Jonathan: Hey folks, this week, Randall Schwartz and Aaron Newcomb join me and we talk about Linux, and some geopolitics, and some open source challenges. It's a great show, you don't want to miss it. This is Floss Weekly, episode 810, recorded November 19th. A rising wallet pays for all boats.

It's time for Floss Weekly, that's the show about free, libre, and open source software. I'm your host, Jonathan Bennett, and today is a little bit different. We do, of course, have a co host. We sort of have two co hosts. We've got Rundle Schwartz. We've got Aaron Newcomb and I'm not sure which one is the guest and which one is the co host.

But it is, it is great to have both of you here today. Yeah. Great to be here.

Randal: It's like the, what is it? The three sort of Sopranos, not three amigos,

Jonathan: three Sopranos,

Randal: three amigos too. But I was thinking, isn't there like. Three opera singers.

Jonathan: Oh, three

Aaron: tenors. Yeah.

Randal: Three tenors. There we go. Not sopranos on the wrong band.

I'm more of a baritone actually.

Yeah, yeah. Me too, actually. So, and as I get older, my karaoke goes lower. So

Jonathan: instead of doing Kermit, the frog, you're going to eventually be You, one of the one of the big animal boy, I don't, I don't even know the Muppets well enough. Animal! Animal! Yeah, that's

Aaron: right. Practice your drums. Yeah, there you go.

Randal: Something like that, yes. I'm going to regret this video already. This is great. Your background

Jonathan: removal tool, I hated that, by the way.

Randal: Oh, oh, I'm sure, I'm sure. I wasn't even looking. I had my eyes half closed. Clothes like animal. That's great. That's great.

Aaron: It's either that, or we're just going to be the, the, the two guys that sit in the back, the two old guys, the two grumpy old guys that sit in the back.

Randal: yeah. Waldorf and Statler. Oh yeah, absolutely. That's what I feel like more and

Aaron: more these days. I'm

Randal: already doing that. I'm already, I'm already channeling them. Sometimes when people ask me questions, I act like one of those guys. I don't know which one brought both of them.

Jonathan: Yeah, that's a little too real, man.

All right. So, hey, there is, there is some news that I have came across this week and I think it's something that's worth talking about. We'll see where all this leads us. The, the main, the main bit of news though that I thought was interesting is that there is a, there is an Ubuntu, I guess it's a derivative, it's a repackaging of Ubuntu.

It's made specifically for Rockchips, which those are the things in, Well in a lot of here. I've got one here actually you see them in little devices like this And so this is a well, it's a it's it's kind of the equivalent of a Raspberry Pi CM4 Yeah But the the SOC so the system on a chip that runs this is a rock chip and in this case It's the RK3 3566 and we're sort of in this weird world where Rockchip does a little bit of work on like pushing things upstream to the Linux kernel.

In fact, I found out just the other day that there are a whopping, I think it's three kernel maintainers that are at rockchip. com. Right? So, like, it's a little bit better than I thought it was. You have some companies that they'll push hardware out. And it's like, eh, if you want to put it in the kernel, that's fine.

But, if you want to run anything official, here's our kernel from 10 years ago that has all of our patches on top of it. Oh, I hate that. Rockchip is doing a little bit better. But when it comes to actual distros to put on it, one of the real leading ones was the Ubuntu Rockchip distro. And that was run by a guy named Josh.

And a couple of weeks ago he put out an announcement that says, I'm not going to be able to do this anymore. So he's frozen the GitHub, he's frozen the Discussions on it. There's no more releases and yeah, and it's it's it's not super great and one of the things that people have pointed out about this is It's, it's a real problem for all of the people that use this, because RockChip doesn't put out a distro, and a lot of the, you know, like, so, so this is a, what is this one, a Banana, something by BananaPie maybe?

I forget. Or no, this is the Pine64 board. Oh yeah, I've got a

Aaron: Pine64 sitting up here too.

Jonathan: Yeah, so this is one of Pine's boards, and it's, it's, again, it's in that little CM4 format. And a lot of these companies don't put out a distro either, they don't put out images. It's just, oh, go grab the the, the Ubuntu image from from Josh Reich.

And that is now frozen and it's not, it's not great. I'm not sure what direction we go from here.

Randal: So, again, I don't know a lot about Linux, which I've been saying over the decades, I really don't know that much about Linux. Is it that the special Rockchip Linux distribution has like extra drivers to support unique hardware?

I mean, what's missing in the standard Ubuntu distribution? You can't just plop it on there. Yeah.

Jonathan: And that's a, that, that is actually a really good question. I've spent some time over the last few weeks figuring that out. Good question. Because it's not, it's not immediately apparent what the answer to that is.

Maybe. Ah, and I think there's two main things that's, that's different about this. One is it's got U boot built right into it because a lot of these devices you actually flash U Boot. And U Boot then boots the kernel. Well, in some cases, you've got to flash U Boot with something called a device tree that's specific to the device.

And so, you know, you've got that where you've got to build this kind of special image that's got U Boot at the very beginning of it, the right device tree, U Boot, and then your kernel after that. And you've got to have the right things turned on in the kernel, right? Because when you build Linux, there's a whole bunch of modules, there's a whole bunch of compile options, like, do we support this piece of hardware?

Do we support that piece of hardware? Because you have to imagine if you just turn every switch on, you get really, really big kernel binaries. And so one of the other things that this project was doing was, you know, these are the boards we support. Let's make sure all of the different switches are turned on for the images.

And then one more thing I know that it does is there are some like out of tree patches. Where, you know, let's say HDMI for one of these particular boards. Well, that hasn't landed upstream in the kernel, but there is, there are some open source patches floating around. That's like, well, you can patch the kernel with this and this and this, and it makes HDMI work.

So he would, he would integrate some of those things as well. I've got another bore, the, the, this one's by TuringPi, it's the RK1, which has another of these RockChip chips on it. And while, while resear I'm trying to do a review on it for Hackaday, actually, and I kept running into the problem that, like, Trying to boot Linux on it was fundamentally broken in one way or another, unless you were using, you know, this specific Ubuntu image.

And I finally got cobbled together all the patches that you boot needs to be able to then boot like Fedora. So I have one of these now that I can boot Fedora 41 on just the, the regular image and it finally works. But getting to that point, it's just been a pain.

Aaron: I mean, isn't there just, I mean, so I fell away from, from.

Ubuntu, especially on the desktop a long time ago when they stopped supporting Gnome and they came up with their own thing. And I just don't like the, the whole, the whole paradigm of Ubuntu right now, but it is pretty stable. So I use derivatives that are based on Ubuntu or I just run stock Debian, right?

Which Ubuntu is based on. So you've got Debian, then you've got Ubuntu, which is built on top of that. And then other like Linux mint and other popular distributions built on top of Ubuntu. So isn't there, can't you just run Debian? Is the problem just that nobody's, nobody's working on all the special things to get the rock chip and all the peripherals to work correctly?

I mean, it seems like, I mean, this is one of the beauties of Linux actually, right? So if this was like Windows or, or Apple saying, we're not going to support this version of Linux. This Mac book anymore, right? Like that would be bad, right? Cause then you have no recourse, but it's Linux. So one of the things about why should I run Linux when we talk about that a little bit is that, you know, someone else can come along and build it.

Like you have started to test things on. Right. And because it's open source, you can actually come up with something. So I see this as a setback. But I don't see it as the end of the world for Rockchip or, you know, it's a pain in the butt basically for people that want to run the latest and greatest because now they have to run whatever the last version was, go get Debian and build the rest yourself.

Also, the other thing I would say is on these boards, I know, at least for myself, having worked on these boards for the past 20 years or whatever. I very rarely run those boards with a GUI with the desktop anyway, because I want those boards to go do something. I want those boards to go run my lights. I want those boards to go run my 3D printer.

And so very rarely am I running a GUI anyway. So as long as I can get to the command line, as someone actually, as long as someone supports all of the peripherals on that device, I don't really care because I just need to get in there, get to the command line and get something done. That's, that's my take on it.

That's, that's my quick take. Yeah...

Episode 810 transcript