some key features. Now is it able to go out to the Internet? Is it an agent?
- [67:56]
C
It is not able to.
- [67:58]
A
So it's going to make it up.
- [68:02]
C
It's looking at the documents that I have in my master library.
- [68:10]
B
Why would you have its official website in the master library though?
- [68:13]
C
I don't.
- [68:15]
B
Then why does it say it's looking?
- [68:17]
C
And if you'll notice this is analysis encountered error.
- [68:20]
A
You know I appreciate that that it errored out rather than making something up.
- [68:29]
B
Well, it looked for sabionlinux.com. Is that actually
- [68:38]
C
JavaScript it was using and trying to find information?
- [68:45]
B
Yeah. That's not a real website though.
- [68:48]
D
It's.org for the official one.
- [68:52]
B
Yeah.com goes nowhere interesting. So it just made it up. So I'm gonna. So. So if that was a real URL though, what if it actually pulled from the Internet there?
- [69:05]
A
It seems that the fetch function is not available in your environment.
- [69:12]
C
And let's go with llama 38. Let's do another one.
- [69:18]
B
Pick something you know is going to be there.
- [69:20]
A
Yeah, one more. We don't. We don't want to Go too long.
- [69:23]
C
Yep.
- [69:29]
A
In fact, actually, let's not take the time to do another one now. Ken kind of. Ken kind of sneaked in a command line tip for us. It's obviously it's not command line, but sneaked in a tip instead of a story. So this was a review. Is this something you're actually going to use ongoing, you think?
- [69:44]
C
Ken? I've actually used it off and on. In fact, the one I showed earlier is where I did use it to just generate random data for trying out another command line tip that I was playing with earlier today.
- [70:00]
B
Will it tell you the source of the documents that it found in it? Because then it could be like a better a better basically a better search
- [70:08]
C
tool for your because right here is one where I asked the question Provide a bash script demonstrating the use of systemd AC power and it gave the three sources that it used for my Master library, Advanced band scripting guide, Python 3 for absolute beginners and the Linux system administration.
- [70:35]
A
Yeah, I think it's worth pointing out that it was not speedy and that's why all of these things prefer to use your GPU instead of your cpu, because they can run a lot faster faster with the multiprocessor aspect of the gpu. All right, Jeff, let's talk before we close the show out and move on to the real command line tips about the kernel. 6.19.3 has been released and we usually don't take a whole lot of time to talk about these small point releases. Is there something notable here that you wanted to cover?
- [71:13]
D
Yeah, first it's like I know regular listeners and like Jonathan said might be remembering last week that I covered the Release of the 6.19 kernel and the astute among you are thinking that would be correct. But I did want to cover the point three release because this one was a little different and I wanted to have people aware of the quick succession of releases. So when a kernel is released we get small point releases normally that fix little issues, no major changes, just little things that slip through the rc, get fixed. Normally they're pretty specialized. You know, it's just a very specific piece of hardware or this certain specific software path that most people don't take. So this week we had the 0.1 release soon after the first 16 release. The point one was to fix some wireless networking, drivers, storage and file system code, SMB fixes, you know, was a lot of stuff, HP ZBook, Studio G4 audio quirk and there's a Bluetooth USB driver, adding a new ID for the edimax EW dash a bunch of numbers and letters. So nothing too outstanding, just a small assortment, little fixes and some device additions. Well, this came out on Monday. All's good, right? Well, not for those who couldn't boot after the point 1 came out. So later Monday 6.19.2 came out. Now, if you're running the 0.1 kernel and things are working just fine, nothing to worry about. But if you're on 6.1 9.0, I would not upgrade to the 0.1 version. So the fix was to revert. One bad commit and it's the enforced device lock for driver match. Device commit was the culprit. Basically some fixes that were taken care of in the 6.19.1 were not backported to other hardware drivers. So there was a mismatch in versioning and that caused the issue because your point one fixes also need to course coincide with your drivers that they reference. Okay, so we have the point two. You know, we wait for the back ports for the drivers and then we're good to upgrade, correct? Well, not so fast. Now we have a point three which came out on Thursday. And again, if you're using an old kernel, things are working okay, then there really isn't a need to worry about it. But if you want to upgrade, make sure you're getting the latest greatest version of the kernel. Now, I will say officially, Greg Crow Hartman said that all users of the 6.19 kernel must upgrade. He said that in the official kernel mailing list. Anyway, I don't know if that's a standard. You know, always upgrade to the latest or if he says that but seems like sound judgment. Anyway, the point three takes care of some crashes. So if you're using Linux on Android, like on an Android phone or a custom install and you get a swap stress test crash and it forces a reboot should fix that also fixes some swap file corruption across non aligned blocks. There's a SCSI driver kernel panic issue fixed along with a USB serial handler memory copy error which it's a security issue, it's not a crashing issue. Basically it could let untrusted apps poke around in some kernel space. But I do want to say that these are very specific hardware, very specific ways that this stuff comes out. So it's not just a standard. Oh, an untrusted program could poke around in kernel space. It's. You have to toggle very specific things to make this work. So not. It's not a big deal. There's some other small fixes for Accidental division by zero error. And for the math challenge, division by zero is not zero, division by zero is undefined.
- [75:31]
B
So there's your.
- [75:32]
D
There's your math for the day. Some long arch K a S A N Kasan initialization order was reordered to avoid early speculative memory access. Some other little bugs which prevent some out of bound reads and writes and some very specific instances. And so, you know, like I said, very, very niche type things.
- [75:56]
B
But you know,
- [75:58]
D
probably good to go to the 0.3 if you're on 16.9 or 19 point.
- [76:06]
A
And let's be honest, probably you just want to install your updates that your distro gives you because they're going to either jump to this or if there's anything that you need to pull, they're going to pull it in as patches.
- [76:18]
D
Yes, and note of that would be, and I made note of this is that if your system relies on a custom driver, like you've got a very specific driver, double check that the upstream module version version matches the 6.19point whatever version kernel you're on. Sometimes distributions can ship patched variants that lag behind the mainline release. So just be aware of that. Normally I say follow this, but it came up because in the discord this week we had some people having issues with the 6.19 kernel and working with some of their drivers. I didn't have an issue, but I was also using a different version of the driver. So this is also kind of just a. Hey, if you're going to install a kernel on your own, be aware of your modules and things like that, that they're on the same release as the kernel is. Take a look at the article in the show notes. The kernel mailing list also has all the details for the code changes. So it's all there.
- [77:29]
C
And if you've been using 16.19.1, definitely update to 16.19.3 now.
- [77:37]
D
Yeah, I mean, I'll be honest, Greg said that, but he knows a lot more than I do. But realistically, a lot of it was like, unless you're using very specific hardware in very specific instances, if it's booting and running fine, it's not really going to probably affect you.
- [77:55]
B
I mean, don't all software owners say to update when they have an update? Come on.
- [78:01]
C
Yeah, back to 6.18.
- [78:05]
D
No, because you'd want 18, whatever the latest is.
- [78:09]
B
Yeah, if you're not having problems, stay where you're at and there's no security vulnerability, at least stay where you're at
- [78:17]
C
and realistically go ahead Jeff?
- [78:20]
D
Well, I was gonna say, and realistically, unless the new kernel has a very specific piece of hardware you're trying to enable or a very specific, like, oh, I need to have that feature because of reasons kind of like Jonathan said, just let the distribution you're on handle the three reasons.
- [78:38]
B
One, there's a security vulnerability you need to patch. Two, there's a feature or something you want. And three, you're just an enthusiast and you just want to try out the latest and greatest.
- [78:52]
A
I was going to say that number three needed to be in there. Just because you want to.
- [78:56]
C
Number three, don't do it on a production system.
- [79:01]
D
Yeah, I've done that. I've compiled my own kernels installed for a while. I did some benchmarking on compiling kernels and the latest, greatest, and. And I've done it. So I'm not saying somebody shouldn't. It's just I've also had to roll back to earlier kernels and things like that because things didn't work so well.
- [79:23]
A
Yeah, absolutely. All right. Well though, that is our news for the week and pretty good overview and we are about to get into some tips and I have already looked at these and I'm already excited about the first one that we're going to about.
- [79:37]
C
Talk.
- [79:37]
A
Talk about. Rob is going to tell us about a. Well, something of a network scanner from the command line. And I'm trying to get it running already because I cheated and looked ahead. We're going to let Rob tell us all about it right after this.
- [79:52]
B
All right, everybody, knock, knock.
- [79:56]
A
Who's there? Who's there?
- [79:57]
B
Who's there? That is my command line tip for today. The command line tip is called who's there? That's W H O S T H E R E. And what this is is it's a network scanner. I mean, in the command line, a TUI network scanner that, you know, scans your LAN or whatever you're doing to show you what's on it. And yes, this is actually my. My home network that you could see. And it has the IP's internal, so it's not too confidential. And the manufacturer of the device on there, I mean, maybe it's a tiny, tiny bit, but I'm not worried. Whatever, hack me, I don't care. Anyway, the Mac addresses last time is seen way over on the right. You know, they're all like one second and you can go into one of them. You know, let's go into this Netgear I have here, and it's going to tell you the IP display Name Mac address Manufacturer first seen last seen Sources. It's from the ARP cache. Open ports now by default. It doesn't say that, but I already looked at this one earlier. You know, you just do a P to to scan and it's going to scan at least common ports, not all of them. And then it also says. It already said when the last port scan was and extra data. So you can also quickly, if you want to look at a device, see what ports it has open. Limited number, of course. Like I said, it's only, you know, it picks off of the following ports are 21, 22, 23, 25, 80, 110 common ports. I guess I'm not going to list them out because I'm not. But it's, it's, you know, there are GUI scanners out there that, you know, I've been using them for years, but this one actually seemed very quick compared to some of the. Some of the GUI ones I've used. Advanced and Angry IP Scanner or some other ones that I've used in the past on Windows. And anyway, I don't know, not a whole lot else to say. You could quickly see what's on your network and I don't know, see if there's something weird out there. I guess. Obviously there's other ways to look at things on your network if you know how to check your DHCP scope and whatever. But this could be more information and more detail on it. So that is who's there.
- [82:35]
A
Yeah, it's cool looking. The one thing that I am missing is it's not pulling DNS names, it's only pulling names from in DNS. So when I, when you run lists, your display names, it. It's like,
- [83:00]
B
are these netbios names?
- [83:04]
C
I don't know.
- [83:05]
A
I don't think so. So like my wife's computer is named Rose and this is Rose Dot, underscore, udisk, TCP is the name I saw on yours. You had some weird names like that on there too. So I think, I think they need to do some work with their display names.
- [83:25]
B
Yeah, NSLookup would be something probably nice to have. Yeah. Do you actually have those named in your local DNS?
- [83:38]
A
I think so, but I would have to look. Yeah, it might be a difficult. I may not, now that you mentioned it, I may not have like reverse DNS working to be able to pull those.
- [83:49]
B
Yeah, these are. It's probably.
- [83:50]
C
It's using multicast DNS, right.
- [83:54]
A
Which MDNs is its own thing for like device discovery. But anyway, it is Still a cool tool and I like it. All right, Jeff, what do you have for us?
- [84:12]
D
Well, in the show notes I have two commands, but they're really one and one is just a little more automated version of the other. So the two commands I have, I have cache Cashios rate mirrors. Now all it does is it simplifies some of the command line that you, that you use. Now I'll go into how to use it and kind of what it is. But first let, I mean let's first talk about kind of what it is. And if you notice after a while that when you try to update your distribution, it's slowing down when doing updates. Well, you could have communication issues with your mirror. You know, there's some reason it's causing lag, whether they rerouted network or whatever it is. And so every so often you know when you, or when you remember it or you feel like it, or you're bored on a Tuesday and want to kill 30 seconds, you know, test. You can test the speed of your mirrors. So the basic command is rate dash mirrors and it's a fast mirror ranking tool that finds the best mirrors for your Linux distribution. Now it uses submarine cable connection data and Internet exchange data to intelligently hop between countries and other geolocations and discover fast mirrors. And process takes about 30 seconds. I've ran it myself. Now for me, because I'm on Cashios, I simply run the cashios rate mirrors command, searches all the mirrors and looks at different criteria, finds the fastest ones it can and then it puts them in your mirror file and it updates it. So then your mirrors are now faster or you're using the fastest mirrors that you have access to. Now if you're on a different distribution, arch based anyway you can run rate will you be like sudo space rate dash mirrors space and option space and then the command. Now the command is just the distribution you're trying to test it test the mirrors on. So it knows which set of mirrors to, to look up. So like if, like just arch, you know, you just put arch after that as your command. It'll look just for the arch mirror. So if you're on Manjaro, it'll look for the Manjaro and so on. You also have the options or like you said as they sound optional, but you can put in all sorts of how many simultaneous connections only test specific protocols you can set specific countries you want to test. So there's a ton of different things you can do. If you just type rate mirrors with nothing else, you'll Get a list of the optional settings, it'll tell you what they'll all do. And if you want more information, you can type Rate mirrors space and then the option and then it'll give you all the option, you know, more detail of the option. I pretty much just say just run it default, you're probably good. Now if you're running say arch or something like that, it won't automatically save it for you. So you'll just get the output to the screen. But what you do is you put in a pipe, you know, that's the vertical bar space, pseudo space, T E E space and then for like arch it's. Etc Pacman D mirror list. Now that will then load the fastest mirrors into your list. So then next time you do a update it's using those faster mirrors. Now you can use this for BSD and even custom mirrors. So if you get into the advanced usage you can set your mirrors meaning you could use it for a Debian based or other independent distribution. They have how you set your mirrors in there, both web address and ideally you have like country in there as well. So it has a little bit of a location to them. But take a look at the link in the show notes, it goes to the GitHub page. It's got all the details and happy benchmarking.
- [88:48]
A
Very cool. Unfortunately it does not work for Fedora. That was the first thing that I checked. Let's take a look.
- [88:55]
D
It can. That's where you go. You have to put in custom mirrors. So you would put in the mirrors you, you know, and then you put in I. You don't have to. But ideally you put a country in as well and then you run it off that custom list of mirrors and it'll go out and do it. So. So there is more setup for like Debian and Fedora but you, you can do it.
- [89:21]
C
It's.
- [89:21]
D
But it's geared towards arch out of
- [89:23]
C
the box with Debian Ubuntu specifically there's a NALA that has a fetch sub command that does similar.
- [89:32]
A
Yeah, this sent me down a rabbit trail now of wondering because I've had problems in Fedora before with some of their mirrors being painfully slow and they have the fastest mirror option which doesn't actually do what it says it does that just chooses the, the one with the lowest ping times but apparently not the fastest.
- [89:52]
B
Yeah, it's not necessarily the fastest bandwidth.
- [89:55]
A
Apparently Fedora does have a min rate option where you can say if you're pulling less than this amount of speed, drop that mirror off your list and go look for another one. I'll have to. I'll have to play with that min right in the timeout, which is cool. But, yeah, I like that. I like being able to figure out which mirrors are going to be best at your location.
- [90:17]
D
And even if you know you, I'm sure there's a tool that does it for Debian and Red Hat. And if you don't want to set up the custom mirror list.
- [90:26]
A
Yeah, very cool. All right, Ken, what do you have for us?
- [90:30]
C
Well, I've got a demonstration of using the command system AC power, whether you are connected to an external power supply. So if you're on a laptop, it's definitely going to come in handy. Speaking of which, I am on a laptop. Is that big enough?
- [90:53]
A
Yeah.
- [90:54]
C
Or should I? Okay. And if you'll note. Do you notice what the prompt is saying there, Jonathan?
- [91:04]
B
It says dad.
- [91:07]
A
I was going to say which. Which part of it dad at Fedora.
- [91:10]
C
Yeah.
- [91:11]
A
Running on a Fedora machine, or at least a Fedora vm Bravo.
- [91:14]
C
No, it's a Fedora installed on a laptop.
- [91:18]
A
Oh, there you go.
- [91:20]
C
Because can really demonstrate using the command. But as I said, the command is system D ac dash ac to S power. So I went ahead and wrote a script to help with demonstrating it. And basically what the script does is it does system ac dash power space das V for verbose. That means when you run it, it'll say yes or no. And let's go ahead and run this script. And yes, we are running on ac power. And it's a good thing this laptop's not the one I do all my work on, because I'm. I'm plugging it now. Let's see how long the battery lasts on it. No, we are running on battery.
- [92:10]
A
Nice. Configure it out. It also has a dash dash low option, which checks if the battery is discharging and at some low battery level. The other interesting thing is if you run this without the verbose option, without the dash V flag, it's just going to return. It's going to return your. Your standard return values like a zero for success and non zero for failure.
- [92:40]
C
Correct.
- [92:41]
B
Which is good for scripting, which is
- [92:43]
A
really good for scripting. All right, very cool.
- [92:47]
C
But like you said, with the dash dash low. And you got it.
- [92:54]
A
You got to make it verbose too, if we want to be able to see it. Yep. No, your battery is not low, so
- [93:06]
C
I don't have to worry about it dying anytime soon.
- [93:11]
A
Indeed. All right, I've got a Very quick tip for us. It was another one that I was surprised we haven't ever covered before, and that's unzip. If you want to. If you have a zip file and you want to extract it, you can just use unzip. And there are a couple of interesting flags. The L will list, the T will just do a test. You can use dash D to specify a different directory. Dash O will overwrite without prompting. Be careful of that one. And then dash X you can use to exclude a list of files. A very useful tool when you have zips that you're working with that you know, each one of these, each one of these archive formats have their own tool. TAR files have, you know, obviously the TAR command, but like G unzip and some of the others for those different file formats. But if you have a regular old fashioned zip file, unzip is the one you want.
- [94:10]
B
Amazing. I use that all the time. I, I often use zip these days just because of portability.
- [94:16]
A
But everything uses everything can run zips.
- [94:19]
D
I think it's funny because I always have to usually look at the command line or the options because, you know, some of them, oh, just run the command and it automatically unpacks some of them. It's like, oh, you need a dash D for decompress, E for extract, U for unpack. It's like, which letter is it?
- [94:36]
B
Or unzip, you could just use no flags and it works just fine.
- [94:40]
A
Indeed.
- [94:40]
D
Right? And that's what I mean.
- [94:42]
A
TAR is probably the best. TAR XV zxvf Yeah, that's the one.
- [94:50]
B
That's what I use. That's my.
- [94:52]
A
Yeah, I was gonna say I don't use 7 zip. My fingers know how to do it, but I can't tell you, man. 7zip is great, but not particularly portable.
- [95:04]
B
Yeah, it's zip with more features, but more windowsy.
- [95:09]
A
Indeed. All right, well, that is it. We have gotten through everything. Let's give each of the guys opportunity to plug whatever they want to or get the last word in on something. Jeff is up first.
- [95:24]
D
Nothing too critical, just a little bit of ending poetry. You have just typed your one millionth character. Since you've acquired this computer 131 days ago, this puts you in the 94th percentile of productivity. Congratulations. You've won a free visit to the hand clinic of your choice. Have a great week, everybody.
- [95:46]
A
Oh, dear. All right. And Ken, I've got a link in
- [95:51]
C
the show notes about a wallpaper contest that the Xubuntu team is hosting. If you follow that link and you want to demonstrate your skills with as an artist, then go ahead and take advantage of this.
- [96:08]
B
And that's pronounced zubontu
- [96:13]
C
forex
- [96:16]
A
however you want to pronounce it. We won't judge.
- [96:18]
B
All right, Rob, couple things. One thing. When we were talking about zip right at the end I said 7 zip is zip but more portable. I meant zip but more features.
- [96:30]
A
I think that's what you said.
- [96:31]
B
Is it? I think I said portable. That's why I had my head. I think you just knew what I meant.
- [96:35]
A
That might be.
- [96:36]
B
I think I said portable.
- [96:38]
C
I said not as portable.
- [96:42]
B
Either way anyway, I don't know that's what I meant. I don't know what I said. Another thing, I want to go back on my Matrix story. Just to clarify, the name is a little overloaded. There are at least two other Matrix oss out there. One is a Debian based distribution that's I guess is still active and they call it Matrix because the only desktop they have is the Trinity Desktop,
- [97:13]
A
the
- [97:13]
B
Matrix movie for those who know there's no look it up. The other one is an operating system for software defined controllers. So just look at our show notes or look for the GitHub one for LXNAY. Or if you search Matrix OS, you're probably going to get the one I was talking about bunch of news stories on and stuff like that. So you'll probably find the right one, but you might not. And finally, as I always say, if you want to find, get more me robertp campbell.com is my website. On that site you can find links to my LinkedIn, my Twitter, my blue sky, my mast on place to donate a coffee. And last week nobody voted for me to keep the mustache. So it's gone. It's gone. I cut it off. Zero votes meant it's gone. And I was getting tired of it being in my mouth anyway and getting food all over it. So I'm all cleaned up now. Have a good week everyone.
- [98:15]
A
He looks like such a kid. All right, appreciate you guys being here is a thing. Wubuntu is a thing. Yeah, we've been in the back chat looking at all.
- [98:24]
B
Yeah, don't use Wubuntu. That's a scam. We've talked about that before though.
- [98:30]
A
All right, appreciate the guys being here. If you want to find more of me, you can check out Hackaday, particularly the that's where Floss Weekly lives. At least on the weeks when everybody at my household is not sick. We took a week off for strep and colds, but we should be back hopefully this upcoming week. Got a couple of folks we're talking to about coming on as guests. Other than that, we just appreciate everybody being here, those that watch and those that listen, whether you get us live or on the download. And we will be back next week on the Untitled Living Show.
- [99:01]
B
Hey everybody.
- [99:02]
A
Leo Laporte here and I'm going to
- [99:04]
B
bug you one more time to join Club Twitter.
- [99:08]
A
If you're not already a member.
- [99:09]
B
I want to to encourage you to support what we do here at Twit. You know, 25% of our operating cost 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.
- [99:46]
A
Thank you so much.