Untitled Linux Show 240 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

Jonathan Bennett [00:00:00]:
This week we start out with a review of Argon 40s one up. That's a laptop made for the Raspberry PI CM5. Then we talk about the caliber ebook reader G parted. We're talking about AMD's new EPYC CPU GeForce. Now the game on the road and a whole lot more from desktop environments all the way to the new Raspberry PI smart display which is also just coming out. You don't want to miss it. It's a lot of fun. So stay tuned.

Jonathan Bennett [00:00:30]:
Podcasts you love from people you Trust. This is TWiT. This is the Untitled Linux show, episode 240, recorded Saturday, January 31st. I like the frosting. Hey folks, it is Saturday and you know what that means. It's a time to get geeky with Linux. We're gonna talk some hardware, some software, talk about the kernel, all kinds of stuff. You don't wanna miss it.

Jonathan Bennett [00:00:57]:
I'm your host, Jonathan Bennett and it just me, I've got a couple of the guys with me. Welcome Ken. And welcome Jeff. It is good to have both of you here today and we've got some stuff to cover.

Ken McDonald [00:01:11]:
Yes, I hope somebody turns the heat up in here.

Jonathan Bennett [00:01:16]:
Oklahoma is going through a bit of a cold snap right now. I don't think we made it above freezing all day today. And then Jeff was telling us that up in the frozen tundra of the north where he's at, it's like 55 degrees and he's back riding the motorcycle again.

Jeff Massie [00:01:29]:
I think I. I never really stopped.

Ken McDonald [00:01:33]:
Right now I'd rather be in a good. In a nice warm room reading a good book.

Jonathan Bennett [00:01:38]:
There you go. But instead you're here talking about Linux with us. We appreciate your sacrifice.

Ken McDonald [00:01:43]:
Yeah, you're going to love what I'm.

Jonathan Bennett [00:01:46]:
Starting off with, I'm sure. Well, before we get there, I've got some hardware to talk about and I happen to have. It is right here. It is a. I'm going to maximize myself. It is a new laptop. Let's see, I got to hold this thing just right for you to be able to see it. This guy.

Jonathan Bennett [00:02:05]:
And you may say, well, it just looks like your regular old laptop. What's so weird about this? Why are we talking about this? I mean, it's running Linux. Those of you that know, that are in the know may know what's going on here. I'll give you a little, give it a little sneak peek of what's on the inside.

Jeff Massie [00:02:22]:
There you go.

Jonathan Bennett [00:02:23]:
There's the motherboard, that, that right there, the green that's the motherboard. And then beside it you've got the, the, the NVME drive. Yeah, this is the Argon 41 up. This is a laptop shell that runs on the Raspberry PI CM5. This came in yesterday for me and I've been fiddling with it a little bit since then and I thought we'd talk about it just a bit. So I will say I, I like it. I am reasonably impressed so far. There's one big irritant that I've hit and that is that it did not include any thermal pads.

Jonathan Bennett [00:03:09]:
And so when it's got a, you know, it's got a nice metallic. It's a heat sink really, that goes all the way across the bottom of the laptop. But there needs to be a thermal pad in between, like your main processor on your PI and ideally your NVME as well. And it just didn't include those. And so I have an order out to Amazon, supposed to come in tomorrow. I'll get some actual thermal pads and then we'll put the base on. And that should help the performance a bit once we get it in contact with the heatsink. So that was the one annoyance that I had.

Jonathan Bennett [00:03:43]:
But other than that, I am fairly impressed. Of course, you know, it's a Raspberry PI CM5, so it's the performance there that you would think it is. You know, it'll, it'll play a YouTube video full screen at pretty much 60fps. I haven't actually done the, like, the benchmarking on it yet, but again, it's a, it's a pi5. It's going to be like every other pi5. There is a script that they give you that you run and it installs things like it sets it to use, I believe I saw in there. It sets it to use the correct WI FI antenna, which apparently is a big deal because last night when I was fiddling with it, the WI FI performance was terrible. And then I finally ran the script and it's better.

Jonathan Bennett [00:04:24]:
So I think it was trying to use an internal antenna instead of the external one. And then it also gives you the battery performance, which it's sort of interesting. You probably won't be able to see this right now. There's an icon on the desktop and that's where you see the battery at. I've not gotten it to work yet. Up in the corner where you're used to the keyboard and the trackpad. They work. They feel okay.

Jonathan Bennett [00:04:49]:
You know, they're not an Apple luxury keyboard, but it's serviceable. It's pretty decent. Power on, power off. Works as you'd expect it to. Like some of the, some of the things that's been weird on the Raspberry PIs throughout the years pretty much just work here. Yeah, so far it's been a perfectly serviceable little machine. And then the thing that comes with it, and I've not tested this out yet either, I have plans for it, but there's a gizmo that comes with it and it's this, this gizmo which, it's a block. It's got two USB C ports on one side, but then on the other side it's got the 40 pin Raspberry PI connector.

Jonathan Bennett [00:05:32]:
So the idea is that you can pop this thing onto the side of the laptop case and it breaks out with some black magic. It breaks out that 40 pin connector for you. So if you've got something like a Raspberry PI hat, which I will. I've got some PI hats I want to play with to be able to then extend it out to the side and actually be able to use it. And you know, we talked about the. The Crow View was another one of these similar ideas. The problem with the Crow View is not only it let you use Raspberry PI hat, but it did that by putting the entire Raspberry PI external to the, to the laptop. And I said at the time, somebody needs to make one of these that has a CM5, the compute module.

Jonathan Bennett [00:06:19]:
Unless you just put a CM5 in the laptop. Well, that's what this is. That's what Argon 40 has done. And so far I like it. I will use it some. I will get the hat going, make sure all that stuff again, get the thermal, the thermal sorted on it as well. But yeah, I think it'll be a service, really serviceable way to have a Raspberry PI. Now, is a Raspberry PI 5 actually going to replace my framework 16 or my desktop? No, not for that kind of stuff, but for just having something to toss around to do a little bit of web browsing on? Yeah, maybe.

Jonathan Bennett [00:06:52]:
We'll see. So that is. That is my one up.

Jeff Massie [00:06:57]:
So there was no cooling on it. Is it just you replace the COVID and is there like a fan or something to have some airflow in there?

Jonathan Bennett [00:07:04]:
I think there is a fan in there, but the. I've got screws sitting out of it so I can't grab it. But it's like a metal strip that goes over that. It's. It's solid metal and so once I get the thermal pads on there, that entire metal strip will turn into a passive heat sink. Okay.

Jeff Massie [00:07:23]:
I just, I just wondered because now normally Raspberry PIs don't have any active cooling on them. Right. But I mean, kind of open chassis.

Jonathan Bennett [00:07:32]:
Usually they are designed that they will never. Well, they will never be dangerous.

Jeff Massie [00:07:38]:
Right.

Jonathan Bennett [00:07:39]:
No matter what you do to one, it will not overheat and set anything on fire. And they are also designed that they will not burn themselves out. But particularly with the PI 5, you get much better performance on them if you have active cooling, or at least more active than just having it out in space.

Jeff Massie [00:07:58]:
Right.

Jonathan Bennett [00:07:59]:
So. But it's, you know, it's, it's to be seen exactly how well that thing performs once I get it all put together.

Ken McDonald [00:08:06]:
Yeah, nice. Yeah. With my Raspberry PI 5, I did put the cooling fan that they included with it in, so it would help to keep it cooler.

Jonathan Bennett [00:08:16]:
Yeah, I, I would say, particularly if you're going to try to use the PI 5, like as a desktop replacement, you do want to do some active.

Ken McDonald [00:08:22]:
Cooling on it or for a standalone Kodi device, probably.

Jonathan Bennett [00:08:31]:
That, that depends upon what exactly. You know, like are you trying to run 4k through it or are you just, you know, playing SNES on it? You're emulating snes. Right. Like you're. That, that can be different things. But yeah, the PI 5 is going to be happier with active cooling, but will not kill itself without it. All right.

Jeff Massie [00:08:51]:
Yes, Just one, one comment in there is. So when we say active cooling, we mean additional. We should be saying additional cooling. Not necessarily active, but passive as well.

Jonathan Bennett [00:09:00]:
Just. Well, you've got, you've got two different. Right. You've got two different things that we could be talking about there. I use active cooling on purpose, but you've got, you could have additional cooling that's passive and that is just a heat sink. Active cooling essentially means a fan. It essentially means you've got a fan that is blowing onto either the chip or the heatsink. Usually the way that works is you have a heatsink pasted on and then a fan blowing over it.

Jonathan Bennett [00:09:26]:
And that's your typical active cooling. I know people have done things like water cool Raspberry PIs, but that's just a little, it's just for fun. There's no real reason to want to do that.

Ken McDonald [00:09:36]:
Just to see if they can do it.

Jonathan Bennett [00:09:38]:
Just to be able to say that, yes, they have a water cooled pie. Yeah, absolutely. All right, well, we've got some stories to cover and we're going to let Ken go first and he's going to tell us about one of his favorite programs that's coming up right after this.

Leo Laporte [00:09:53]:
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Leo Laporte [00:13:40]:
Thank you Jonathan and crew, Back to Untitled Linux Show.

Ken McDonald [00:13:45]:
Well, Jonathan, this week we hear from Bobby Borisov and Marcus Nestor. They both wrote about the latest stable version of my favorite ebook management software. Yes, I'm talking about calibrating or caliber version 9.0. And yes, I still fall into that old habit with that. The most visible change in Caliber is the new Bookshelf View, which presents libraries as shelves lined with book spines. In fact, I was trying that out last night. It looks really interesting. I'll probably still just go with having a table listing all my things when I'm going through my most of the time.

Ken McDonald [00:14:27]:
But the ebook viewer now has an Edit book button in its controls to let you edit the current book when it's in an edible format such as ePub, the old AZW3, or kePub. Also new in calibre 9 is the ability to type a page number in the ebook viewer to go to that page instead of scrolling through existing pages. In the past, I would be sitting there holding down the left or right arrow key to go backwards or forwards until I got to the spot I was looking for. This should make that a lot Easier now. Linux systems now have momentum based scrolling for the ebook list when using high resolution scroll devices like touchpads. Numerous bug fixes include speeding up caliber shutdown time by a couple of seconds, fixing spurious unreferenced warnings for smil media overlay audio files. I'm waiting to see how that works and disabling GPU acceleration for QT Webengine by default to prevent crashes on some older systems. Now for more details, since I just hit some of the highlights, follow the links in our show notes to read Bobby and Marcus's article and they even have a link to the release notes that Covid put out.

Jonathan Bennett [00:15:55]:
Cool. Do you use. You actually do your ebook reading on your Linux computer, right? Because one of the other things that Calibre really supports is syncing to your other devices.

Ken McDonald [00:16:07]:
It depends. I actually will sync the ebook to my use caliber to transfer ebooks to my Chromebook and my phone and a Kindle Fire 7 HD that I have.

Jonathan Bennett [00:16:26]:
Do you have an Android phone?

Ken McDonald [00:16:28]:
Yeah.

Jonathan Bennett [00:16:29]:
What ebook reader do you use on the Android phone?

Ken McDonald [00:16:31]:
Well, on the Android phone, on the Chromebook and on the Kindle, I use Fbreader.

Jonathan Bennett [00:16:38]:
Fbreader. All right, I will have to look into that one. I'm getting like an 8 inch tablet coming in here in another few days.

Ken McDonald [00:16:46]:
And the reason why I use that one is it has a network where basically it sits up. So it uses a folder on your Google Drive to sync between the various devices that it's set up on.

Jonathan Bennett [00:16:59]:
Oh, cool.

Ken McDonald [00:17:00]:
That way I can move from one device to another that picks up at the same spot.

Jonathan Bennett [00:17:06]:
Andy. All right, yeah, like I said, I've got the Android tablet coming in and so I think I may do a caliber install and try to set it up with an Android app and see what happens.

Ken McDonald [00:17:19]:
But yeah, you'll want to figure out where you want to store your master library of ebooks. Or you may decide that you want to have different libraries depending on what the ebook's about. Like one for just fiction, one for. One for your reference material, and then a third one for juvenile fiction.

Jonathan Bennett [00:17:46]:
Right.

Ken McDonald [00:17:48]:
Move between the three and Caliber, depending on which ebook or ebooks you want to sync up to whichever device you're wanting.

Jonathan Bennett [00:18:00]:
Yep. All right, well, let's talk now about some hardware. Something a little bit more powerful than the Raspberry PI 5. Jeff's got a story for us about.

Ken McDonald [00:18:12]:
Just a little bit more powerful.

Jonathan Bennett [00:18:14]:
A little more powerful. Jeff, what's up?

Jeff Massie [00:18:17]:
Yeah, a little, you know, maybe 256 times more powerful. So we're looking at AMD Epyc 9755 versus a Xeon 6, Granite Rapids. Now, those of you in the server arena are probably aware that these chips are not new. They were both released in the fall of 2024, so they're a little over a year old. So why is Michael Larable over at Pharonix doing a story on him? Well, there's a couple of reasons. First, he did a fresh set of tests on these CPUs about a month ago because one of his servers died, he had a new one and he wanted to rerun the tests. Now, these are both the AMD and intel systems are two CPU boards. The systems hold two CPUs, and each CPU has 120 cores and 256 threads.

Jeff Massie [00:19:10]:
So each system will then have 256 cores and 512 threads. Now, Michael then talks about how over the holidays he reworked the benchmark tests. Some were updated to newer versions, some were set to increase the load, to work the systems harder, and there's new tests added. Now, he did mention, you know, because of future hardware coming, things become more powerful, he wanted to kind of crank up the difficulty of some of these benchmarks. Now, when he did all this, he redid the, did more tests, and since this was a new set of benchmarks, he took the time to run over 500 benchmarks on each system to really put them through their paces. Now, both systems were running Ubuntu 25.10 with the 6.18.1 kernel, and they were using the gcc 15.2 compiler, and both systems were running 24 sticks of 64 gigabyte DDR5 memory. So, yeah, it's a lot of memory. Yeah, in my head I can't do 24 times 64, but it's a lot.

Jeff Massie [00:20:22]:
Michael also noted that when he was taking power measurements, it was only done for the cpu because while the EPYC is still on the AMD reference platform, but the intel system is the one that died. So it's now using a gigabyte R284, a 92AAL1 board. So since there's only one reference platform, he didn't think it seemed fair to run the total system power on both these because you're kind of now comparing apples to oranges, since one's a reference board, one's an aftermarket board board, so. And for those that don't know, he tries to keep the hardware as the same or similar as much as he can. For example, if they were both on reference platforms, he would have used the system numbers. Now, pure performance wise, it wasn't a shock as the AMD Epic came out on top by a very noticeable margin. Power versus performance is also captured in the test. And that kind of shows that Epic does take more power sometimes.

Jeff Massie [00:21:25]:
But based on the kind of workloads you do, the power per unit work done matters. So power and power efficiency is huge for these types of chips because when you have hundreds or thousands of them in a server farm, the power bill becomes enormous. And not to mention you have to cool all these servers. And depending on the overall heat load, the method of cooling might need to be changed or supplemented or it can. Extra power can really cause a lot of cascading effects and issues you're going to have to deal with. And all of them cost money and probably a lot of money. Now, if this was the end of the story, I might not have picked it up. It isn't really much different than we've seen in the past, but this next item I thought was really cool.

Jeff Massie [00:22:12]:
So Michael said he ran 500 tests. And I often say, you know, you hear me, you hear me the mantra, look at the tests and match your specific workload to find out the best solution is for you. Because there were a few tests, for example, where intel just ran away with the result. On average it didn't. But certain, certain things it handles really well. Now, scrolling through 500 tests to find what you want is a task of drudgery. Out of 500 tests, maybe you only care about 10 of them and you might not even be 100% sure which benchmarks are a good analog for your workload. Well, no more.

Jeff Massie [00:22:48]:
Michael added a new summary page and at the bottom of the article linked in the show notes, there's a link to a new summary page which is interactive. So when you click on that link, that page that opens up, there are two columns on the left and the first is workload categories which have items like audio encoding, time code compilation, linear algebra, linear algebra, molecular dynamics, and many others. I just cherry picked a few in there. There's tons of them in there. The second column is individual workloads, so all the specific benchmarks marks are shown. So that's where you'll find like your seven zip compression, your blender test, FFmpeg and so on. Now I say interactive. So for example, you click on audio encoding.

Jeff Massie [00:23:39]:
The long list of individual workloads will only show four items in this case, so that you can just see which specific individual tests align with the audio encoding. Now, in the center of the page will be the geometric mean of all those tests of the four, and then the individual tests results below that. So in this case, out of the four tests, maybe, and maybe you only, in this case, you only care about FLAC encoding. Well, clicking the FLAC encoding on the individual tests, now there's only four. So you click on it. Now that summary table will then shrink to just the FLAC results. And on all these below the results, and like in this case the FLAC results, you'll be all the details of how the test was run, you know, all the hardware details, the software specifics, you know, kernel compile, flags, all the full detail. So if you want to have any question how it's run, it's in this monster block of texts of exactly how everything was set up.

Jeff Massie [00:24:46]:
Now not only though will you see the performance numbers above the result page. There are other buttons to look at, you know, not only performance, but power efficiency. And there's a value performance per dollar. And then there's three different sorting methods. So you could, you know, you can have, you can look alphabetical results, you know, biggest to smallest you get, so you can sort through how you want. Now the only issue playing around with this that I had was I was just looking at FLAC results, for example, and I was on performance. Well, then I was like, oh, let's, let's look at power efficiency, see how it, see how it handles it. Well, it reloads the whole full table again.

Jeff Massie [00:25:30]:
So then I have to go back and select audio encoding again and then select the FLAC option again. So I can't just cycle through the three different options there. You kind of have to reselect each time you jump a different category. I can get the information I want. It's just that you're not going to go, say, toggle between performance and value per work, per work unit really quickly. And it's not bad. I mean, it takes a couple seconds to load, then you click and maybe a second to summarize. So it's pretty quick.

Jeff Massie [00:26:12]:
It's just not instantaneous like you think it would be. But you know what, I think it's still really awesome. And I can cut out a ton of the tests that I don't really care about and just focus on the ones I do. Because sometimes you look at these tests, there's ones in there and like, I don't even know what the heck this is for. And other than the grouping it's near, you're like, I don't even know what this is. I guess it's some kind of encoding or compile because it's kind of around other ones I recognize. But now you'll have a very definitive. Oh yes, this is exactly what I want.

Jeff Massie [00:26:49]:
So take a look at the article in the show notes and have a look and play with the results too. It's pretty cool. Happy data mining.

Jonathan Bennett [00:26:56]:
Yeah, that's super cool. I like his, I like his new, his new interface to look through all of those. That's really useful. Hopefully other. Other things that he benchmarks will get the same treatment.

Ken McDonald [00:27:07]:
How cheap are the AMD EPYC chips?

Jonathan Bennett [00:27:10]:
Almost $10,000.

Ken McDonald [00:27:12]:
Yeah that'll break my bank.

Jonathan Bennett [00:27:16]:
Yeah.

Jeff Massie [00:27:16]:
Well and then, then you need two of them for the board because these are. These are dual CPU boards. And then 16 times 64 DDR5.

Jonathan Bennett [00:27:27]:
Yeah, that's the expensive thing right now. Yeah.

Ken McDonald [00:27:29]:
So I guess I wouldn't go into my existing workstation.

Jonathan Bennett [00:27:33]:
No. Probably wouldn't even fit in the case. That's funny.

Jeff Massie [00:27:37]:
Yeah, they're and to cool those. So if anybody hasn't ever seen them, they're. They're stacked vertical and very tightly spaced. But they're set so that usually on servers you have fans at the front and back or just at the back or. And so you get pretty extreme airflow across them. And if anybody hasn't seen them the.

Ken McDonald [00:28:03]:
Back in a vacuum at the front.

Jeff Massie [00:28:07]:
Actually they kind of do.

Jonathan Bennett [00:28:09]:
But it depends. It depends upon the data center. Right. I've seen, I've seen some data centers where it's just open front and back and you've got the fans inside of the case doing everything. But then apparently some data centers will actually be like hot aisle or cold aisle and so that it, it'll. It'll air condition. It'll air condition the front of the cases and then they all blow their hot air into the back and then that's like a separate plenum area. Some, some data center setups for air conditioning is really impressive.

Ken McDonald [00:28:36]:
And then they take that hot air and run it out through an exhaust or if they it.

Jeff Massie [00:28:44]:
So what you do is most of the modern ones now are at least hot aisle, cold aisle. So you have these and these fans and these servers are not like your regular PC fans. They scream and they are. I mean they have guards because they will take your finger off. They are serious fans.

Jonathan Bennett [00:29:01]:
Yes.

Jeff Massie [00:29:01]:
And outside room is chilled and your hot aisle has, is pulling air up. So you have your server stacked back to back in an enclosed space and it's the ends are capped and the tops are cap. So it's, it's its own little chamber. It's pulling air up into air circulators to reach the air. Now there's a lot of, because of the power in the chips now there's a lot of people are looking at direct water cooling in servers. Now there's even, you know, people are looking at immersion and immersing the whole board in a tank to help cool it better. And so that not only is your CPU getting cooled your memory, the other chips on the board are getting cooled. So that's, that's some stuff going on.

Jeff Massie [00:29:54]:
There's, there's a lot of technology going into. How do you keep these things cool? And you know, if you, if you just have a few. You don't need hot aisle, cold aisle. I mean, that's the bare minimum though, if you really have a server farm. And then up from there is where you start getting some liquid solutions. You start getting, you know, other, other solutions.

Jonathan Bennett [00:30:16]:
But.

Jeff Massie [00:30:17]:
And I, and I will add keys. 512 said it's around 38,000 for two terabytes of RAM. And he said it's. These are running about one and a half so little below 38,000 just for the memory.

Jonathan Bennett [00:30:31]:
Still a lot of money, which technically.

Jeff Massie [00:30:34]:
Is more than two of the CPUs.

Jonathan Bennett [00:30:36]:
Yeah.

Ken McDonald [00:30:39]:
Thanks for letting me know that. There's another update that came out today that fixes several bug fixes that were found with three 9.0 oh of caliber.

Jonathan Bennett [00:30:50]:
Yes. Calibre 9.1 came out on the day we recorded this episode. Um, so yeah, okay, I've got some stuff to talk about now and I too will take a bit of time to get through all of this. So I'm going to go ahead and jump to that. We're going to talk about desktops for a bit. Not the hardware, but the desktop environments. And up first we got a video from Brody, Brody Robertson, talking about KDE's new. Well, it's not even out yet.

Jonathan Bennett [00:31:20]:
It's still a pull request. KDE's VR mode, which this is obviously. It's obviously based on what the new Apple headset does. I've seen screenshots of people using this, but this is for Linux machines in VR under kde. And I'll include the link to the actual pull request. Now there's something really fun that is part of this and it's that at the very top of the pull request there is the statement, I do not work for Valve. I'm just doing this in my spare time. This is something Brody points out too.

Jonathan Bennett [00:32:07]:
The last few really fun things that we've seen come along for KDE and for Linux in general. Valve has secretly been paying for it and so Stanislav Alexandrov wants us to know that this is not one of those. He is just doing it because he finds it funny fun. However, if you are going to get a Steam frame, this is something that would be very interesting to do with it. And maybe he has a developer kit for it. I don't know, we'll find out. But yeah, it's the idea of let's map individual windows. Well, you have like a KDE desktop in the center.

Jonathan Bennett [00:32:46]:
If you go and watch the video, you've got a KDE desktop floating in 3D space in the center and you can open applications and map them into 3.3D space so that you have essentially your workstation as if you have a, you know, a 10 monitor battle station. You can just have them floating in space. Which it's a super cool thing. Personally, I don't know how practical this is, but you know, for folks that really like to spend all of their time in VR, there you go. Makes a lot of sense. I think it would be fun to play with, right? Like this is something that at least for me is going to be fun to play with a couple of times at some point, but probably not super duper practical long term. And then also in KDE news, we've got the plasma. Well this week in Plasma blog post is out and one of the really interesting things here is that Plasma 6.7 is getting the old Air Plasma styling.

Jonathan Bennett [00:33:46]:
The Aehr Desktop 4 theme, that's the one that debuted with KDE 4 is coming back and looking at it again. I hate to say this twice, but it reminds me of the new Apple Liquid Glass. It's got sort of that look to it, but that's something that's been around in KDE since back in the old days and it's coming back. There's a couple of other things like the Wayland ext background effect v1 protocol to do things like background blur that's coming to Plasma67. Some fixes for 6.6 global shortcut for clearing notification history. Oh my goodness, I want that. I end up with a lot of notifications sitting various things like emoji selectors, cursor themes are getting more accurate previews. They fixed a bug where intensive Alt tab usage could cause a black screen.

Jonathan Bennett [00:34:45]:
All kinds of fun stuff happening in Plasma 6.6 and 67. We're talking about this week. And then the last thing to mention here is not to leave Cosmic out. Cosmic is getting a new release and some new upcoming things have been revealed. Carl Ritchell talked about things like the Frosted Glass effect is coming to the Cosmic desktop. And they've got some previews of what that looks like, which is pretty nice looking. It looks pretty impressive. And then there's just other rough edges being sanded off of Cosmic animations coming.

Jonathan Bennett [00:35:30]:
Just a fix for Bluetooth, for Bluetooth being automatically re enabled. And it's just the, the things that you expect, like the niceties, the frosting, let's put it that way, that you expect on a modern desktop environment that maybe Cosmic shipped without. They are now going back and putting those things back on. So it seems like Cosmic is really becoming a player, becoming a real alternative for the Linux desktop. And at least for me, right now the only two interesting desktops are KDE and Cosmic. All of the rest are dead to me. I'm just not terribly interested in them. These are the two that I have my eyes on.

Jonathan Bennett [00:36:19]:
And I don't know, maybe there's a Cosmic future for me on one of my machines. We'll have to see. But a lot going on in the desktop environments these days, exciting stuff and lots of this fun stuff coming.

Ken McDonald [00:36:32]:
So what desktop would you be least likely to pick?

Jonathan Bennett [00:36:36]:
Probably XFCE or.

Ken McDonald [00:36:40]:
So should I remove my. The next article from the show notes?

Jonathan Bennett [00:36:44]:
No, no, you can cover it. I'm just not going to run it.

Jeff Massie [00:36:47]:
I was gonna say you're hurting Ken's feelings now because I would, I would say mine would be cde.

Jonathan Bennett [00:36:56]:
Yeah.

Jeff Massie [00:36:56]:
Remembers that.

Jonathan Bennett [00:37:00]:
Yeah, Like, I just, I like the sort of full fat, you know, I ran Gnome for a while. Gnome's still not my favorite these days. I really like kde. I really do. I dig what they've done with it, particularly with the most recent stuff like with the KDE 6 and some of the fun things that have come, you know, I mean, you could, you can have interactive, you can put your screen savers on your desktop. And so when you, when, when you have screen, when you have Windows that's not full screen, you can have fun things moving under your desk, like just like that kind of stuff.

Jeff Massie [00:37:36]:
Well, and it's not, it's not the memory hog it used to be. They got rid of that like a couple generations ago. Yeah, I mean, oh my God, it's so huge and bloated. No.

Ken McDonald [00:37:45]:
Is that KDE4?

Jonathan Bennett [00:37:48]:
Yeah. Look at this, look at this. Those, those of you that, that can see. I mean, look at this. This is the kind of thing that you can do in KDE. I've got, I've got the, you know, the, the 80s style synthwave rolling hills grid. I know that sounds really weird, but it, that is what it is as my wallpaper and that's just something that works. It's fun.

Jonathan Bennett [00:38:14]:
Like I said, I just love all of these fun extra bits. The frosting, I like the frosting on my desktop.

Jeff Massie [00:38:22]:
And for those that can't see, I'd say it's the average person. Definition would be kind of rolling hills that are moving, but they're on just a mesh grid like an old 80s video game.

Ken McDonald [00:38:37]:
And I'm using Ubuntu Studio 2510 which has KDE. And here's my desktop.

Jonathan Bennett [00:38:48]:
Hang on, hang on. There we go. There's your desktop. Yep. It's very simple. Says that it seems like a waste of CPU cycles. Actually that plugin is fairly smart. And when you don't have a.

Jonathan Bennett [00:39:09]:
When your Windows are full screen, it freezes it, it does not continue to render it. It's only when you want to look at it. It's not wasting any cycles at all.

Ken McDonald [00:39:22]:
Right now with everything I've got running, I'm only using 21% of my AMD Ryzen 7.

Jeff Massie [00:39:31]:
And Wizarding the Xfce. You said very light on resources. KDE is not that much different anymore. I've seen comparisons where people have actually done benchmarking between the two. They're not that far apart. It's pretty close nowadays.

Jonathan Bennett [00:39:51]:
Indeed. Yeah, it really is.

Jeff Massie [00:39:53]:
And if you're worried about every CPU cycle, so you got like a really old processor and you're fighting it, you can turn all that stuff off. I mean it's all optional. So you can make it really slim if you really want to and just go, I'm going to turn off all these composting things and all the cool stuff and.

Jonathan Bennett [00:40:15]:
Yeah, all right. Well, so we were talking about desktop environments and what I don't use anymore. And one of the ones that I don't use is gnome. But there are a few things inside of GNOME that I still really like. I found really useful. Some of the utilities that start with the letter G. Right. It's like this, this show brought to you by the letter G.

Jonathan Bennett [00:40:36]:
And Ken is going to tell us about an update of one of those right after this.

Ken McDonald [00:40:43]:
Well, Jonathan, I'm going to have to correct you. I'm not going to be talking about anything from gnome. I'm actually going to be talking about XFCE since this week Bobby and Marcus also wrote about the XFCE project working on a brand new Wayland compositor for their lightweight desktop environment, which will be used as an alternative to the current window manager to support Wayland sessions. Currently XFCE uses XFWM4 for X11 sessions. Now it will be replaced by XFWL4, a brand new Wayland compositor designed to offer the same functionality and behavior. Now, XFCE core developer Brian Terricon and I do apologize if I'm mispronouncing that, but he is leading the work and is going to be reusing the existing configuration file Dialogues and X F comp settings for the from the XFWM4 window manager. Now, XFWL4 will not be based on the existing XFWM4 code. Instead it will be written from scratch in Rust using Smitha building blocks.

Ken McDonald [00:42:08]:
Jonathan is Smitha from gno.

Jonathan Bennett [00:42:11]:
I was thinking about that. I'm trying to remember if anybody else is using that. Is it Smith A Is that part of what is Cosmic as well?

Ken McDonald [00:42:21]:
It's possible. I'd have to do some research on that, but as always you can get more details from Bobby and Marcus's article about what XFCE is doing.

Jonathan Bennett [00:42:33]:
Yeah, it looks like it is. It looks like Cosmic is part of is working on Smithy as well. So Cosmic and XFCE are going to have some similar roots now as they enter the, the Wayland era. And I have to say in my defense, in the show notes, Ken said that he was going to do a, a a project that starts with a G. I'm not going to spoil it for everybody. And he, I called it out and then he switched it on me. So thanks for that. Appreciate that.

Jonathan Bennett [00:43:01]:
Anyway, we'll get to that here in a bit. Interesting to see XFCE coming around to Wayland and interesting to see that they have the funding to be able to do this too. Like that's really, that's actually really neat to see that they've, they've raised enough money to hire somebody one of to take one of their developers and bring him on full time to be able to work on this. Like, that's very cool. I like to see that. Good for them. Okay, Jeff, it's time to talk about Team Green.

Jeff Massie [00:43:31]:
Yeah, well, you know, we did some work. Let's do a little play.

Jonathan Bennett [00:43:35]:
It's time to play.

Jeff Massie [00:43:36]:
Yeah. So it At CES this year, Nvidia announced that their Nvidia now service is going to be coming to Linux. Well, it's shown up as a flatpak now. Now I should note that this is still in beta. So if things are not perfect, be aware they're still putting polish on the final product. So just, just be forewarned, there could, you know, there could be dragons beyond this point. Now before we go too far, I should fill in those who are asking, what is Nvidia now? Nvidia now is a service where you can play games locally, but the heavy lifting is done on Nvidia servers remotely. You do need a modern GPU that can support H264, H265 Vulkan video support.

Jeff Massie [00:44:22]:
Nvidia hasn't yet supported the Vulkan Video AV1 codecs with GeForce now on Linux. But so we're stuck right now with264,265 until they get AV1 working. If you're using Nvidia graphics on the Nvidia 580 series or newer is what's recommended. And they say while using an Xorg session, now it's recommended. It's, you know, with Wayland, you know, your mileage may vary, but again, it's still beta. If you're using intel or AMD Radeon graphics, you need recommended Mesa 24.2 or greater and it's recommended to use that with Wayland. So just, just be aware there's some basic requirements. Now I also need to mention that GeForce now is pretty much a paid service.

Jeff Massie [00:45:16]:
I say pretty much because there is a free tier, but you only get one hour game session. And now you can fire up another session right after. But you know, once, once an hour you're gonna, you're gonna have that break in gameplay where you gotta jump back in. You're also limited to 1080p resolution at 60 frames per second. And you only have access to 2000 games only where the paid versions get 4000 plus the free version also has ads. Now they do have a performance which is kind of their middle tier with no ads. 9.99amonth or basically $10 a month, you get higher resolution, more games, longer play times, you know, things like that. And then they have a top Tier which is 1999amonth with even more resolution.

Jeff Massie [00:46:07]:
You know, more frames per second, faster queue times getting on the service. You know it, you pay more, you get a little more. So now while I did say you need a newer GPU which supports the correct codecs, but because of all the work being done on the Nvidia servers, you don't need that good a local hardware. So your video card has to support the right codecs, but it doesn't have to be super powerful. You don't need something really crazy. It's just display. Your local system is kind of like a dumb terminal. For the most part, you're just a display device.

Jeff Massie [00:46:51]:
If you want to get this or at least try it out, you can take a look at the article in the show notes to get the link to download the Flatpak from Nvidia. Now you can find it on flathub, but I'm not sure how recent it is and the package is also unverified. So personally I would get to link in the show notes or just go directly to Nvidia's website and just download the Flatpak from there just so you get the latest greatest and it's a verified source. Now, on a personal editorial note, I think this could be a good stopgap for those who either can't afford a big computer, powerful enough hardware, or those who play games which maybe won't run on Proton locally. Now, personally, I don't see it replacing Steam, especially for me locally. But I could see if I had some friends playing a game which doesn't run on Linux and I, you know, I didn't know how or I for some reason couldn't dual boot, you know, into Windows. This, this might let me play those games. And I hear from people that they play games that normally they can't through GeForce.

Jeff Massie [00:48:03]:
Now, now, because realistically, I don't really honestly see much of a difference with this than the Steam remote play ability where you can have a powerful PC somewhere in your house doing the rendering and you're playing it somewhere else on your house in a less powerful device, kind of. Except this, you know, you're using Nvidia Server somewhere. Now, I don't, I don't think I would get it and I'm not advocating for it, but you know, I'd like to have the option out there for everyone to decide on their own. And you know, if there's one thing that Linux users love, its choices. And now we have another one. So happy gaming.

Jonathan Bennett [00:48:44]:
Yeah. Now, can those of us that use AMD video cards, is it possible to run Nvidia now with an AMD video card?

Jeff Massie [00:48:53]:
Yes, and they want it. They. You have to have Mesa 20.24.2 or greater. They recommend it and they recommend you're on Wayland, both AMD and intel, so, so all three video card companies you can they support.

Jonathan Bennett [00:49:11]:
Very cool.

Ken McDonald [00:49:13]:
And for those that just want to try it without putting out any money, there is a free tier.

Jonathan Bennett [00:49:20]:
Yeah, that's the one with only 2000 games. It's got ads though and I, I don't think I could do that like interrupted did you say it was once an hour?

Jeff Massie [00:49:32]:
Once an hour. So every hour you get logged off and then you got to log in again and there's a server queue and they say the average time for the free tier is about two minutes. So you probably have a two minute pause waiting to get back into the server queue. The middle tier has a queue but it's usually under two minutes. You get a little more priority and if you pay for the full one there's. You kind of jump to the front of the queue and get in quickly and it's like the middle tier, the first paid tier is I think six hours gameplay and the primo tier is like eight hours of uninterrupted gameplay. And then after eight hours you will have to re log back in.

Jonathan Bennett [00:50:15]:
But yeah, yeah, for, for legal, legal purposes. Right. They don't want to be responsible for anybody playing for over eight hours. Yeah, guys have had heart attack and died because of that.

Ken McDonald [00:50:26]:
But the good news is you can try before you buy.

Jeff Massie [00:50:30]:
Yeah, yeah, you totally can. And even if you're just like oh, I can't play whatever favorite game, okay, now you can play it. Now you. I don't know if there's extra fees in getting the games or how that quite works or if you just have access to them and you can play them however you want without. I don't know how that works to be honest.

Ken McDonald [00:50:55]:
But maybe next week Rob can give us a review of it.

Jeff Massie [00:51:01]:
Yeah, if we can get him into Linux and not booting into Windows all the time.

Jonathan Bennett [00:51:04]:
Yeah. All right, let's talk about remote desktop then. So this is I guess very similar, a very similar idea. Although we're going to talk about it for business, not for gaming. Those that have been around the sort of Linux desktop world for a while, you may know the bit of a. The drama around vnc. And so there was, I think real VNC was first and then there was tight VNC and now there's Tiger VNC and each of these projects have like started gone really well and then either go paid only or development stops on them. I think we finally have one that is still being developed in TigerVNC and I say that because we have a story here that TigerVNC had the 1.16 release this past week and it's got some interesting stuff in it.

Jonathan Bennett [00:52:09]:
Obviously it's got the normal bug fixes that you would imagine. It has official support for RHEL10, which will be important for some of us, but it has the W0VNC server to show share Wayland desktops and of course that is something that has been complained about when talking about the Wayland versus X11 thing. And so we now have Tiger VNC which brings official support for doing that. So you can do VNC for your whole Wayland desktop. Now I've not set this up myself, haven't had any deal, so I don't know how well or how poorly it works, but it should now be a usable option. You get some more keyboard shortcuts like F8 apparently will let you go into full screen mode and do some key redirects. So that sounds pretty useful. It's still on sourceforge.

Jonathan Bennett [00:53:07]:
Just to give you an idea of how creaky the VNC world is, Tiger VNC is still available on sourceforge and man, I don't know about you guys but for me that's generally a sign that oh, this project has been around for a while. One of the other interesting notes is that Ubuntu 20.04 and RHEL 7 are no longer officially supported. But yeah, TigerVNC 1.16, it's out there, it's ready to go, it still has a Java Viewer in it. I mean goodness, VNC has been around for a long time.

Ken McDonald [00:53:49]:
But at least that they've added support for red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.

Jonathan Bennett [00:53:54]:
Yes, yeah, Reltan. I think Wayland. I think the Wayland support is the bigger deal, honestly. Yeah, the W0VNC server, I wonder how that works under the hood. I'm sure there was long drawn out, five year long fight inside the Wayland Git repository before they were able to make that work.

Jeff Massie [00:54:18]:
And like I said, VNC has been around a long time. Yes, I've used a few of those different VNCs you rattle off over the years.

Jonathan Bennett [00:54:28]:
Yep, it's been quite the, quite the, quite the trip. You got to set something up for somebody particularly trying to do like VNC on Windows was always real interesting.

Ken McDonald [00:54:39]:
Especially when Windows wants to push the rdp.

Jonathan Bennett [00:54:43]:
Yeah, yeah, sure. All right, let's see now. Now it is about time to get Ken to talk about an application that starts with a G and assuming that he has not pulled something else out of his hat, we're going to do that right after this.

Ken McDonald [00:55:03]:
Yes, Jonathan, this time I am going to talk about something that begins with G, though I don't really think of it as being associated with Gnome anymore, because this week Bobby Borisov and Marcus Nestor also wrote about the release of g parted version 1.8 open source partition editor software and gparted live 1.8.02. Now, gparted 1.8 resolved several crash scenarios, including failures caused by missing icon resource and crashes in command status when the application is compiled. Without optimization, file system operations are now safer and more consistent. Gparted now erases file system signatures before all file system copy operations, reducing the risk of conflicts or residual metadata during partition duplication. GPARTED 1.8 also improves support for FAT file systems by fixing a hang when setting FAT labels that match a root folder entry, as well as an issue where GPARTed displayed error messages along with the fat label. GPARTed Live 1.8.02 is now built from the Debian SID repository as of January 27, 2026, so it's a very recent build and it's providing newer core components than previous images. The Linux kernel has been updated to version 6.18.5, improving hardware support and compatibility across a wider range of systems. It also includes a mechanism to avoid blank screen issues on some systems, as well as all the latest package updates, bug fixes, and security patches from the upstream Debian repositories.

Ken McDonald [00:57:10]:
I'm going to recommend checking out Bobby and Marcus's articles for more details, since again, I'm just touching on the highlights from their articles.

Jonathan Bennett [00:57:20]:
Yeah, I discovered I discovered gparted years ago because I got tired of doing parthead on the command line because that gets fiddly and gparta just it tends to just work.

Ken McDonald [00:57:35]:
And the gharted Live is great for when you're wanting to mess around with a system that has Windows on it already.

Jonathan Bennett [00:57:43]:
Yeah, I usually will. Just I've got a some Fedora Live discs I'll do that and then if you can get online you can go install G Parted real easy.

Jeff Massie [00:57:52]:
I might be a little weird, but I use G Parted and K Parted so they're both front ends. It depends what I'm trying to do because some, you know, the way they display it works better for to use one rather than the other or you know, it's not that you can't do it, it's just like oh this works better for this and this works better for that and just by how they graphically display things. But it's the same core right?

Ken McDonald [00:58:20]:
Since I've got G Parted Live on my ventoy that what I default to.

Jonathan Bennett [00:58:26]:
Yeah, that makes sense, that makes sense. It's super, super useful though to be able to do, do all this, this disk manipulation stuff, particularly from a gui. It's handy for a GUI though.

Ken McDonald [00:58:39]:
There's not much to manipulate when it's only a 58 gigabyte drive.

Jonathan Bennett [00:58:44]:
Yeah, I suppose that's a very small hard drive. Have not used guess what that's in a long time. I mean that sounds like a netbook size hard Drive.

Ken McDonald [00:58:56]:
It's a 2024 HP Laptop 14DQ3XXX.

Jeff Massie [00:59:05]:
2024?

Ken McDonald [00:59:09]:
Yeah, bought at Walmart.

Jeff Massie [00:59:15]:
I was, I was thinking if you were in 2014 I would have went oh okay. Yeah.

Ken McDonald [00:59:20]:
I don't know where it was bought. I'm assuming it was bought through Amazon.

Jonathan Bennett [00:59:24]:
Oh that could be. I know that there was there for a while there were some very sketchy low spec machines bought at stores like Walmart and other places and it's like outdated the moment you brought them home.

Ken McDonald [00:59:41]:
Yep.

Jeff Massie [00:59:42]:
First thing I wanted to do was Update the Windows 11.

Ken McDonald [00:59:46]:
Now I'm just trying to figure out with that with an Intel Celeron and that much memory or let's talk about space.

Jonathan Bennett [00:59:54]:
Yeah, let's talk about the upgrade path for this computer. You take the computer and you drop it in the trash can and then you go and get an upgrade.

Ken McDonald [01:00:03]:
You wouldn't put a Linux distribution on it and use it as a thin.

Jonathan Bennett [01:00:06]:
Client man, in some cases those things are so underpowered you're not even going to have a good time running Linux on them.

Jeff Massie [01:00:13]:
Yeah, they're kind of spare parts and a lot of times they're. Everything's soldered in so you can't upgrade them. They, you know. Well can you add a video card? It doesn't even have the connector for it. It's the, there's nothing you can do with shop.

Jonathan Bennett [01:00:25]:
I've got a, I've got a buddy that talks about how that some of these factories, what they'll, what they'll do is they, they sweep the floors and then they take all the, the bits that they found fall into the floor and use them to build something. It's like not literally but that's sort of the idea with some of these. It's like you just had all these leftover parts. You said what can we make with these parts? And you made this. That sounds like a junkie laptop.

Jeff Massie [01:00:49]:
40 years ago AMC, they used to say that about Detroit. They'd sweep all the parts and whatever was left over they threw it into An AMC vehicle. All you car nuts are going to appreciate that.

Jonathan Bennett [01:01:01]:
Yup.

Ken McDonald [01:01:02]:
Johnny Cash wrote a song about it.

Jonathan Bennett [01:01:04]:
Yup, yup. I was just thinking about that. We better not sing it. Then we'll get contact content matches. Jeff, what's that?

Jeff Massie [01:01:14]:
Oh, our singing? Yeah, we're not matching.

Jonathan Bennett [01:01:17]:
Nothing. Hey, now, speak for yourself. All right, Jeff, you want to talk about Proton? There's something new fun there.

Jeff Massie [01:01:25]:
I do. All right, so far we covered an enterprise story, which is like work. Then we covered gaming, but remote gaming, which kind of deals with remote servers. Now let's get it back home with local gaming. And to do that, we're going to talk about a new Proton release that's just come out. Proton 10.04 is out with several fixes. Now, if you've been on experimental, there are now several titles which this release version is fixed or has the fixes applied. So they moved them from experimental into the release version.

Jeff Massie [01:02:02]:
Games include Surgeon Simulator experience, Reality Changeling, VR Summoners, War Rush, Quantum Threshold Fellowship, Metal Slug Awakening, Zero Caliber 2 Remastered, and many others. And if you've been. And there's other fixes, like if you've been playing Far Cry 5 and getting outdated driver warnings, that's been taken care of, along with age of Empires 4 Anniversary Edition, which had the same issue. You know, if you have an OLED Steam deck, you now have HDR. When playing Far Cry 5. They also fixed a bunch of regressions from previous Proton 10 releases, which so they they fixed. Video should play correctly again in King of Bones, and then Indivisible Sackboy Big Adventure should no longer display a series of errors on a fresh prefix. God's Arena Online is now registering touch and mouse input correctly.

Jeff Massie [01:03:01]:
Killer Instinct should no longer crash at the end of a match. Camera panning should also work as expected in Dungeons and Dragons Online. Blood Rush should no longer crash with new Proton prefixes. So this is just a tiny sampling of what they've done. They also added support for Steamworks SDK 1.63, they've updated Wine Mono to 4.2.10, updated VDK3D Proton to version 3.0B, and they updated VK3D 3D to 1.18. Now, like I said I wanted to add, this is just a tiny fraction of the fixes. They go from things like Assassin's Creed Shadows being playable again to others like Agatha Christie. Evil under the sun now being playable in French.

Jeff Massie [01:03:54]:
In the changelog, they've listed 19 games that were playable under experimental, which are now playable under the release version of proton, they have 43 items they've fixed for games and that's not counting regression fixes of which there were nine of those and those are the ones listed. And you know, because many times fixing something in one game can fix it in another because of how games, you know, they share libraries, they share game engines, you know, you can have further fix fixes, repercussions than they originally planned on. So if you had a game with an issue which was not listed in here, I would suggest giving the new version a try and just see if the game got fixed. So you can take a look at the article linked in the show Notes for full details. And it has a link to the official changelog. So happy gaming.

Jonathan Bennett [01:04:49]:
Yeah, I've got a game that I enjoy playing that gives me a. You're running an unsupported video card. I'm going to have to boot that up again, make sure I have the newest Proton and boot that up and see what it does. See if it fixed that one. That would be pretty cool.

Ken McDonald [01:05:12]:
Now, The Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3. Sounds like it might be time for me to go back and try that.

Jonathan Bennett [01:05:20]:
Yeah, I mean, if you have something that you have something that hasn't worked in the past. Yeah. Try it on the newest Proton Experimental and see if you get anything. They are, they are constantly working to fix those things. And there's a. There's a huge. I think it's on GitHub, the Proton Project. They've got just a huge list of issues and most games, most games in the Steam library has an issue of some sort there, even if it's just, you know, it pretty much works.

Jonathan Bennett [01:05:48]:
But if there's not one for your particular game, go open an issue.

Ken McDonald [01:05:52]:
And then with Valve working on running on Arch or ARM 64, what kind of display do we need?

Jonathan Bennett [01:06:04]:
I mean, you can use whatever display you want to. I think. I'm gonna. That was an attempt at a segue. I shot it down and then I will segue. Yeah. I've got the last story this week and it's not about gaming at all. It's about the Raspberry PI and the new Raspberry PI smart display module.

Jonathan Bennett [01:06:34]:
So Pharonix picked this up, but it's also on the official Raspberry PI blog. And this is something that was shown off at a conference this year, the ISE conference in Spain. And so intel, intel has this specification for what's called a smart display module. So you'll have like a. A big format or at least reasonably large format screen that you want to be able to plug a computer of some sort into. And I'm not talking that hdmi, I'm talking like you have the computer on a little car that you slide you slot into the side of the TV or the projector or whatever it is to be able to do it. Essentially you're smart video marketing, right? So like you go to a restaurant and it has instead of the old printed out menus up on the wall, it's got a display. Well, maybe they have these in it or you know, you see one of those big walls of monitors that, that, that gives you a really big video playing.

Jonathan Bennett [01:07:37]:
It may be based on these, right? So it's like this miniature sort of blade thing and what Raspberry P. They.

Jeff Massie [01:07:45]:
Have looked at that.

Jonathan Bennett [01:07:46]:
Apparently it's an open specification. They've looked at that specification and they've said well, we could do that. And so there is now a Raspberry PI smart display module and it's got the guts of a Raspberry PI CM5. So it's a PI 5, but it is built into this little thin sort of rack mount looking. It's got a handle on it. It's got a really satisfying looking handle on it. It looks really cool actually. And so the idea is you slot this thing in and it's going like power and HDMI internally is going to get routed to the display that it's connecting to.

Jonathan Bennett [01:08:23]:
And then this thing has on the outside facing a couple of USB ports, an ethernet port. And the second HDMI port looks like a power switch as well. And so again, this is designed for smart displays. And I immediately I look at this and I go, this is like the old blade servers. Is somebody building a, it would be maybe a 3 or 4U high if you were to do this. Is somebody building a chassis that we could just get these and slot, you know, 10 or 15 or 20 of them into it across the chassis. You know, the pi5 has just enough power that would be interesting to do. I don't know if anybody's doing it yet, but man, I couldn't help but think about that when I saw this here.

Jonathan Bennett [01:09:11]:
I will, I'll throw up the, I'll share the picture of what this looks like, this thing, right? This is, this is what it is. It's a little tiny rack mount thingy. And man, I, I think it would be so much fun to have one of these in sort of a blade style rack mount solution. So I don't know, I don't know if it'll happen or not. But that's, that's sort of my dream. I want. I like rack mounting Raspberry PIs. Something about it makes.

Jonathan Bennett [01:09:42]:
Makes. Makes me feel good. It's fun.

Ken McDonald [01:09:47]:
Now, besides signage, what other possibilities could you use this for?

Jonathan Bennett [01:09:53]:
I mean, if you have the right stuff to plug it into any place that you could put a Raspberry PI. But like, signage is what it is explicitly designed for now, you know, people.

Ken McDonald [01:10:04]:
Somebody'S going to get it and do some sort of hack with it, of course, and then we can read about it on Hackaday.

Jonathan Bennett [01:10:11]:
Indeed. Indeed. Yeah, there's some interesting. There's some interesting comments on the Raspberry PI blog. Someone says there was a comment that we expect this to be mostly commercial. I'm trying to find it. Exactly. We expect this to be mostly.

Jonathan Bennett [01:10:36]:
Ah, I expect this is Simon Burgess. I believe he is someone at Raspberry PI foundation or at the Raspberry PI Corp. He says, although I expect the majority of demand to be from businesses, I wouldn't want anyone else to miss out. So apparently they are going to make these accessible, at least to some extent for normal people. Yeah, it's just. It looks real interesting to me. I kind of want one. All right, well, that is our stories for the day and we are about to move into some tips.

Jonathan Bennett [01:11:17]:
I think we get to take one more break. My spreadsheet says we get to take one more break before then. So we'll be back with some tips right after this. All right, so we're going to let Ken kick us off with the command line tips or tips of some sort. Ken, you've got a splash of color for us?

Ken McDonald [01:11:35]:
Yes, I do. This week I want to introduce the color ASCII Art Library Lib Kaka, which is included when you install the package Kaka Utils. Also included are some demo applications such as Kakafire, Kaka Demo and Kaka View. And this is using Cock of you with my screenshot that I'm using for today's avatar. But let me go ahead and expand the that up there so you can read what that's saying. Is that big enough?

Jonathan Bennett [01:12:13]:
Yeah, it's just big.

Ken McDonald [01:12:14]:
I just did Cock of you and since I'm in the folder that my current Avadar pings in, I just ran that. Now you can also run Cock of Fire and that way I can warm my hands up here. And if you want a little bit of psychedelic, there's Cockademo.

Jonathan Bennett [01:12:39]:
Oh my.

Ken McDonald [01:12:42]:
And it goes through all sorts of changes. And what's interesting is You've got some buttons when you're in kaka view that allow you to change the dynamic random. Let's go back to this, but for the pixelization. Tell me which one looks like most like me.

Jonathan Bennett [01:13:13]:
That was pretty good. Yeah.

Ken McDonald [01:13:16]:
And you can even see the bookcases. You can't read us make out the titles, can you?

Jonathan Bennett [01:13:21]:
No, not quite. Not quite, but that's fun. Yep.

Ken McDonald [01:13:27]:
I just came across it when I was looking through file that I had made of all the executables that I've got on my computer. Trying to figure out what I can use for future tips.

Jonathan Bennett [01:13:43]:
Ah, yeah. I. I need to see if I can get CACA fire to work as like a desktop background or a screensaver. Now I'm kind of. Kind of.

Ken McDonald [01:13:55]:
Now what you probably need to do is do a cat either a screen capture or screen recording actually of it because it's going to be in the terminal itself and then convert that screen recording into a.

Jonathan Bennett [01:14:16]:
Oh, potentially you might be able to actually run the full terminal as the. As the screensaver kd because KDE is running. It's running an application back there and just mapping it through. So I don't know, it might be possible to fiddle with it. Yeah, future. Future tip. There you go.

Jeff Massie [01:14:37]:
And I would add. So for anybody listening, it's lib caca is L, I, B C A C A true.

Ken McDonald [01:14:47]:
And you're gonna find the it's license an interesting one. Let's just say I'm not going to say it right now.

Jonathan Bennett [01:15:00]:
Oh, it's one of those, huh? I guess it's like the WTF license or whatever.

Ken McDonald [01:15:06]:
Wtfl Yep, yep.

Jonathan Bennett [01:15:10]:
I've seen this.

Ken McDonald [01:15:10]:
Do whatever you want with it.

Jonathan Bennett [01:15:12]:
Yep. All right. Well, Jeff, you've got something interesting. You have a candy tip.

Jeff Massie [01:15:19]:
Yeah, my. My tip this week is I love candy. And this is going to be a short little one. And so for those of you who use the Pacman package manager, there's a little Easter egg in there. If you go in and edit your.

Ken McDonald [01:15:34]:
Etc.

Jeff Massie [01:15:36]:
Pacman conf file conf file and add I love candy with no spaces. The I, L and C are all capitalized and you put it in the miscellaneous options section of the file. And in that same section you also need to add the option color with a capital C. You know, they're on different lines. And then after that when you do an update to install a program or just update the system, the progress meter will change to a yellow pac man eating the candy progress dots. So it's just a little Easter egg thing. That's no actual useful purpose other than it's just fun.

Jonathan Bennett [01:16:27]:
I like it. All right, I've got a command line tip that I couldn't make work and I will tell you why. It's called Shell Beats and the idea is that it is a Linux command line music player, but that specifically what it's doing is it's letting you play music from YouTube and the, the, the backend of it is YTDLP. Now for those of you that are familiar with YTDLP and that use it a lot, you know that YouTube is. Google is trying real hard to not entirely kill that project, but they go out of their way now to make it very difficult to, to Download or access YouTube without actually doing it in the browser, in some cases without doing it as a logged in user. So the idea here is that you search for tracks, you add on playlists in your command line. You can say hey, play it. You can also tell to download it and you have access to this music to play command line, which is cool.

Jonathan Bennett [01:17:32]:
When I go to do it, I get the dreaded 403 errors and it's asking me to log in. What I've not found out yet is whether shellbeats has an option to do things like copy your cookies over from your browser, which that's one of the ways to get around the YouTube restrictions. All that said, it looks like a really cool way to listen to music. Again, Shelby, it's not packaged. It's packaged in very few places. It is quite new, but it is just a simple make and make install. And yeah, it looks neat. I'm very sad that I can't use it yet, yet I'm still working on it because I would, I would make, I would make great use of this.

Jonathan Bennett [01:18:15]:
But if you're not, you know, if you haven't done Y2DLP shenanigans, if your IP address is not on Google's list, then it'll probably work for you. Interesting times we live in.

Ken McDonald [01:18:29]:
How long ago did you download the copy you're working with.

Jonathan Bennett [01:18:34]:
Today? Like a couple hours before the show. Okay.

Ken McDonald [01:18:37]:
Because I was noticing that it just had an Update on the GitHub about 12 hours ago.

Jonathan Bennett [01:18:43]:
Yes, Yep, I grabbed, I grabbed that one. That was indeed the one that I, that I have. And you know, it's the, the problem that I'm running into is based off of the problem that YTDLP has. So it's not even, it's not even a shell beats problem. It's just where Google is going out of their way to make life difficult for us. Oh, well, such is life. All right, those are our command line tips. That is the show.

Jonathan Bennett [01:19:13]:
I'm going to let the guys plug whatever they want to here at the end. Ken, do you have anything that you want to plug or talk about?

Ken McDonald [01:19:20]:
Well, I just want to share an article Bobby Borisov wrote about. It's a new open source deadman switch. Let me go ahead and post that into the show notes so you all can follow the link to read about it yourself. But that way, if you ever need to, you have some way of notifying next to Ken that something's happened and give them the ability to access things that they may need to get to.

Jonathan Bennett [01:19:54]:
Yep. Even if you don't use a dead man switch, this is. Or this particular application, this is something to think about. I've had to go through this with a couple of different family members when they've got passed and it's. Nobody wants to have to think about it. And it's a real pain. So, you know, write your. Write those passwords down somewhere secure and do something.

Jonathan Bennett [01:20:12]:
Don't just, don't just leave folks in the lurch.

Ken McDonald [01:20:14]:
And you youngins, you need to think about that now, not 30 years from now.

Jonathan Bennett [01:20:19]:
Yes, absolutely. All right. And Jeff?

Jeff Massie [01:20:24]:
Nothing. Nothing too much this week. I appreciate everybody that's conversation contributed to the poetry corner. I'm getting. I'm getting submissions, so if you don't hear yours right away, we got a lot of weeks of poetry coming, so. And I will say if in the future you hear one that I've said in the past, it's because I, I think I've told you, when I upgraded, I had a backup issue and I backed. Didn't back up something I thought I did. So there was some poetry I read and some and I hadn't got to, so you might hear a repeat because I can't remember if I hadn't got to it or I did get to it.

Jeff Massie [01:21:00]:
But enough of that poetry. But I'm sorry, there's insufficient. What's it called, the term eludes me. Have a great week, everybody.

Jonathan Bennett [01:21:21]:
Oh, bravo, bravo. You got me there. Okay. If you want to find more of my stuff, there is, of course, Floss Weekly over Hackaday. Have a lot of fun there. And we've got all kinds of fun stuff going on. I don't have the spreadsheet up in front of me. I don't know who we've talked to.

Jonathan Bennett [01:21:36]:
We've talked to a bunch of people and we've got more scheduled, so you can check us out over there. Other than that, just want to say thank you to everybody that watches or listens, whether you get us live or on the download, and we'll be back next week for another Untitled Linux Show