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FLOSS Weekly
Hosted by Hackaday · EN
It's the OG podcast about Free, Libre, and Open Source Software, FLOSS Weekly! Join us each Wednesday as Jonathan Bennett and the posse of Co-hosts interview big names of Free Software, cover utterly fascinating Open Source Projects you may have never heard of, and cover the news about software you use every day without even realizing it.
35episodes
Episodes
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Episode 858 - YottaDB: Sometimes the Solution is Bigger Servers
Dec 1001:04:46Tap to summarizeThis week Jonathan chats with K. S. Bhaskar about YottaDB. This very high performance database has some unique tricks! How does YottaDB run across multiple processes without a daemon? Why is it licensed AGPL, and how does that work with commercial deployments? Listen to find out! You can join the conversation in the Hackaday Discord, watch live or get the video version of the show on Youtube, as well as getting the full story and show links from Hackaday. Oh, and follow the official Mastadon account! Theme music: "Newer Wave" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Transcribe →Episode 857: SOCification
Dec 301:13:19Tap to summarizeThis week Jonathan chats with Konstantinos Margaritis about SIMD programming. Why do these wide data instructions matter? What's the state of Hyperscan, the project from Intel to power regex with SIMD? And what is Konstantinos' connection to ARM's SIMD approach? Listen to find out! You can join the conversation in the Hackaday Discord, watch live or get the video version of the show on Youtube, as well as getting the full story and show links from Hackaday. Oh, and follow the official Mastadon account! Theme music: "Newer Wave" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Transcribe →FLOSS 856: QT: Fix It Please, My Mom is Calling
Nov 2601:04:18Tap to summarizeThis week Jonathan chats with Maurice Kalinowski about QT! That's the framework that runs just about anywhere, making it easy to write cross-platform applications. What's the connection with KDE? And how has this turned into a successful company? Listen to find out! You can join the conversation in the Hackaday Discord, watch live or get the video version of the show on Youtube, as well as getting the full story and show links from Hackaday. Oh, and follow the official Mastadon account! Theme music: "Newer Wave" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Transcribe →Episode 813a: Happy Holidays
Dec 18, 202400:00:44Tap to summarizeThis week and next we take off for the holidays! We have an exciting schedule after the break! You can join the conversation in the Hackaday Discord, watch live or get the video version of the show on Youtube, as well as getting the full story and show links from Hackaday. Oh, and follow the official Mastadon account! Theme music: "Newer Wave" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Transcribe →Episode 813: Turn Off the Internet
Dec 11, 202401:08:54Tap to summarizeThis week Jonathan, Simon, and Aaron chat about Open Source Retro-computing, Open Source AI, and ... politics? You can join the conversation in the Hackaday Discord, watch live or get the video version of the show on Youtube, as well as getting the full story and show links from Hackaday. Oh, and follow the official Mastadon account! Theme music: "Newer Wave" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Transcribe →Episode 812 transcript
Dec 4, 2024Tap to summarizeFLOSS-812 Jonathan: Hey folks, this week David Ruggles joins me and we talk with Sylvester and Brian about Firefox, the original open source browser. Something of a perpetual underdog, but maybe it's time to take another look at. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned. This is Floss Weekly Episode 812, recorded Tuesday, December the 3rd. Firefox and the future. It's time for Floss Weekly. That's the show about free Libre and open source software. I'm your host, Jonathan Bennett, and we're going to have a lot of fun today. First off, we've got the one, the only David Ruggles, the David Factor, the, the original David Ruggles, as opposed to all of those clones running around out there. Hey, David, welcome. David: You're just trying to bring in every single one of my handles from every possible source. Oh, I'm excited to be here today. In proper form, I am calling in from a Firefox based browser, so this is, this is awesome. I'm excited. In fact, I plan to do a lot of listening and not a whole lot of talking. Jonathan: Oh, well, but I mean, you're kind of the, you're the, you're the expert co host this time. You're, you're the Firefox user. So you gotta, you gotta be on the ball to be able to jump in and ask questions. All the things that I wouldn't think to ask. I can do that. Yeah. So for those that don't know, that are not watching the schedule the way that we are, our, our Guests today are Sylvester and Brian of the Firefox project. So from Mozilla and boy, there's a lot, there's a lot going on with browsers these days, and I am just thrilled that these guys are willing to be here and chat about it. There's. There's some things to talk about. So let's, let's go ahead and we will just go ahead and bring them on. So Sylvester and Brian, both welcome. Glad to have you both. Thank you. Brian: Glad to be here. Thanks. Thanks for having us. Jonathan: Yeah. Let me start with Sylvester and just kind of give us the rundown of like where, where are you in Firefox? Where are you in Mozilla? Well, how do you, how do you fit into this, this thing that we all know and love? Sylvestre: So I am, I am. I started at Mozilla 11 years ago, and now I'm a director of engineering. I'm managing an organization of about 50 people. We do release management, release engineers, OS integration, engineering workflow, and some security work also. So we do a lot of things, and we touch a lot of different parts of the project. All Jonathan: right. And then, Brian, same question for you. Kind of help us get the mental map. Where do you fit into the organization? Brian: Yeah, I'm a senior principal engineer working on Firefox and Gecko, the web engine that powers it. I joined Mozilla in 2013 and I've worked on a whole bunch of stuff from kind of dev tools to the desktop front end to platform and recently performance and a whole bunch of other fundamental stuff. Jonathan: Yeah. Okay, perfect. Perfect. So both both very senior engineering types, which we love. We'd love to be able to ask the engineering questions. But before we get to engineering, I think there's some, there's some interesting history stuff to talk about. I don't think we've ever had like Mozilla or Firefox on the show. So let's, let's talk about some ancient history and Firefox and Mozilla used to be Netscape. Is that, is that fair to say there's at least a connection to Netscape? Sylvestre: Oh yeah. In a while, right? So we just celebrated the 20th birthday of Firefox a few weeks ago. Basically Firefox started on the ashes of Netscape. So, you know, Microsoft decided to ship IE with Windows for free, and back in the day, we, Netscape was sold. Two users. So obviously it Netscape took a hit and some people decided to refactor on Netscape into what we call back then the Matia project. And then the project was renamed to Firefox and here 20 years after. So, but it's also a, Firefox was really a revolution. We think about it like most of us in that call are pretty old. And remember what it in the day when had popups everywhere. And you didn't have tabs. So if you wanted to look three different websites, you have to open three windows. Now we have tabs and a proper blogger. Firefox is a browser that created that. Jonathan: Yeah. Boy, there's some, there's some cool history there. I remember Firefox 4. It's kind of a big memory I have because I was just getting active like in things and on the internet. And I remember when Firefox 4 was sort of the big push and I don't remember when that was. Early, early 2000s I guess. And that was, that was a big deal because you know, there were cool things happening in Firefox and it's been a long time ago now. And I was, I was talking with David before the show and, you know, you kind of look at the, the, the current browser wars and the, the how shall we put this, the market share of Firefox is maybe not quite as big as what everybody would like. And it, it occurred to me, Firefox has been in this position before. This is, this is not the first time that Firefox is, is approaching the the market as the underdog. And this in some ways is a comfortable position for you guys. And one of the things I think that we can dig into maybe today is like what, what cool things are coming because you know, when you're, when you're a bit of an underdog, that kind of gives you a bit of freedom, I think. to to experiment and try things out. And so I'm, I'm hoping that you guys will have, have some neat things to talk about that you're kind of looking at with that, that you know, things coming, things down the pike where Firefox is going to once again, be sort of shaking up the entire ecosystem. Brian: Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's a, it's a, tough position to be sort of the independent choice and not be the default on on most, most devices. But I think at the same time, in terms of, I think that's important for the platform in terms of having an open interoperable platform and then being able to compete on, you know, basic browsing fundamentals, performance, security, stability you know, managing web compatibility, and then you know, adding a bunch of, a bunch of new features to just make getting through that. Getting through the day better, you know, people use their browsers for all sorts of things today. And so there's a bunch of stuff coming down the pike in the next year that we'd love to get into. Jonathan: Yeah, but before we, before we dive into sort of what's coming, maybe let's, let's talk about some more of the like fundamentals. So Firefox has been around for 20 years and If, if I forget this, David, you particularly, I'm gonna put a pin in this and you help me remember, if I forget, I want to talk about Rust too, because that's something big that Mozilla has been involved in. But I guess first, what, how, how big of a project is Firefox? Like what, what does the line of code look like? How about, do you know, just off the top of your head, like in the, in the ballpark, how many commits there are? Let's, let's chat about the size of the thing. Sylvestre: Sure. So it's one of the biggest project that we can find on the planet. Like we we love the expression. It's not rocket science, but here it might be more complex at rocket science at time Because when you think about a brother you have to run untrusted code all day long and you have to keep the user safe And secure so for firefox to give you a scale of what we have i'm looking at the number We have more than 10 000 Contributor over the history. We have about 1000 contributor per year. We have about 31 million of code. Of course, some of them are platform specific. So you don't always get all those code in your binary. Some of the code is Android specific. Some of them are Mac specific, et cetera. And we are close to 1 million commits in the code base. So when you think about it software that has been alive for 20 years, how many of those are still alive? The Linux kernel. Jonathan: Yeah. Sylvestre: So windows. And Photoshop, there's only a few. So yeah, it's crazy the scale of what we do. Jonathan: Yeah. You know, we, we had, we've interviewed some of the people that have been around for 20 years and there's, there's projects that you wouldn't necessarily think of, you know, like the core utils, you know, some of those have been around for a long time, Emacs and VI, but. Most of those have gone through, like, big shakeups, and you know, we're not still using the same Unix core util source code from the Unix days, right? People have re implemented that now a couple of times. And there's now, you know, this interesting move to re implement it in Rust, which is really fascinating. I have put my foot in my mouth a few times and said that Mozilla created Rust, and I've been corrected each time. No, no, no, no, no, that was this professor guy. And Mozilla just came along and used it. But, is it fair to say that Mozilla is responsible for a big part of where Rust is today? I think that's probably fair to say. Sylvestre: I think Graydon was a Mozilla employee when he started that project. Oh, so I think it's a, I think it is a Mozilla product. Like it is, maybe I'm showing off, but it is something that Mozilla created and we had like 10 or 10 employees at some point working full time on Rust. And we are still contributing to Rust in many different places. So to me, it's a Mozilla product. Correct me if I'm wrong, Brian. Brian: Yeah. And to, to add on to that, I think nowadays it's a separate sort of spun off into an independent foundation and has huge traction in the ecosystem from tons of, you know, companies and open source supporters and, and and, and whatnot. But I think in terms of what it was sort of designed to ...
Transcribe →Episode 812: Firefox and the Future
Dec 4, 202401:21:21Tap to summarizeThis week Jonathan and David chat with Sylvestre and Brian about Firefox! What's up in the browser world, what's coming, and what's the new feature for Firefox on mobile that has Jonathan so excited? Listen to find out! You can join the conversation in the Hackaday Discord, watch live or get the video version of the show on Youtube, as well as getting the full story and show links from Hackaday. Oh, and follow the official Mastadon account! Theme music: "Newer Wave" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Transcribe →Episode 811 transcript
Nov 27, 2024Tap to summarizeFLOSS-811 Jonathan: Hey folks, this week we talked with Lars Wickman about Elixir, a modern take on Erlang, and NURVs, a really clever way to run it with Linux on embedded devices. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned. This is Floss Weekly, episode 811, recorded Tuesday, November 26th. NURVs, real embedded Linux. It's time for Floss Weekly. It's the show about free Libre and open source software. I'm your host, Jonathan Bennett, and we've got something real fun this week. I've got Lars Wickman with me, and we're going to talk about Elixir and nerves and running things on embedded devices and the Raspberry Pi. It's going to be a lot of fun. It is just me alone in the hot seat this week, and so I'm, I'm just going to go ahead and bring Lars right on. And first off, welcome to the show, sir. Thank you very much. Yes, I appreciate you kind of stepping in, not exactly last minute, but a little late and we didn't have anybody. And so we, we avoided doing yet another round table discussion or, Oh, God forbid, even worse me doing a monologue for an entire hour. That probably wouldn't go well. So thank you for being here. Oh, my pleasure. So let's see, where do we, where do we start? You, you are, you're responsible for something called NERVS, which I don't know what that is, I know a little bit, but I don't know what that is. And I Lars: refuse to take responsibility, but I can't tell you who is responsible. Okay, well, you're, Jonathan: you're involved with something called NERVS, which is based on something called Elixir, which is maybe based on something called Erlang. And I, I sort of know what Erlang is. And so maybe let's, let's start with what, what is this elixir thing and why should people care about it? Lars: Yeah. So starting with Erlang is not a bad idea. So 40 years ago, the Swedish forests of Stockholm, no, I'm not going to do full story time, but Erlang was created. in Sweden by the telecom company Ericsson, who people might know from like Sony Ericsson and a few Ericsson phones. But they're a massive company that does a lot of telecom equipment, 3G, 4G, 5G, all the Gs. No longer 2G, I think, I don't think anyone does that anymore. But back in the 80s, they were developing telecom switches. And they wanted to experiment with whether they could develop a language for Developing resilient, reliable, performant telecom equipment because it's, it was a really hard problem at the time the computers were not that fast and they needed to have sort of massive concurrency. So many phone calls at a time. Yeah. One phone call having an oopsie should not bring down a thousand other phone calls. So a sort of error error handling and resilience. They also ship these sort of resilient redundant boxes that were physically connected. It's not like, Oh, they were network. No, no. They, they shared a backplane essentially. So they needed to actually run it as clustered devices. Jonathan: Yeah, so back in the 80s, telecom equipment was basically big iron, right? That's kind of the era still that we're talking about now. Lars: It's the era of, okay, we're going to put this under, we're going to put this in the ground before we put a parking garage on it. Jonathan: Yes, I've been in those rooms a time or two, yes. Yeah. Lars: They also did not want to have to remove the parking garage or even go to the parking garage to update the software. Yeah. So Erlang has supported concurrency distributed computing like fault isolation or reliability, consistently low latency is kind of important for, for telecom and hot code updates since somewhere around the 80s. It's almost 40 years old now. Wow. I just. recently interviewed on Beam Radio one of the developers that have been maintaining the virtual machine for Erlang. And he's just been doing it for like 27 years now. He didn't make it. He's just the guy who maintained Jonathan: it. He's a real noob in the field at that point. Lars: Yeah. So, so Erlang has been around for a long time. Yeah. It's what Like RabbitMQ was built on Erlang. WhatsApp was built on Erlang famously. So they had like 10 years of uptime before they actually had to reboot all their servers for the first time. They did hot code updates. They did all the fancy things and they had very few developers, but a very performant, massive system. And then they sold for a lot of money apparently, but Erlang has always been sort of a bit of an open secret. It's like only deep nerd wizards. known to use it or, and sort of fought through the documentation to use it. It has not been, it has not been focused on adoption. Not in, in the way that modern languages are. And at some point Ruby showed up like Ruby, Ruby on Rails. And in that community, Was a guy called Joseph Lim. Well called it's his name. And he, he built up a decent following in Ruby. He did a lot of cool libraries, a lot of useful stuff for the community, very active. And then he got a little bit sick of Ruby being very slow and sort of not great operationally and started exploring other things. options. And he settled on Erlang, and then he built Elixir on top of the Erlang virtual machine. So it is a separate language, compiles to the same thing. Jonathan: Ah, okay. And Elixir Lars: is a modern ecosystem with modern tooling, good build tools, good dependency management, a nice web framework, database layers, all the niceties built out and built up over the last 10 years. So it's new in the sense that Just 10 years old. Jonathan: Yeah. And so the original Erlang is, it sort of reminds me of Java and in that it's got, it's based on a virtual machine and it's got some of these, you know, really impressive features under the hood. And so would that make a Elixir kind of like the equivalent to I know there's, I guess Kotlin is one of them, right? Languages that are compiled to the same kind of bytecode that runs on that existing VM. Lars: I would say it's kind of the a closure or similar? Well, Erlang and Elixir are very equivalent languages. Okay. With Java and the JVM, if you look at like, I guess Kotlin is a fair comparison in that Kotlin is not a very different language from language from Java, aside from trying to modernize and make things nicer. Erlang is a functional programming language, so it's functional programming, but it's the functional programming because they wanted the massive concurrency and like, so they, they do, they spawn lightweight processes and communicate via message passing, a bunch of that stuff. And then it really helps if your data is immutable. So. They chose, they ended up doing functional programming as a consequence of what they were trying to solve for. So Elixir is also a functional programming language. Where I would say the JVM is a fairly general purpose virtual machine as far as I know. I don't spend a lot of time in, with it. I mean, object oriented programming is a very general, Right. Paradigm. Right. It's not specific in any real sense, but the Erlang virtual machine has, has these primitives of like spawning processes and sending messages. Those are things inside of the machine code, well, the virtual machine's machine code. So it's like, it's a fairly high level of abstraction for, for a system language like that. And Erlang was built. To build systems. It's like, yeah, you have an OS, but you want to find out if you have disk space. Well, you can just ask the airline system. You, you can stop and start parts of the system. You can inspect the running system at runtime. You can of course, update the system at runtime. That's the whole hot code updates part. And it had preemptive multitasking from very early on. So it's, it's very much a language and a tool for building systems. Jonathan: Yeah. And so is Elixir kind of focused on that same thing? And then I guess along with that Elixir Erlang, do they have object oriented stuff added onto them or are they strictly functional? Lars: They, they are. The least strict, strictly functional language you can run into. So they are high level dynamic languages. So it's not static typing and it's not like Haskell or Elm. And some people are very upset about that. Some people are very happy about that. I come from like PHP and on into Python and then I went to Elixir. So high level and dynamic has been my tool for the longest time. Sure. So didn't bother me. The FP part was kind of weird to get used to, but it also clarifies a lot of stuff. You don't get this very messy thing where you have classes and objects that interact in weird ways. It's like, no, no, the data you have in front of you is all the data you can deal with and have to deal with. They're, they're not pure in the sense of the purest functional programming languages, because you have, you're allowed to do a bunch of side effects. You can do logging, you can do IO, you can. Do a bunch of things and you don't have to involve any monads at all. So, Jonathan: okay. So what, what are people primarily using Elixir for these days? What's the, what's kind of the problem set somebody today would have that you would say, Hey, Elixir would be great for that. Lars: A lot of people pick it up to do something like messaging related, like chat or real timey stuff, because it is very good at. sort of soft real time. But it is also just generally good. So Erlang was built to run services. Services turned out to be like the entire world. Yeah. It's like, okay. Yeah. Define services. But Elixir comparing Elixir to Erlang. Elixir has much more clearly built out like the web toolkit. So the Phoenix web framework, very nice to work with for building APIs and WebSockety stuff and all of that. And then they built Phoenix live view, which is like, ho...
Transcribe →Episode 811: Elixir & Nerves - Real Embedded Linux
Nov 26, 202401:12:04Tap to summarizeThis week Jonathan and Lars Wikman chat about Elixir and Nerves. That's a modern language that's a take on Erlang, and an embedded Linux approach for running Elixir code on devices. https://underjord.io https://elixir-lang.org/ https://nerves-project.org/ You can join the conversation in the Hackaday Discord, watch live or get the video version of the show on Youtube, as well as getting the full story and show links from Hackaday. Oh, and follow the official Mastadon account! Theme music: "Newer Wave" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Transcribe →Episode 810 transcript
Nov 20, 2024Tap to summarizeJonathan: 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. Oh 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...
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