Untitled Linux Show 226 Transcript

Please be advised that 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]:
Hey, this week the headline news is that Xubuntu was hacked. You might want to watch out for that. Then we have a showdown, a shootout between Windows and Linux and the Ryzen 9 processors. No surprise which one comes out ahead there. There's updates to Clonezilla. We take a look at Mobian, which is Debian for the phone and Austria says goodbye. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned.

TWiT.tv [00:00:32]:
Podcasts you love from people you trust.

TWiT.tv [00:00:36]:
This is Twit.

Jonathan Bennett [00:00:40]:
This is the Untitled Linux Show, Episode 226, recorded Saturday, October 25th. Ubuntu Friendly Fire. Hey folks, it is Saturday and you know what that means. It's time for Linux and some geekery with open source news. Some hardware stuff, some software stuff. We got some tips at the end. It's to going to be great. You don't want to, you don't want to miss it.

Jonathan Bennett [00:01:02]:
Don't go anywhere. It's not just me. We've got the guys, the squad and yeah, it's going to be, it's going to be fun. It is getting close to Halloween and in celebration I'll go ahead and plug this now in celebration of sort of the Halloween fall time season here at twit, we did a DND one shot. We did that yesterday and had a lot of fun with that. It was my nemesis, Paul Thurot, the Windows guy. Leo was there, Micah Sargent was the dm and then we had Paris and I forget his name. I can see him.

Jonathan Bennett [00:01:47]:
He ran the Barbarian.

Ken McDonald [00:01:48]:
Micah Sergeant.

Jonathan Bennett [00:01:49]:
No, the Barbarian. He ran a half horse orc. He ran a half orc barbarian called Helm. I don't remember the player's name, I don't remember the character's name. D and D problems. Anyway, it was a lot of fun and like most one shots go, we got halfway through the adventure and so we are already talking about trying to find a day to finish that up. Just had to find a way for all of our schedules to once again coincide. But that was a blast and if you haven't gone and see it, you should go and check that out.

Jonathan Bennett [00:02:22]:
So we've got some news stories. You guys have anything else you want to talk about before we start?

Jeff Massie [00:02:27]:
The news stories coming at you from KDE 6.5.

Jonathan Bennett [00:02:32]:
Ooh, I'm not even there yet.

Jeff Massie [00:02:35]:
Filtering through out to the distribution. So watch your local updater for. You know in a way it's a little disappointing because it's boring before, it still works now. You know there's the, the login screen changed a little bit. But other than that it's. Everything's working. Nothing's nothing crazy or.

Jonathan Bennett [00:02:57]:
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's. It is. It's kind of a anti.

Ken McDonald [00:03:02]:
Climatic.

Jonathan Bennett [00:03:02]:
Yes. Anticlimactic sort of a deal. But that's a good problem to have. That's the sort of problem that you really, you really want.

Ken McDonald [00:03:10]:
You don't want the excitement of stuff crashing.

Jonathan Bennett [00:03:13]:
I mean, sometimes you do, but not.

Ken McDonald [00:03:15]:
On a production machine.

Jonathan Bennett [00:03:17]:
Yeah, not. Not when you. Not when that's not what you're especially going out for. Paul. Paul was the other player. No, Jacob Ward. I'm sorry? Jacob Ward was the other player. We had Paul.

Jonathan Bennett [00:03:32]:
I came up with Paul Thorat because he's the Windows guy. I can remember that. Jacob Ward was the. Was the player that I couldn't. I couldn't remember.

Rob Campbell [00:03:42]:
I've seen Paul throt. In person.

Jeff Massie [00:03:44]:
Really?

Rob Campbell [00:03:45]:
2016.

Jonathan Bennett [00:03:46]:
Wow. Yes, yes.

Jeff Massie [00:03:49]:
Jeff, I was just going to tell you this is a Linux show. No cussing.

Jonathan Bennett [00:03:55]:
Indeed. All right, let's move on to speaking of being Linux, let's move on to some Linux news. And there was kind of a big security thing. Rob's got the story here, but I was watching this too. It's not the sort of security news that we want to see, but. Rob, tell us about it.

Rob Campbell [00:04:12]:
Yeah, so here is a cautionary tale to be careful over the past weekend. About a week ago now, around the time we were recording this last show, the official Zubin 2 or X Ubuntu as some of you may think of it as, but it's Zubin 2 website was compromised and briefly served up Windows malware to users who were trying to download the Linux distribution. Instead of the legit legitimate Zubin 2 torrent, the site offered a file called Zubin 2 safe dash download zip and when extracted, the zip contain a Windows executable and a fake Terms of Service text file. The Zubin 2 team reacted quickly and once they were notified they. They were. They took down the affected download page and confirmed that the direct ISO downloads and checksums were never altered. Only the torrent link was replaced and it appears the malicious file was live for no more than a day or two. According to the snapshots from the Wayback Machine, the page looked normal on October 11, but by October 18 the fake zip had appeared.

Rob Campbell [00:05:27]:
The good news is that the malware was designed for Windows, not Linux. And if you're following the typical directions on how to install Zoom 2 that involves downloading a ISO and put it on a USB and booting up to it, you. You would have noticed something wasn't right when the link didn't even serve up an ISO. The malware reportedly tried to intercept cryptocurrency links copied to the clipboard, so anyone downloading from a Windows machine could have been at risk for. But but for experienced Linux users, they likely spotted the warning warning signs pretty easily. A Windows EXE coming from a Linux distro site. It's a little SUS right there. I know Ubuntu used to have EXE that allowed you in to install Ubuntu from Windows years ago, but that's not a thing anymore.

Rob Campbell [00:06:25]:
Also, Zuba 2 lead Sean Davies said the team will accelerate efforts to replace their aging WordPress site with a static version. Team member Elizabeth Krumbach Joseph added that the issue came from a lapse in their hosting environment and that the group is still in triage mode investigating how the turn link was hijacked. This incident also highlights an ongoing problem with website security in the open source projects like this, even when the software itself is solid, the website behind it often relies on shared or outdated content systems like WordPress, where a single vulnerable plugin can open the doors to attackers. So for now, anyone who wants to safely download Zuba 2 can use the official Ubuntu CD image server. And again, there's no indication that any other Ubuntu flavors or infrastructure was affected.

Jonathan Bennett [00:07:25]:
Indeed. Yeah, it's a little startling when something like this happens, because that could have been so much worse if it had been a more sophisticated actor that got in there.

Jeff Massie [00:07:40]:
Right?

Jonathan Bennett [00:07:40]:
Because I mean, imagine instead of just replacing it with a Windows executable, what if they replaced it with an ISO that was completely the same, except it ran a script on the resulting system?

Rob Campbell [00:07:59]:
Yeah, that would have been smart, but let's not give the main idea well.

Jonathan Bennett [00:08:02]:
Yeah, so that is the blindingly obvious thing to do. I'm not giving anybody ideas. Anyone worth their salt would be able to figure that one out.

Rob Campbell [00:08:13]:
The malicious actors are listening to our show right now being like, oh, why did I do that?

Jonathan Bennett [00:08:20]:
Yeah, I'm sure.

Jeff Massie [00:08:24]:
They'Re probably thinking it was a Windows game or something. Didn't even think Linux.

Jonathan Bennett [00:08:28]:
I would imagine that that's what it is. Whoever did it wasn't even aware of what they were fiddling with. But it does sort of make you stop and think like, what would it look like if there was a more sophisticated actor that did something like this? And we've seen a few things. There was the attack on npm, there's been a bunch of attacks on npm. But there was one about a month ago where the code that they injected actually went and looked for additional NPM tokens. And it was a self replicating worm. I can't remember what they called it. It was a Dune reference.

Jonathan Bennett [00:09:06]:
It was a reference to the worms in Doom.

Ken McDonald [00:09:10]:
Sandworm.

Jonathan Bennett [00:09:11]:
No, I'll find it for you. But what it was doing is it was looking for NPM tokens and it was attempting to insert its own code into additional packages libraries. Okay, so Shai Hulud is the term from Dune that refers to the giant worms in the Dune universe. And that is what that particular bit of malware was called. And then there was another one this week called Glass Worm. At least that's what it's being referred to as. And it is similar. It is a worm inside of VS code extensions.

Jonathan Bennett [00:09:56]:
And so when you download a compromised VS code extension, it will do the exact same thing. It will immediately go out and look for source code for other VS code extensions and attempt to insert itself into that and then upload it. And so these are the sorts of things that like more sophisticated malware authors are doing. And it terrifies me whenever I hear of something like, you know, a Linux ISO got replaced. And in this case it was, it was just, it was nothing. It was dumb. The thing they did with it was, was ridiculous. But there are some groups that are very sophisticated.

Jonathan Bennett [00:10:34]:
They're doing stuff like this. Um, yeah, it'll be intriguing to see the first like really interesting attack against the Linux infrastructure.

Rob Campbell [00:10:45]:
And I'm guessing, I'm guessing they attacked the, the turret link because that helped hide the source. You know, they didn't have to have a download server out there that they're feeding it out on. Which makes me think maybe they are. They, they weren't somebody in some, I don't know, odd third world, odd whatever country that, that doesn't worry about hiding it. Somebody would actually did not want to, you know, any traces back to him.

Jonathan Bennett [00:11:12]:
It's possible, yeah, it's hard, it's hard to say.

Rob Campbell [00:11:16]:
Some script kitty in, in somewhere in America.

Jeff Massie [00:11:20]:
Yeah.

Jonathan Bennett [00:11:20]:
Oh very, yeah, very possible.

Ken McDonald [00:11:22]:
And from the timing of it, you could almost suspect that it might have been somebody trying to get some Windows users thinking about going to.

Jonathan Bennett [00:11:34]:
That's possible that it was sort of related to the end of 10 thing. So maybe what these guys do is they just look for popular torrent links and then go try to attack those. I can imagine it being something like that. Yeah, yeah. Hard to say. All right, so up next, Jeff is going to Talk about a bit of a hardware shootout, a Windows vs Linux shootout. And we're going to let him jump on that right after this.

Leo Laporte [00:12:02]:
Hey, everybody, it's Leo Laporte.

Leo Laporte [00:12:04]:
You know about Mac Break Weekly, right? You don't? Oh, if you're a Macintosh fan or you just want to keep up what's going on with Apple, this is the show for you. Every Tuesday, Andy Inaco, Alex Lindsey, Jason Snell and I get together and talk about the week's Apple news.

Leo Laporte [00:12:19]:
It's an easy subscription.

Leo Laporte [00:12:21]:
Just go to your favorite podcast client and search for Mac Break Weekly or visit our website, TWIT TV mbw. You don't want to miss a week of Mac Break Weekly.

Jeff Massie [00:12:31]:
It's been a while since we've done a benchmark of Windows versus Linux, but Michael Lerbel over at Phronix has, you know, kind of scratched that itch for us. Now he did the benchmarking with an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X and a 9950X 3D. So this allowed each OS to see how they can take advantage of the cache and how the core scheduler works with the slowdown when you cross the pneumonodes. So for people that don't know, these are 16 core chips and there's a group of eight and a group of eight and then they communicate through to each other. But the group inside the group of eight has really fast communication and when you cross that boundary to the other eight, I mean it's still really fast, but it processor speeds you take a hit, so it's a little slower. So this is basically showing how they can handle chip topography. Now the Microsoft OS was Windows 1125H2 and had all the patches and everything up to date. And on the Linux side It was Ubuntu 24.3 LTS and Ubuntu 25.10.

Jeff Massie [00:13:51]:
From the 7th of September, all the, you know, so from the 7th of September, all THE OPERATING systems had all the patches and every everything. The rest of the Hardware is on ASRock X870E Taichi motherboard, 2 sticks of 16 gigabyte DDR5 6000 speed G skill memory used AMD Radeon RX 9070 graphics card, a terabyte crucial T705NVME SSD and all the other hardware was, you know, was the same through the testing. The only things that changed was the os. All the hardware was identical. You know, unlike a lot of the previous benchmarks, there were no games in this set it was all CPU based workloads, so various encoding tests, several rendering benchmarks, you know, just other CPU tests. So with these tests there was honestly looking at the results, there's very little difference between the X and the X3D chips as they were all very close. Now the Windows benchmark did favor the X3D cache enabled chips a little more, but the difference was really slight. And I weren't, I wouldn't swear, it just wasn't in the statistical noise.

Jeff Massie [00:15:07]:
Meaning that if you ran this test 100 times, you know, 50 times out of, out of 100, maybe it would be the other way around. It's just so close. The test didn't have a resolution for it. Linux was almost identical. And you know, the differences for Linux were definitely in statistical variation. They were just really, really tight. Now the big question, Windows versus Linux. And I know there are several out there that are going to say Ubuntu isn't the fastest distribution out there, but these tests were to focus on the kernel more than anything.

Jeff Massie [00:15:46]:
And Michael wanted to see if the 6.17 kernel brought anything to the table or at the very least didn't have a large regression. The LTS and The more recent 25.10 were almost identical. So keep in mind this was not the release version of 2510, so things could have gotten a little better. But based on these tests the kernel didn't regress but it also didn't have a huge jump in the CPU performance so they very flat. So 2510 to 2404, the results were basically identical.

Jonathan Bennett [00:16:28]:
Sort of as boring as you'd want them to be, right?

Jeff Massie [00:16:32]:
Yes, yes. You don't want any regressions. I mean it would be nice to have a little, hey, we picked up 5% or something. But it wasn't and like I said, this is very CPU for focus. So this was less about the entire distribution, more about the just the kernel and the schedulers on the kernel and how it handled the hardware. Now everything was just pretty flat until Windows was added. Yes, Linux was faster by 11 to 13% across the tests. In performance tests the rule of thumb is 10% is where you can really start to notice a difference.

Jeff Massie [00:17:10]:
So while seat of the pants might not feel huge, but you will be able to tell a difference. So Windows is slower than Linux. And I'll be honest, I can't say as I'm surprised. I've used Windows in several different scenarios from work where it's required and I've been on other people's personal machines. And I'll be honest, just my opinion, it feels like 11 is a lot slower and less responsive than Windows 10 but you know, Linux feels faster to me. But Windows seems like it went under a large regression when they went from 10 to 11, but I don't have data to back it up. That's just how it feels to me. You know, I also would have loved to seen a distribution which had a performance kernel, you know, performance built kernel.

Jeff Massie [00:18:01]:
You know, like I said my switch to Cashy they put some optimizations they build for you know, the, the newer higher level instruction sets. So but you know, historically we've done it on this show. It isn't normally a huge change but you know, might have spread a few more percentage points in there, might have been nice to go. Well now it's 15% faster, you know, 16%. Make that feather in our cap just a little bit bigger. One last thing of note, the cache aware patch for the Linux kernel that we, you know, that we've talked about was not in this build. So there's going to be a future benchmark or benchmarks because Michael's very thorough at this. So this could also give us more performance by even more optimized cache usage.

Jeff Massie [00:18:51]:
So that was not in this set of tests. So take a look at the article linked in the show notes for full details on each benchmark so you can see what did good where and get all the details and give your thoughts on the discord of the Linux performance.

Jonathan Bennett [00:19:11]:
Yeah, it's interesting to see that. I know with Windows 11 it's obviously going to be a little bit less, how shall we put it, less tolerant of low system performance and older processors. You sort of see that in the Microsoft requirements for running it. So I guess it sort of stands to reason that it's going to have performance problems as well across all of them. Yeah, interesting.

Jeff Massie [00:19:38]:
Yeah.

Rob Campbell [00:19:40]:
How fast would Windows XP or 95 or 98 be if you could get that to run on modern hardware?

Jonathan Bennett [00:19:45]:
You know, it's actually really interesting. There are some videos out there of people running like Windows 95 on period hardware and just looking at how responsive it is compared to, you know, the vast majority of modern machines. It's like the videos are along the lines of this is what we had that they took from us. But it's seriously like you would click on something and immediately Windows would pop up and things would happen and you.

Rob Campbell [00:20:08]:
Gotta set this up somewhere sometime.

Jonathan Bennett [00:20:10]:
Yeah, absolutely. It'd be super fun. It is really interesting though to look at that and that yes, the old OSes really did run well and the new stuff in a lot of cases really is kind of terrible.

Jeff Massie [00:20:26]:
And for those on audio, what was that disk you held up Rob?

Rob Campbell [00:20:30]:
The Windows 98.

Jeff Massie [00:20:32]:
There you go. Well, and if you think about it, you know, they didn't have the features. Modern operating systems do all that little feature and bling and it costs performance.

Jonathan Bennett [00:20:45]:
It does add up. Absolutely.

Jeff Massie [00:20:47]:
It might be tiny, but you start putting, you know, a thousand of those in, pretty soon those tiny become in something noticeable.

Rob Campbell [00:20:55]:
I mean it's just like websites, you know I've used to do a lot of websites 25 years ago and maybe a little bit here and there, but now. But you know, everything was slower. Like back then Internet speeds were slower so you had to make them efficient and optimized to work with those speeds. Now you run a, one of those really basic pages from back then on, on today's fast Internet and it's, you know, ridiculously fast and it's, you know, just another way to think about how, how you know, the operating systems had to be optimized to work for that old slow hardware.

Jonathan Bennett [00:21:33]:
Yeah.

Ken McDonald [00:21:34]:
And that's taken into account that you were running on slow storage devices, comparatively speaking. Yeah.

Jeff Massie [00:21:44]:
Oh yeah, floppy disks.

Ken McDonald [00:21:48]:
The early hard drives weren't that fast really. In reading and writing one one thing.

Jeff Massie [00:21:55]:
From the discord quickly says nothing is faster than XOR and OS based on historical benchmarks. Clear Linux, which is now defunct, was always pretty much the performance winner every time. Second has been Cache eos which has taken a lot of Clear Linux's optimizations and applied them.

Jonathan Bennett [00:22:16]:
So it.

Jeff Massie [00:22:19]:
I haven't seen Zorin come out on top. Not that it's a slouch, but it per anymore cash. He's kind of the crown champion.

Rob Campbell [00:22:30]:
Yeah. After Ken. After Ken sharing last week about how Zorin had a new release. Apparently this time was one of their biggest, fastest downloads or whatever of one of their new releases. So I'm sure they appreciate that. Ken, it's all because of you.

Ken McDonald [00:22:48]:
Actually that was before me. Remember Bobby wrote about that last week as well.

Rob Campbell [00:22:52]:
What was that for you they had.

Jonathan Bennett [00:22:54]:
Like 100,000 downloads or something ridiculous within.

Ken McDonald [00:22:57]:
A 48 hour period.

Jonathan Bennett [00:22:59]:
Yeah, yeah, that seems right. And people have kind of latched onto that and said well this is obviously because of the end of Windows 10, which it might be, I don't know, it's hard to say. When you get a real weird result like that in your page hits your downloads, there's always, I always ask myself like are we actually going nuts and we're really that popular? Or did someone's bot accidentally download a 70,000 times and sometimes it's hard to actually know the difference.

Rob Campbell [00:23:28]:
Zorn is one of the very commonly recommended ones for Windows users just because it's designed very Windows like interface and it has WINE integrations.

Ken McDonald [00:23:40]:
Jonathan, what are you going to recommend people using if they want to back up that old Windows system before they migrate to Linux?

Jonathan Bennett [00:23:49]:
I know the answer you're fishing for.

Jeff Massie [00:23:51]:
Is Clonezilla and you don't get to segue yourself, Ken.

Jonathan Bennett [00:23:56]:
I mean I guess he can try honestly go turn on OneDrive because it's free and just let it do it.

Jeff Massie [00:24:09]:
You know and I could and I'm not saying just, just to preface what I said before. Zorn is not a bad distribution. I just not the speed champion based on the benchmarks I've seen. But on the flip side I would not recommend Cashy for a new user. It's. It's maybe, maybe your second one, you know, but you, you need to have at least kind of dabbled in Linux a little bit before you jump in.

Jonathan Bennett [00:24:37]:
Yeah, I would agree with that. I will, I will stick by my. I will stick by my recommendation of do Fedora do Ubuntu for a new user. I think those are probably the two best.

Ken McDonald [00:24:49]:
All right, after you back up all that data.

Jonathan Bennett [00:24:51]:
Okay, Ken is just dying to tell us about backups, so we'll let him take it away.

Ken McDonald [00:24:59]:
Actually, it's not so much about backups, it's just that Marius wrote about the latest release of my favorite Debian based free and open source bootable live system for cloning disk drives and partitions. I am talking of course about Clonezilla live version 3.3.0.33. According to Marius, it is powered by the Linux 6.16 kernel series. Adds the UOAB option to the OCS SR and OCS live feed IMG tools to support selecting Clonezilla alias block device names in the text mode user interface adds the ATD and CRON packages to the Live system Updates the OCS Live hook Con configuration file to force the loop module to be added to InItram FS and add support for imaging, MTD Block and EMMC Boot devices in expert mode. Clonezilla Live 3.3.0.33 also adds a new OCS Block Dev Sorter tool that allows UDEV to create Clonezilla alias Block devices in dev OCS disks Clone. It also adds the OCS Command screen sample tool which can be used with the Run Again script and adds the OCS Live Gen UBRD tool for merging an OCS zip file with a U boot enabled bootable RAW image. Marius also started said Starting with this release, the locale and key map selection were moved to the login show, allowing FB Term, which is now used by default for locale and key map selection to run in an interactive titty teletype display. If you want to find out what is under the hood then I recommend reading Marius's article to get those details.

Jonathan Bennett [00:27:31]:
My goodness, what was the last time that you actually used Clonezilla, Ken?

Ken McDonald [00:27:38]:
It's been a while. I need to use it to back up my studio 2504 before I try upgrading the heartbearer metal to 2510.

Rob Campbell [00:27:51]:
I've been a fan of Clonezilla and used it a lot over like the last decade plus, but it's. It's really not the best backup tool. It's maybe good if you, if you want to do an archive like if you just want to do an image archive of this and like stash it away, but it's really better. It's like. Like my use case has always been for migrating drive to drive or actually migrating one place to anything, even drive to VM or whatever. But as a backup, because it's does that full image it's. I don't know, it's not. Doesn't seem like the best backup.

Ken McDonald [00:28:33]:
But yeah, the last time that I actually used it was when I backed up the partition that I've got all my data on before so I could. Before moving it over to another partition to another drive.

Jonathan Bennett [00:28:49]:
Yeah, it's great as a whole disk backup, but that's really the sort of its trick, as it were. I don't know that it makes a whole lot of sense to give it to somebody as a system backup otherwise. Unless what you're wanting to do is get your whole disk backed up so that you can restore from. Either restore from disk or move to vm, Something like that.

Rob Campbell [00:29:15]:
Yeah, for real regular backups. I mean you kind of want something that has like versioning or you know, incrementals, differentials or something like that. You know, whichever you want.

Jeff Massie [00:29:27]:
Yeah, those are definitely really simple rsync.

Jonathan Bennett [00:29:31]:
Rsync is actually not bad as a backup solution. And then there's.

Jeff Massie [00:29:35]:
There's a couple.

Jonathan Bennett [00:29:36]:
Yeah, there's a couple of other programs that sort of do like Rsync does, but they have support for different backends for daily backups.

Ken McDonald [00:29:48]:
I use a combination of rsync and rclone rsync to back up my document directory from one system to my file server. Basically it just duplicates the directory structure. Then I also use TAR to compress down some of my document directories and then I use our clone to back those up to my Google Drive. You make at least one offset these.

Rob Campbell [00:30:26]:
Days I use Proxmox backup PBS service system. I can't remember the S's I was using.

Ken McDonald [00:30:34]:
I want to say it was called backup that comes with Linux.

Jonathan Bennett [00:30:41]:
I could not tell you for sure that there was a just backup command.

Ken McDonald [00:30:46]:
Not a command, it was a program. You'd use it to configure so that you could use like an external drive and it would just schedule and do routine backups.

Rob Campbell [00:30:58]:
I'm sure somebody took that, that beautiful single easy to remember command and made it theirs.

Jonathan Bennett [00:31:05]:
But yeah, figure. All right, let's see, what do we have next? I believe Rob has the Asahi. So I suppose this answers the question of what distro should you run if you want to run on your M3 or M4 MacBook, right?

Rob Campbell [00:31:26]:
Well, I don't know if I'd quite go that far far yet, but it's coming.

Jonathan Bennett [00:31:32]:
It's coming.

Rob Campbell [00:31:33]:
Yeah. So the Asahi Linux team, or what is left of it, is back with another progress report and they've been busy bringing Apple Silicon even deeper into the Linux ecosystem. First, on the kernel front, they continue to upstreaming patches into the Linux 6.7 and 6.6.17 and 6.1 1.8 kernels. The big milestone this cycle is that the SMSC core drivers have finally landed, and that's been in discussion since 2022. It's a foundational piece of the Apple Silicon, handling everything from GPIO to reboot control. This also lays the groundwork for WI Fi and Bluetooth support to go fully upstream. They've also merged the device tree for the M2 Pro Max and Ultra chips, along with the fix for Apple's Dart Iommu. And they're still working on the USB patches.

Rob Campbell [00:32:38]:
Those continue to get attention from across the kernel mailing list. But outside of the kernel, the M1N1 bootloader is starting to rust. The team has begun rewriting key savings critical components in Rust for better maintainability and correctness. They've already ported the Apple device tree handling code to Rust with no performance lost and future safety critical pieces will follow. They've also added a CI pipeline that keeps the UEFI installer bundle automatically up to date, ending the old two year gap between updates and for gamers like myself, like Jeff, like a lot of you out there, they've gotten 64 bit Windows games running under Wine outside of the old MUVM environment. Hollow Knight and Nier Automata are up and running on the M1 Pro MacBooks with Gen 2 support for ARM64X and ARM64EC is still early, but this is a major proof of concept that native Apple Silicon hardware can handle Windows games through Wine. Macs have have never really been great for gaming, you know, as they were alone, but maybe with the SAI helinics they someday will be. They also continue to collaborate upstream, working directly with projects like Mesa, Pipewire, Wire and Wire Plumber 1 standout this cycle is Poly, a shared Mesa module that emulates geometry and tessellation shaders on GPUs that lag native support not just for Apples, but for other mobile GPUs like ARMS that could enable OpenGL and direct 3D compatibility across a wider range of devices.

Rob Campbell [00:34:38]:
And they're even testing basic M3 support. Nice though it's still early. Right now it's literally just a blinking cursor. M1N1 can initialize cores and boot the kernel, but that's it for now. It's early, but it shows they're already laying the groundwork for Apple's newer generation of chips. I think this covers the M4 too, working with the M3 if I understand that correctly. Finally, the team has begun building FedoraSahi Remix daily, starting Fedora 43 with integration into KDE's Plasma Setup project or for a smoother first boot experience. Even after losing a couple of their most public figures, Asahi keeps making huge steps forward.

Rob Campbell [00:35:30]:
The kernel work keeps moving upstream, rust is bringing more safety into the boot chain and and even gaming support is becoming a real possibility on Apple Silicon. So for a community driven project that started as a bold experiment, they're firmly shaping, they continue to firmly shape how Linux runs on Apple hardware.

Jonathan Bennett [00:35:55]:
Yeah, it's real fascinating that the gaming experience on Asahi is better than the gaming experience on macOS.

Rob Campbell [00:36:07]:
Yeah, that, that. I mean I always joke that that was kind of how it just is on Macs.

Ken McDonald [00:36:15]:
Assuming that we say someday that other operating system's even better than Mac OS as far as gaming. Well, Mac os.

Jonathan Bennett [00:36:22]:
The deal with Mac is that they, they made the decision to kill OpenGL support. That's really what, what did it. And they, they went all in on metal, which is like the most Apple thing to do. Your OpenGL thing wasn't invented here. So we have to build our own thing because Mac Apple has this terrible not invented here syndrome. And so I mean we've talked about this for a while that it was inevitably it was going to come the day that if you wanted to game on a Mac you would have to install Asahi. And that day is sort of here.

Rob Campbell [00:36:51]:
Yeah, there are games that in Steam I know of, I can't think of which ones right now. Maybe arc, but that are native. They have native versions for Linux but not for Mac. So.

Jeff Massie [00:37:07]:
Well, and Mac kind of basically gave up on gaming for a while until there's a bit of a hubbub about it and then they went well no, no, we're supporting gaming. We're all in. You know. But I want to say I don't remember exactly how it went. I'm not a huge Mac follower but it was something like look, here's the books, you can program it yourself kind of thing. You know, it was, they didn't give the, the base coding and there was.

Rob Campbell [00:37:37]:
Probably some thought behind the scenes.

Ken McDonald [00:37:38]:
Did they give the books away?

Jonathan Bennett [00:37:41]:
No, of course not.

Rob Campbell [00:37:43]:
There, there was probably some thoughts behind the scene that oh, gaming's all going consoles, nobody's playing PC gaming anymore. So I guess let's just not even worry about this and worry about computer stuff.

Jeff Massie [00:37:54]:
And I think, well, I don't even think they're thinking much of computer stuff anymore. They're all, all in on, I mean phones and tablets even.

Rob Campbell [00:38:02]:
The rumor mill going around is that Xbox is pretty much just going to be on a computer in the future. I've heard a lot of stuff about that.

Ken McDonald [00:38:11]:
It makes it a lot easier.

Rob Campbell [00:38:13]:
It's just going to be a computer they sell and they have their Xbox software. It does, yeah.

Ken McDonald [00:38:18]:
I mean thank IBM for that too.

Rob Campbell [00:38:21]:
They lose money on their consoles anyway is what I've always heard.

Jeff Massie [00:38:24]:
So initially they eventually start breaking even and make a little money through, through the roughly five year life cycle. But yeah, and honestly I, I have heard there's going to be a handheld. I've heard there's.

Rob Campbell [00:38:39]:
They might do another box is a handheld now already. But it's not okay. It's not really an Xbox. It's. It's a Windows based handheld that runs some Xbox software which is maybe part of.

Ken McDonald [00:38:53]:
Made by Asus.

Rob Campbell [00:38:55]:
Yeah, I think it's, I think it's the X Rag or something like that.

Jeff Massie [00:39:00]:
Well and I don't, I don't think they're gonna have enough like a computer with an Xbox even package. It wouldn't surprise me if it's you know, it's gonna be just, oh, look, it's Windows 11 and we have the Xbox experience. And it's just like.

Rob Campbell [00:39:16]:
Well, yeah.

Jeff Massie [00:39:17]:
And that it's kind of a Microsoft Steam version.

Rob Campbell [00:39:22]:
And I think others like Asus will make consoles that run the Xbox software and anybody will. Which actually kind of sounds awesome thinking about it. But comparatively to the current setup, I.

Jonathan Bennett [00:39:35]:
Mean, that does seem to be the direction that things are moving, which is pretty interesting to see.

Ken McDonald [00:39:44]:
Now, if we could just get the same going with the smartphones.

Rob Campbell [00:39:49]:
Well, if we could just get those running Linux instead of Windows on those consoles.

Jeff Massie [00:39:54]:
Well, I mean, most handhelds are running Linux because it's faster. Yeah.

Rob Campbell [00:40:02]:
But I imagine the Xbox ones that require the Xbox software may not. Or maybe they will in the future. Maybe they'll port that.

Ken McDonald [00:40:09]:
Well, with smartphones. We're running into the same issue we've got with trying to get Linux up on the newer versions of the Apple hardware. It's the ARM chips and the hardware, basically.

Jonathan Bennett [00:40:28]:
Yeah.

Ken McDonald [00:40:29]:
In fact, I'll touch on that a bit more when I get to my next starter.

Rob Campbell [00:40:34]:
We've had a hard time getting Linux on any iPhones, like ever.

Jeff Massie [00:40:38]:
Yeah, well, because the chips are not.

Jonathan Bennett [00:40:41]:
Actually with the iPhone. The problem is it's not necessarily the lack of standardized chips. It is the closed bootloader. Back when Hector Martin was still as part of Asahi, we talked to him about this particular issue on Floss Weekly. Back when, I think that's back when we were still a twit. And his comment then was, oh, I would love to be able to run Asahi on an iPhone or an iPad. But the bootloader was completely locked down. You'd have to have an exploit to be able to do it.

Jonathan Bennett [00:41:09]:
And that's not what Asahi is particularly interested in. So yeah, it's kind of a closed door for them for now.

Ken McDonald [00:41:17]:
They don't want to jailbreak the hardware.

Jonathan Bennett [00:41:19]:
Correct. Yep. That is not their thing. All right, so here in just a second, Jeff has for us a story about the multi kernel architecture on Linux and we're going to go to that right after this.

Leo Laporte [00:41:32]:
Hey everybody, Leo Laporte here and I'm going to bug you one more time to join Club twit. If you're not already a member, I want to encourage you to support what we do here at Twit. You know, 25% of our operating costs comes from membership in the club. That's a huge portion and it's growing all the time. That means we can do more, we can have more fun you get a lot of benefits ad free versions of all the shows, you get access to the club Twit discord and special programming like the keynotes from Apple and Google and Microsoft and others that we don't stream otherwise in public. Please join the club if you haven't done it yet, we'd love to have you find out more at Twit TV Club Twit and thank you so much.

Jeff Massie [00:42:20]:
This week we have more multi kernel patches at least requesting for comment which were posted on the Linux kernel mailing list. For those who have been watching this, you know that a month ago there was some initial patches posted for getting multi kernel running and you know, getting, getting that going and then, but Then shortly after ByteDance proposed patches and they called their software Parker for multi kernel operation which is very similar to the first set of patches but the actual implementation is very different. I'm not going to compare and contrast the two different methods as I don't have enough deep kernel knowledge to give a pros and cons argument on which should be the path forward. Just know there's a lot of work going on on thinking about running multiple kernels on a Linux system. Now some of you are probably wondering why would a person want to run multiple kernels on their system? And we're, we're talking about not. We're not talking about switching kernels like saying oh well I have an LTS kernel and I got the cutting edge kernel and I'll just boot into which one are, you know, whichever one I want. It's running them all at the same time. Running multiple kernels in parallel.

Jeff Massie [00:43:44]:
There's some advantages Kong Wang explained in the Linux kernel mailing list. I'll let him describe it because I think he does a nice job of it. He says this patch series introduces multi kernel architecture support, enabling multiple independent kernel instances to coexist and communicate on a single physical machine. Each kernel instance can run on a dedicated CPU core while sharing the underlying hardware resources and could be core or cores. So just clarification on my part there. The multi kernel architecture provides several key benefits. Improve fault isolations between different workloads Enhance security through kernel level separation Better resource utilization than traditional VMs. Potential zero down kernel updates with Kho, which is kernel handover.

Jeff Massie [00:44:37]:
Now the multi kernel idea is gaining more interest because of today's high core count CPUs and the thought is different cores could run on different kernels could have different cores run on different.

Ken McDonald [00:44:57]:
Let.

Jeff Massie [00:44:57]:
Me start that over. Different kernels could run on different cores in the cpu. There we go. If you look at the article linked in the show notes, there's a nice diagram to help visualize containers versus virtual machines versus multi kernel architecture for those who are listening, the images are sets of blocks on top of each other to show the high level architecture. So going from the bottom up, the container starts with the hardware. On top of that is the kernel, then the OS and then a couple of container blocks with applications on top of the container blocks. So that would be your normal like Docker or something like that where you're running a container. The virtual machine setup again from the bottom up is hardware and then you have the kernel and hypervisor.

Jeff Massie [00:45:47]:
Then you have the virtual machine on top of that and then there's a couple different stacks of blocks which show both a kernel and os. Then the application. So it could show and you have an isolated kernel, OS and application running on the lower level, larger blocks and it's just to show how different kernels run on top of the hypervisor. Well, they also have the multi kernel solution. The base is the hardware with a kernel on top of that. Now here's where it gets a little different. On top of the kernel block there are two smaller stacks of blocks and they both go kernel, OS and then application. There's two layers of kernel, large one at the base which helps with the resource allocation, scheduling, keeping order on everything.

Jeff Massie [00:46:37]:
And then the other kernels run on top of that kernel. So it looks like the virtual machine model is. Except the hypervisor layer is removed. You know, and this, this is still very, very high level. I mean this. But I'll be honest, I'm kind of excited to see where this could go is there has been mention of things like some cores and a kernel could be real time doing real time things while the other kernel and cores or kernels and cores could be doing normal workload type of things. It will be a while before we see this in practices. These patches are all at the request for comments stage.

Jeff Massie [00:47:20]:
This isn't even going into the pull directories or anything like that. This is still. Hey, here's what I patched. What does everybody think? For those who are wondering, they do have in these patches there's an interface for physical memory allocations per instance, virtual memory allocations and interface for managing the kernels instances, device tree kernel handover, the KHO framework for resource management and sharing. There is ways to control what gets access to what and you know, I. We'll. We'll see where this goes. We'll keep an eye on it.

Jeff Massie [00:48:03]:
I'm sure we're going to be. There's, there's a lot of interest in this so we'll, we'll keep an eye on this as this progresses. But on a personal note, I think this is going to become more important as Even consumer level CPUs game gain more cores. Intel has now got their low power cores and they have efficiency cores and performance cores all in one physical package. And there have been leaks, slash rumors that the next generation of AMD chips will have 16 cores per numa node instead of 8. So our regular instead of our Ryzen 7 9800x3D might have 16 cores. The next generation, maybe it's a rumor. And then the, our normal 16 core chip would now go to a 32 core chip because they would have two of those clusters in there.

Jeff Massie [00:48:50]:
We'll see. Like I said, that's just kind of rumors and leaks and we'll see what comes out of it. But we do know the server chips are gaining more and more cores, so being able to run different kernels could replace different machines as the hardware would allow it to run on one.

Jonathan Bennett [00:49:08]:
Yeah, I've seen similar ideas to this get proposed in years gone by. I remember one was sort of similar and that was being able to run an application in kernel mode to do something sort of similar to this. And that got shot down pretty quick by the colonel guys. I'm very interested to see if this is going to be well received or if this is the sort of thing.

Jeff Massie [00:49:39]:
That there's a little pushback on it but not like killing pushback there, you know. And part of the thing is there's so many different groups trying to push this forward. So I think it's going to happen. Basically it's like a virtual machine that you don't have to run a hypervisor. And they talk about, you know, it's a little more efficient and better isolation and.

Rob Campbell [00:50:05]:
Well, right now.

Jeff Massie [00:50:07]:
Oh, go ahead.

Rob Campbell [00:50:08]:
I was just saying right now we have two implementations basically. I think they're announced about a month ago when we talked about this on the show, that these two implementations were both announced like within days of each other. And I think one of the more interesting uses without, you know, I mentioned this last time too but you know, with all the security concerns we have out there, you know, having a kernel being isolated for the security stack and then you know, your other a kernel for, for everything else or what, however else you want to break your other stuff down. But like separating security from everything else, I think that to me, seems like an interesting use case of it and.

Ken McDonald [00:50:49]:
Almost have basically a wall between each core, basically so that each kernel would run on a core for whatever single application you're going to run on that core.

Jeff Massie [00:51:05]:
You probably have at least a couple of them, a couple cores. But I mean you could, you could have a single core if you had something really lightweight and it was just kind of monitoring as, you know, something simple and like doing Blender or OBS Studio.

Jonathan Bennett [00:51:21]:
No, not like that.

Jeff Massie [00:51:23]:
But no, I, I actually thought of you, Ken, on this because if you had a machine say that, we'll say you got a new Ryzen chip and it's got 16 cores in it, you could, you could eliminate a bunch of your simpler machines doing things because you could say, oh, I want you run Ubuntu Studio. Well, I'm going to set this set of cores doing this. I'm going to have these other cores recording and doing OBS and sending things out and I'm going to have this other set playing with audio stuff or whatever. And it would replace several smaller machines because now you have so many cores in one package and you have so much memory and everything in one setup now acts like several different machines.

Ken McDonald [00:52:12]:
Instead of having to have several different physical machines.

Jeff Massie [00:52:16]:
Right.

Ken McDonald [00:52:18]:
Last time we covered this all in one case because you have several virtual machines in that one case.

Jeff Massie [00:52:28]:
Yeah, and they do have cases that will handle two machines. Because sometimes you have your gaming people streaming. Well, they don't want to screw up their frame rate on their game. So they have a second smaller PC which is usually like an IPX or something small that's just capturing video and restreaming it. It doesn't have to be super powerful. Well, now you could have a real time kernel doing that so you don't have any lags and drops. No matter what the game is doing, the game is then running on a regular kernel and you're playing along and your real time kernel on the hardware is doing its thing.

Rob Campbell [00:53:08]:
And yeah, you know, one of the questions I had last time, and maybe, maybe with your update you got a little more about this. But do they have to be Linux kernels? Like in theory, could somebody set this up where one kernel is running Windows and you could have games kind of enter Windows games intertwined with the full kernel? You know, obviously that be against some terms of service, but.

Jeff Massie [00:53:35]:
Nope, it's all Linux kernel right now. I think if you could get it working, I'm sure you probably, you know, when they get the Linux part really ironed out, you probably could do do Windows but there's no mention of it.

Ken McDonald [00:53:56]:
Running as on one of the.

Jonathan Bennett [00:54:00]:
Well yeah, but you can run wine. You can run wine. Anyways, it seems like a waste to run it with its own kernel but the idea of using, of doing a Windows kernel, I bet you that'd be fiendishly difficult though it sounds like that would be very difficult to pull off but who knows, maybe with sharing all.

Ken McDonald [00:54:19]:
The peripheral devices that you've got connected to that system.

Jonathan Bennett [00:54:24]:
Yeah, that would, that would essentially be the hard part would essentially be the.

Jeff Massie [00:54:29]:
Patches that were posted was the Kong Wang patches. So he cleaned up some stuff that he actually had from the first round and they added a few more features. This is not the bytedance code at all. This is, this is Kong Wang continuing, continuing on his work.

Ken McDonald [00:54:50]:
But I bet I can think of one OS that would not, probably would not take this multi kernel as one of its choices.

Jonathan Bennett [00:55:03]:
What, what's that? Are you thinking of Debian.

Ken McDonald [00:55:07]:
Or the Mobians version of Debian?

Jonathan Bennett [00:55:10]:
See, he's doing it again. He's trying to, he's trying to segue himself.

Rob Campbell [00:55:13]:
You before you segue, what could happen with the possibly with Windows loving Linux maybe they could take it on and do that multi kernel, you know, maybe their future WSL is built with multi kernel technology and you can intertwine that any way you want.

Jonathan Bennett [00:55:34]:
I mean WSL has actually moved to using Hypervisor now, hasn't it?

Rob Campbell [00:55:39]:
Yeah, that's what it's been using the whole time.

Jonathan Bennett [00:55:41]:
Yeah, so it's actually not that big of a stretch. All right, so Ken is again itching to tell us about this and this is something I'm real fascinated by too actually. This is Debian on phones. Mobian. I get the name now Ken, take it away and tell us all about it.

Ken McDonald [00:56:02]:
Well this week we actually are hearing from Liam Proven about the latest version of an edition of Debian aimed at mobile devices as I said, called Mobian. It is based on Debian 13 Trixie and available in two main variants. One with Phosh, that's Gnomes phone shell and one with KDE Plasma Mobile 6.3 just for you Jeff. You can select from versions for the Pine Phone, Pine Phone Pro and Pine Tab. Now both sizes of Google's Pixel 3a, the OnePlus 6 and 6T and the. I know I'm going to butcher this. Xiaomi Poco F1. Now they all run the current version kernel from Debian 13 which is version 6.12.

Ken McDonald [00:57:03]:
There's also a version for the Purism Libram 5 phone that uses the older kernel 6.6. Liam also provides a little history on the PC industry and how the x86 PC world is unlike any other part of the computer market, especially the mobile handheld market. I'm going to recommend reading Liam's very informative article on why we can't just run Linux on all the phones out there.

Jonathan Bennett [00:57:34]:
You can't run Linux on all the phones. Probably the same thing as we were talking about it a minute ago, some of them have blocked bootloaders and some of them just don't have support for the chips and the kernels.

Jeff Massie [00:57:44]:
And.

Ken McDonald [00:57:48]:
There'S so many differences between the hardware that's being used.

Jonathan Bennett [00:57:54]:
Well, and so that's going to boil down to has somebody put together a working device tree for that particular device, which is one of those things about ARM that just makes so many ARM devices a pain to try to support. You may have support for all of the individual bits of hardware on the board, but then you also have to have someone come along and make a working device tree to be able to boot Linux on it. And then you also have to have some way to know when you go to boot it that that's what's there. Which oftentimes means essentially compiling your own distro.

Ken McDonald [00:58:27]:
But we can really thank IBM for not squashing down on the cloning that was done when the IBM PC first came out because they wanted to sell more software.

Jonathan Bennett [00:58:38]:
Right, right.

Ken McDonald [00:58:40]:
Because before then, how many computers were that close together? Even those that were based on, say, for example, the 6502 chip?

Jonathan Bennett [00:58:50]:
No, they were all completely different. Yeah, I guess the IBM personal PC was one of the first standards to be able to, you know, you can run the same software on multiple vendors machines.

Ken McDonald [00:59:02]:
And it became a de facto standard because IBM, instead of squashing all the cloning that was being done when it first came out, said, let them do it. It's other machines that can use our software.

Jonathan Bennett [00:59:14]:
Yeah, yeah.

Rob Campbell [00:59:15]:
They didn't think it was going to take off like it did too far down a path. And they've seen the history. I don't think we're gonna get that standardized phone.

Jonathan Bennett [00:59:26]:
Probably not anytime soon. Well, there is, there is another company that would love, or at least in the past has thought that they would love to be the company, the distro for the Linux phone. And here in just a second, we're gonna let Rob tell us what is up with Canonical. But right after this.

Rob Campbell [00:59:47]:
Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, has had a busy month, and not all of it's been smooth sailing. We've already talked about how many of the major changes with the rollout of Ubuntu 2510 and like, for example, how it now uses Rust core utils instead of the traditional GNU Core utils. You know, we've already talked about some of the problems that cause and, and you know, that's all part of Canonical's larger move toward modern memory safe system components written in Rust. You know, we've already shared some of the bugs and issues these major changes have created. Well, a new one has been discovered this week. A bug in Rust core utils has broken Ubuntu's unattended upgrade feature. Our previous discussions, you know, we were understanding when their changes broke some third party software and integrations that, you know, they didn't necessarily think about or care about. But we even had some, you know, conspiracy theories, but you know, when it breaks their own stuff that they made themselves oops.

Rob Campbell [01:01:00]:
I guess that kind of rules out the malicious conspiracy theory though, that some of us had just a big oops there. But the unattended upgrades feature, obviously it's responsible for automatically installing security updates and this bug causes it to just stop running altogether. The issue came from a difference in how the new Rust version of the Date R command reports timestamps. You know, it seemed like a minor change at first, but it turned out to break one of Ubuntu's most important background processes. You know, I mean, if you like security at least it's important. Canonical has marked it as a critical issue and is pushing out a fix. But users will need to manually run APT Update and APT Upgrade once the patch package is released. That's the rough part.

Rob Campbell [01:01:54]:
Now for the big picture side. Canonical isn't slowing down, it's. It's doubling down on Ubuntu as a complete platform. At the Ubuntu Summit 25.10 and in a recent blog post, various things were announced. Canonical announced several major new initiatives. One is AI models as Snaps. So you can now install optimized large language models directly from the Snap store. The first beta release includes models like deep seq, R1 and quin 2.5 VL optimized for intel and ARM64 systems.

Rob Campbell [01:02:32]:
The idea is simple. Type a command like sudasnap, install deepseek r1-space dash dash beta and you get a pre tuned AI model ready to run locally on your hardware. So it's making AI a lot more accessible. Canonical says these AI Snaps are Open source and hardware aware, meaning they'll automatically take advantage of your system CPU or NPU for acceleration. Now, support for Nvidia and AMD hardware isn't quite here yet, but it's on their radar and they'll be there. Along with that, Canonical launched the new Canonical Academy, a new certification program designed to validate real world Linux and Ubuntu skills. The first track focused on system administration with self paced exams covering the Linux terminal, Ubuntu desktop and Ubuntu servers. You know, at least their first track focused on this stuff.

Rob Campbell [01:03:34]:
Participants who pass earn digital badges to showcase their expertise, will expertise and will showcase their expertise. And while prices haven't been published yet, Canonical hinted that discount rates will apply during the beta phase, which means there will be prices. It's not free. I would maybe be interested in learning, getting some Canonical achievements, some badges, you know, kind of like gamifying it if the price wasn't too crazy. We'll see. You know, there's already other certifications, the Linux plus the, the, the L Pick or whatever. So I don't know if you give me at a fraction of cost something I could just wing on the side, maybe I'll just go through it. But also it's not going to be as relevant if it's cheap too.

Rob Campbell [01:04:27]:
So you know, it goes both ways. But it's not just Canonical's own tooling and things that are changing along with this. Another little side story is that the GIMP Snap. The Snap, that's the. The Snap store version of the popular Open Source Image editor is now officially maintained by the GIMP developers themselves. That means updates will roll out automatically through GIMP's own CI pipeline. And the Snap now matches the official GIMP releases, you know, exactly without, without Canonical's previous extras like OpenVINO AI plugin. So I guess that's.

Rob Campbell [01:05:07]:
There's good and bad there. You know, it's. It's nice when a developer maintains their own packages so you get it right from the source all up to date and no one has to step in and do anything. But one of the nice benefits of a to a universal package packaging is the extra stuff that sometimes gets bundled with it. So I guess we'll miss out on that. I don't know. I don't know that Open BE no is one that I'm interested but I'm sure there's some plugins I like to see automatically there. Anyway, all this taken together shows Canonical and Ubuntu are making strong.

Rob Campbell [01:05:40]:
Well, Canonical and their distro Ubuntu are making strong pushes to being the leaders of Linux and pushing the limits of what Linux can be.

Jonathan Bennett [01:05:52]:
Yeah, lots of that.

Rob Campbell [01:05:55]:
Lots of stuff going on there.

Jonathan Bennett [01:05:57]:
There's a lot of stuff going on there.

Ken McDonald [01:05:59]:
Yeah. I'm really intrigued by the gimp snap.

Jonathan Bennett [01:06:04]:
Yeah.

Ken McDonald [01:06:07]:
See where the Ubuntu studio would find that an easier way to distribute it.

Jeff Massie [01:06:11]:
It.

Rob Campbell [01:06:12]:
Yeah, possibly there already was a snap before, but it was a snap crafters their, their people that were snapping it up. So it's one less thing that they have to worry about doing. But I'm kind of interested in the LLM stuff. I've never really. I haven't dabbled with that. I'm not like Jeff. I haven't really used any of that stuff on my own equipment. I've used the cloud stuff like chat GPT.

Rob Campbell [01:06:33]:
But if it's this easy to just set up, install it makes it a.

Ken McDonald [01:06:40]:
Little more accessible and subscribe to.

Jeff Massie [01:06:44]:
Sure, yeah. It's in my, my workflow. It's part of my job now. I use it every day.

Jonathan Bennett [01:06:54]:
LLMs.

Jeff Massie [01:06:56]:
Yeah, well, LLMs and various agents.

Rob Campbell [01:07:01]:
Yeah.

Ken McDonald [01:07:02]:
Probably for documenting what you've been doing.

Jonathan Bennett [01:07:06]:
For lots of stuff.

Jeff Massie [01:07:07]:
I'm sure way beyond that.

Rob Campbell [01:07:09]:
Yeah. He's using it for coding all. All those. All the process of stuff we're using.

Jeff Massie [01:07:14]:
So no, it does make. I will say it is nice for when you have meetings. You record the meetings. It gets summaries and action items.

Jonathan Bennett [01:07:23]:
That is. That is extremely useful. Yes.

Jeff Massie [01:07:24]:
Then you can send it out. Yeah. There's a lot of cool stuff it does. Other stuff I can't even talk about.

Jonathan Bennett [01:07:32]:
Yeah, sure.

Ken McDonald [01:07:33]:
Use it because he's cheating.

Rob Campbell [01:07:35]:
He's using it to cheat on things.

Ken McDonald [01:07:39]:
It's like buying a Cliff Notes, right?

Jonathan Bennett [01:07:42]:
Sort of.

Jeff Massie [01:07:43]:
It's like having an assistant now read.

Ken McDonald [01:07:46]:
The Cliff Notes for you.

Rob Campbell [01:07:48]:
It's having a scribe.

Jeff Massie [01:07:50]:
Yeah. Having a scribe.

Jonathan Bennett [01:07:52]:
Yeah. I'm super curious if somebody finds out what those certifications from Canonical are actually what they cost. Yeah.

Rob Campbell [01:08:02]:
They haven't been announced yet, but yeah.

Jonathan Bennett [01:08:04]:
I'm probably far enough along in my career that I'm not going to invest in them. But I could see that being useful for someone that is not taking the exact career path that I have.

Rob Campbell [01:08:14]:
I mean if they're cheap. I mean it probably it's that much.

Jeff Massie [01:08:18]:
More you can put in. In your LinkedIn if they're reasonable.

Rob Campbell [01:08:21]:
I would just. I would do it just for the heck of it. You know, even years ago when I was already into. In, in it. I. On a whim, I Did the Microsoft Network fundamentals and the CompTIA IT fundamentals. Now this was already when I was in my career. These fundamentals are like very entry level but they were cheap and I got a student discount so they were really cheap.

Rob Campbell [01:08:44]:
I'm like I didn't study for them. I just like I'm going to take them see how I do so I'd be willing to do that.

Jonathan Bennett [01:08:52]:
Yeah I started studying for the CompTIA IT fundamentals at one point when I was very young and it was simple enough that I got fed up and walked away from it. I couldn't.

Rob Campbell [01:09:02]:
Yeah, you shouldn't have to study. I just took it. I can't remember one of these. They took me like 20 minutes to do and you know, no studying. It's simple. If you are in technology you should be able to pass the IT fundamentals without studying.

Jonathan Bennett [01:09:18]:
Yeah, yeah.

Ken McDonald [01:09:19]:
Well Keith512 had a link to.

Jeff Massie [01:09:25]:
Bobby.

Ken McDonald [01:09:25]:
Borisov's article about it and apparently it's $100 just for one certification dealing with the Linux terminal.

Jonathan Bennett [01:09:38]:
My. My wife is making fun of me talking about the. When I said when I was very young. This was before I met her so yes I was very young. That was that. I'm still young. I would like to say. I would like back when you were.

Ken McDonald [01:09:53]:
Very young and single and naive.

Jeff Massie [01:09:57]:
I was going to say very young is kind of a matter of perspective.

Ken McDonald [01:10:01]:
It's relative.

Jeff Massie [01:10:02]:
You're still very young.

Rob Campbell [01:10:04]:
$100 is not one of those cheap certifications I'm just going to do on a whim like the IT fundamentals. I think it cost me like 50 bucks with the student discount everything or less.

Ken McDonald [01:10:16]:
I'm sure you're business will cover that for you so they can write it off as a text.

Rob Campbell [01:10:22]:
They would if I pass.

Jonathan Bennett [01:10:25]:
That's funny.

Jeff Massie [01:10:25]:
Yeah there's a lot of educational pass or grade requirements for could see that having your class and education maybe maybe.

Rob Campbell [01:10:38]:
I am not as good at Linux as I think so I don't know if I want to take do it as a whim. A lot of tests, a lot of. A lot of certification. Certification exams have a lot of obscure tricky questions like you could be an expert in an area and they ask you the stupidest questions.

Jeff Massie [01:10:59]:
Some weird never hardly switch you've never used in tar. That's like. Well it really originally came from the vax days but it still supports the.

Jonathan Bennett [01:11:10]:
Blah blah blah.

Ken McDonald [01:11:14]:
Then you'll probably love my command line tip later.

Jonathan Bennett [01:11:18]:
Sure.

Rob Campbell [01:11:18]:
Well let's get moving so we can get to them soon.

Jonathan Bennett [01:11:20]:
Yeah, so Jeff has a story on Digicam that I am interested to hear.

Jeff Massie [01:11:27]:
Yeah, and it's been a while since we've talked about digicam. And for those that don't know, it calls itself a digital asset manager and image editor. It can import and organize your photos, allow adding metadata. It can edit and post process the images and even batch process images. There's facial recognition and powerful advanced search tools to look through your images. This is, this image is pretty much a one stop shop for your digital image needs. Now, I mean, I'm not saying it's like Photoshop, but I mean for, you know, your, your photos and whatnot, it's excellent. I personally, you know, I use it myself, but I will admit I, I only use a fraction of the power it has.

Jeff Massie [01:12:09]:
You know, I'm still learning. And they have documentation and you can actually pay for tricks and tips where they really have a well written book to go through everything that, you know, all the cool stuff that you're like, oh, if you combine this with that, you can do this. But I digress back to the main topic of this segment. Version 8.8 has been released four months after the 8.7 release. It comes with enhancements to the image editor to do things like progressively blur the background behind a subject of the photo. The G Mic QT plugin is updated to version 3.6, which allows expanded image processing and improve the progress manager to use the native desktop notifications. There's increased stability under Wayland. Read that as bug fixes, there's improved color management, better focus point extraction for supported cameras.

Jeff Massie [01:13:07]:
So basically you can pick out on supported cameras what was supposed to be the, the focus point of your image. And then it helps with some of the tools for enhancements and things like that. There's a ton of bug fixes in it and they now support up to 61 languages. And it also has been upgraded to Support the QT 6.10 application framework. So it's going to work better with Wayland. And so because this is a point, you know, 0.7 to 0.8, it's not this, this is not a huge new feature, but you know, they kind of fine tune bug fix, things like that. Take a look at the article linked in the show notes for all the details and things that I didn't cover. And the article also has a link to the official announcement which goes into even greater details on a lot of the image tools and enhancements and bugs that they actually squash.

Jeff Massie [01:14:07]:
So take a look.

Jonathan Bennett [01:14:09]:
Yeah, very cool. Let's see.

Jeff Massie [01:14:16]:
And I will say it is a powerful program. It's.

Jonathan Bennett [01:14:20]:
Yeah, Digicam is the one that actually has like lens correction stuff built into it to where you could go in and say, you know, I took. This is the camera I use, this is the lens I use. And it has a bit of magic to go in there and try to try to do correction based on that. Like some really sophisticated stuff inside Digicam.

Jeff Massie [01:14:40]:
Well, like the facial recognition, I've had it find, you know, put it like say put in a picture of my son and it'll find pictures, you know, when he's say 16, it'll find pictures when he was a baby and they'll be like, oh yeah. And it's right.

Jonathan Bennett [01:14:56]:
Cool.

Jeff Massie [01:14:57]:
It's pretty awesome.

Jonathan Bennett [01:14:58]:
Yeah, that's actually really nice to be able to do that locally and so you don't have to feed all that stuff up to somebody like Google because you could do that same thing with Google Images. But it is a little disconcerting. Yeah, it's a little creepy for Google Images to then be generating facial profiles of everyone that, you know, it's like, what else are they doing with that information?

Rob Campbell [01:15:22]:
I mean, my Google doorbell mixes up people all the time, so they don't even do it.

Jonathan Bennett [01:15:28]:
Well.

Jeff Massie [01:15:30]:
I was saying we're close to Halloween so we can say words like creepy and macabre and you know, terrifying.

Jonathan Bennett [01:15:36]:
Yeah, absolutely. All right, Ken, last story of the day. Let's talk about Austria. Creepy and macabre place. No, no, surely not.

Ken McDonald [01:15:49]:
Actually, no, they are more for doing free and open source software as their daily project. Because this week Christine hall wrote about some great news about open source adoption that came out of the Nextcloud Enterprise Day Copenhagen 2025 event. Now, the Australian Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs, Energy and Tourism, or the abbreviation for the Australian way of saying that is BMWet. Is that BMWit? But they have made a major shift away from foreign owned and operated Clouds and proprietary SaaS services to a homegrown IT infrastructure centered on NextCloud along with Collabora, which runs on NextCloud and offers the LibreOffice productive productivity suite as a user hosted service. Now, according to Christine, the good news is that this isn't some pie in the sky plan that will see fruition in a future date. This one's already in the can. It's a done deal. Nextcloud Co Founder and Director of Communications Josh Porvoo and I do apologize for, I know I mispronounced that, I guess you could say mangled that.

Ken McDonald [01:17:21]:
But he told Phosphorus, we're very excited about this case because it shows that with some courage you can get great results. Why is Austria doing this? According to Christine, the move is about digital sovereignty Digital sovereignty has been a catchphrase in European discussions concerning the intersection of tech and jurisprudence for the last few years. Christine defines digital sovereignty as the idea that a country should be able to govern how data about its citizens is collected, stored and processed to create what is essentially a what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas approach to the information control. Austria's move was prompted by a risk analysis showing that overseas cloud offers failed to meet the ministry's privacy requirements. The project went from proof of concept to full deployment in about four months, according to Martin Ulram, VMWET's CIO. An extensive information campaign, clear communications training and a gradual transition ensured high acceptance and a smooth process. By integrating the new solution into existing systems, we were able to modernize our digital service catalog and collaboration process without changing established workflows. Now, according to Christine, the part about integrating new solutions with existing systems might be key to this migration success.

Ken McDonald [01:19:07]:
Some of BMW existing license tech, notably I hate saying this, but Microsoft Teams.

Jonathan Bennett [01:19:18]:
Nobody likes teams. That's hilarious.

Ken McDonald [01:19:21]:
Remains in use even though it appears that the plan is to eventually phase those out as licenses expire. That sounds like a good plan to me for the time being. According to an article by nextcloud Senior Communications Manager Kim Poleman, nextcloud handles internal collaboration and secure data management while Teams remains available for external meetings. Christine's article also gives details about the Austrian military's success in migrating to Liberia Office. I think we touched on that a couple of episodes back.

Jonathan Bennett [01:20:00]:
We have several times, as well as.

Ken McDonald [01:20:03]:
What you may expect from other EU members. I recommend reading Christine's article because there's a lot more that I have not touched on.

Rob Campbell [01:20:14]:
Yeah, this is at least our fourth story this year about some municipality going open source, moving away from Microsoft and you know, all the things like this. So it's, it just keeps on going.

Jeff Massie [01:20:27]:
Yep.

Jonathan Bennett [01:20:28]:
Yep.

Jeff Massie [01:20:28]:
Well I, I see that in Europe. I see a lot of people around the world. I mean you're, you're, and I think we've mentioned this before, you know you get the people like linus Tech Tips, Jay's 2 cents. You know, gamers, Nexus, they're bringing up and doing Linux benchmarks and talking about Linux more now they're not focused. They're not. But it's now a topic they mention.

Jonathan Bennett [01:20:53]:
It is, it is broken into the public consciousness.

Jeff Massie [01:20:56]:
It, it's Kind of hit mainstream.

Jonathan Bennett [01:20:59]:
Yeah. Yep. Interesting.

Jeff Massie [01:21:00]:
It is interesting to see as mainstream as tech geeks are.

Rob Campbell [01:21:05]:
You know what? Maybe this exists. I want to see, you know how they always have youtubers or whatever streamer service they're on, walking around with the mic and they ask somebody, some. Some question. I want to see him going around, do you know what Linux is? And then shoving a mic in their face.

Jonathan Bennett [01:21:18]:
Yeah, that'd be fun.

Rob Campbell [01:21:20]:
Just. Yeah.

Ken McDonald [01:21:22]:
So names Turvolds, right?

Jeff Massie [01:21:24]:
Yeah, so.

Rob Campbell [01:21:26]:
So there's an idea, people, go ahead and run with it. Send me a link so I can watch it. I want to see the answers.

Jonathan Bennett [01:21:32]:
Oh, I thought you were going to say that you wanted some, some. Some royalty money. If anybody used your idea, I would love that too.

Rob Campbell [01:21:38]:
But I know no one's going to do that. Just buy me a coffee at least. If you like it and you take in.

Jonathan Bennett [01:21:42]:
There you go.

Jeff Massie [01:21:44]:
Every hundred thousand is a coffee or something.

Rob Campbell [01:21:47]:
Whatever, whatever. Just thank me, mention my name, whatever.

Jonathan Bennett [01:21:52]:
Yep. All right, up next, that's our. That is our news stories. Up next, we're going to talk about some tips. And that'll come right after this. Okay, up first, we are going to let Rob talk about being lazy. This is a perfect tip for Rob.

Rob Campbell [01:22:07]:
It really is. If you know me. Work smarter, not harder has always been my mantra. I've always gone by that. So my tip this week is a little app, it's fairly new called Lazy ssh. So hopefully you all know what SSH is by now, if you're using it. And if you are, if you have a lot of systems that you ssh into this system to manage, that might be what you're looking for. So for those watching here, I've already installed Lazy SSH on this system here.

Rob Campbell [01:22:47]:
And so you just type Lazy ssh. You can alias that, I guess, to SSH if you wanted it. That might cause problems. Just do Lazy SSH or lss SSH or whatever. Anyway, lazy ssh, you open that up. So I already set up a few of my systems on here. Playing around, you know, I got PI hole, Ansible, SHG20, 25, and if I want to SSH to one, I'm going to SSH to PI hole. I go there and I just hit enter and I don't have the key set up on this one yet, so it's going to ask me for a password and boom, I'm in.

Rob Campbell [01:23:27]:
I'm going to back out and go back to here. Now, if you're looking at it shows the basic settings on the Side there, you know, all the things I put in there, it shows other things, not at the bottom. And on the, on the commands on the right, you know, I can do F report forward, X, stop it, see to copy it, G to ping it. So if I just hit G there, it's going to ping it and it showed at the bottom quickly. If you were paying attention, I'll do it again. I could refresh the list, add a new server, edit an entry. So if I were to add a server, you know, let me just edit this one. It shows the same for add, but this one, if I edit it.

Ken McDonald [01:24:06]:
You.

Rob Campbell [01:24:06]:
Have an alias, you know, whatever the name is you want. The host or the ip, a username, a port. If you have SSH keys, you could put that in there. You could tag it if you want different tags. Like if you have a lot of them and then you want to tag them to categorize them, you can put a tag in there and then you can save it. It's the same thing to add a new one. But you know, if I edit it has some already in there. So yeah, just a nice little tool to organize all the different places you ssh into and make it quick and easy.

Jeff Massie [01:24:45]:
Great.

Jonathan Bennett [01:24:45]:
Ssh, lazy ssh, I like it. I'll see if I can get that running on one of my machines.

Rob Campbell [01:24:51]:
Yeah, so I guess one other quick thing about it is, you know, it's new so you can either compile it, you can just grab the binaries. I guess that's about your options. I think I saw a Windows binary too, which I don't know, I'm sure.

Jonathan Bennett [01:25:09]:
It'S available on some repo somewhere. Maybe somebody has a PPA for it or.

Rob Campbell [01:25:13]:
I saw Homebrew.

Jonathan Bennett [01:25:15]:
Yeah, there you go. It's interesting now that you mentioned that the number of people that have started using Homebrew for installing stuff on Linux that's really picking up as a thing. So yeah, that's definitely.

Ken McDonald [01:25:26]:
Google even uses Homebrew for installing Gemini CLI on Linux.

Jonathan Bennett [01:25:31]:
Yeah, yeah, bunch of places. All right, Jeff is up next with a barrier. I don't know what that. Is that a firewall? I would guess it's a firewall.

Jeff Massie [01:25:42]:
Nope.

Jonathan Bennett [01:25:42]:
And a couple things.

Jeff Massie [01:25:44]:
If you hear some loud noises, we got a thunderstorm. And if you lose me, we probably lost power.

Jonathan Bennett [01:25:50]:
Understood.

Jeff Massie [01:25:51]:
Just a heads up and barrier, this is one that Rob knows about. So it is not any kind of security software. It's barrier is a KVM type of software. It'll allow a single keyboard and mouse to control multiple Computers, but it's all done in software. Now Barrier needs to be installed on every machine you want to use remotely and it won't switch video, so it's only keyboard mouse. To use it, you move your mouse to the edge of the screen, hit a special key and then you can select which machine you want to control. Barrier will let you use your keyboard and mouse from one computer to control just several machines, whatever you want. And clipboard sharing is supported.

Jeff Massie [01:26:41]:
That's basically it. It's a very basic should work type of program. Not a lot of bells and whistles they specifically talk about. It's built to have this one basic function and that's what it is. I will say it's been a couple years since the last update, so I'm not sure if that means the project isn't being worked on or they met their goal and it. And it just works and they're done there. There has been activity in the past year. It's just not a release.

Jeff Massie [01:27:12]:
So it could be the latter. You know, they just. Well it's working, it does what we want. We're. We're done until something major changes. If you want though, take a look at Barrier if you're wanting a non hardware KVM and give it a shot.

Jonathan Bennett [01:27:28]:
So Barrier.

Rob Campbell [01:27:31]:
I would like to expand on that a little bit though too.

Jonathan Bennett [01:27:34]:
Yeah, there's some interesting history here Rob. You can, you can.

Rob Campbell [01:27:38]:
Well so I mean originally like I used a program like this, the. A closed source program called Synergy 15 years ago. So this is essentially open source version of that. Now though your. The way you used it, the way you describe there sounds different from how I described or how I've used it. Like I would have my Linux computer, my one or two monitors for that right next to it, a Windows computer with a monitor. And then I've even had like a laptop, like a Mac laptop next to that all running it. And when I get to the edge I've never had to push a key.

Rob Campbell [01:28:16]:
It just worked like these were all one system. I scroll off one monitor and right onto the next off of my Linux monitor and right onto a Windows monitor like seamlessly. And that's how I've always used it. So it almost. So like even side by side a Linux and a Windows computer acted, you know, use one keyboard, one mouse acted like they were a single computer.

Jonathan Bennett [01:28:42]:
Yeah. So Barrier is A fork of DeskFlow and DeskFlow is the upstream open source project that is behind Synergy. So they are all sort of related. Synergy changed their funding model essentially to where if you want to run like Synergy proper, you get to pay some money for that. Although it is still based on the open source project and I'm guessing when that funding model changed is when Barrier got forked. But yeah, it's interesting to see. And to their credit, on the desk flow repo, there's even a question here. It says, does this work with similar projects? And it says yes, all of these downstream forks do continue to work.

Jonathan Bennett [01:29:30]:
Synergy Input, Leap, Barrier. It has network compatibility with all of those forks, which is pretty cool. Like good for them for making that work.

Rob Campbell [01:29:43]:
Yeah, I did not know that they were all actually based on the same code.

Jonathan Bennett [01:29:47]:
Yeah.

Ken McDonald [01:29:48]:
So would it work on Chromebook?

Jeff Massie [01:29:50]:
Probably.

Jonathan Bennett [01:29:51]:
It'd probably be possible, yeah.

Ken McDonald [01:29:54]:
Or at least from within the Linux terminal on it.

Jonathan Bennett [01:29:57]:
From within one of the VMs for sure.

Jeff Massie [01:30:00]:
Now they have distro a list of distro specific packages.

Jonathan Bennett [01:30:05]:
I wonder if Wayland causes problems for this.

Rob Campbell [01:30:08]:
Yeah, it's actually been a little while since I've used it.

Jonathan Bennett [01:30:11]:
I bet Wayland would cause problems for this just because of the additional security hardening that Wayland does. All right, Ken, I was going to.

Jeff Massie [01:30:21]:
Say they do mention Wayland is not fully working yet.

Jonathan Bennett [01:30:27]:
It's coming. Still working on it. Yeah. I'm not surprised. Ken, let's talk about echoing and printing. Printing stuff to the command line. How do you do it?

Ken McDonald [01:30:40]:
By more than happy to tell you about this, especially since we have never formally covered printing to standard output or even to files in any of our previous tips in any kind of great measure. But let me go ahead and bring up a terminal here and I'm going to demonstrate. Well, we all know about Echo. You just type echo followed by whatever you want to print, right?

Jonathan Bennett [01:31:15]:
Yeah.

Ken McDonald [01:31:21]:
And what's the simplest thing to do? Echo. Hello, World. For those of y' all listening, I've got my terminal up. Let's go ahead and make this all a bit bigger so everybody can see it. How's that?

Jonathan Bennett [01:31:36]:
That'll work.

Ken McDonald [01:31:39]:
And I just typed echo and then in quotes hello world with a space before the H and hello. And that gave us that. Now, in the past we have included the command echo when displaying how another command may change data without ever covering some of its options or alternative commands that have more control or formatting on how the data is displayed. What kind of formatting can you do with the echo command? Do you know offhand, Jonathan?

Jonathan Bennett [01:32:15]:
I don't know of any, actually. There might be some, but I've never looked.

Ken McDonald [01:32:21]:
You can use a dash. I want to say lowercase E, so it doesn't. So, like if, say, for example, you typed hello, backslash T, what do you think's going to happen?

Jonathan Bennett [01:32:43]:
So the slash T. The slash T is one way to represent a tab command. Tab character.

Ken McDonald [01:32:49]:
But with echo. Doesn't treat it that way, does it?

Jonathan Bennett [01:32:52]:
Apparently not. Ah, so the dash E tells it to what, expand the stuff inside.

Ken McDonald [01:33:01]:
Right. And if you don't want it to expand, you can use dash in or not at dash in, dash capital E. And there it just tells it not to.

Jonathan Bennett [01:33:23]:
Yeah.

Ken McDonald [01:33:24]:
Now, there is another command that I want to touch on, and that is printf.

Jonathan Bennett [01:33:30]:
That one will be very familiar to all of our C and C programmers.

Ken McDonald [01:33:36]:
I hope so, because I don't want to try to explain all of this.

Jonathan Bennett [01:33:42]:
Printf, the level 0 debug. Yep.

Ken McDonald [01:33:48]:
And with a printf, you can do formatting, you can put in tabs, you can designate how long you want a string to be and whether to lift or right align it. For example, with the command I've got here is printf, then in quotes, slash V or backslash V's backslash T percent D with a dash space, percent 2 0s, backslash N, then end quotes. Then I'm following that with one space. Hello, space, two space, world space, three space. Done. What do you think that's going to print?

Jonathan Bennett [01:34:45]:
Percent D is a digit. The dash may get. The dash may just come through as a dash. I'm not sure what the percent 20s does. Maybe a string.

Ken McDonald [01:35:02]:
What's percent S?

Jonathan Bennett [01:35:03]:
Percent S is going to be string. So maybe a string 20 characters wide.

Ken McDonald [01:35:08]:
Yep. And it will. Right, align it.

Rob Campbell [01:35:12]:
Aha.

Ken McDonald [01:35:14]:
So if we take that 20L, for those of y' all listening, the first time I did it, it had right below the line that I entered it in, you have a blank line. Then you have the one that looks like it's tabbed over followed by a dash. And then I'll let y' all count the. All the spaces in between that dash and the. Hello. But it should come out to about six. Yes. Set to 15 spaces.

Ken McDonald [01:35:54]:
Then hello. Yeah, then you've got the same for two dash, world, three dash. Done with a line in between, because I've got the slash Visa, vertical tab.

Jonathan Bennett [01:36:10]:
Got it.

Ken McDonald [01:36:11]:
Now, here's what's really nice, is you can put all that into a. Into a single variable.

Jonathan Bennett [01:36:34]:
Oh, and they just do A instead of. You can tell printf. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can tell printf to just print the variable.

Jeff Massie [01:36:46]:
Yep.

Jonathan Bennett [01:36:52]:
Yeah. Use dollar sign. Cool. Yeah. Printf is. Is super useful. On the command line, you can do a. It's really powerful.

Jonathan Bennett [01:37:02]:
You can do a lot with the same. Same enc. Right. It's. It's. It's used very often in C and C programming for a reason. But for doing structured output on the command line, it is. It is super cool.

Jonathan Bennett [01:37:15]:
Yeah.

Ken McDonald [01:37:16]:
So if you're writing a script where, you know somebody's going to be expecting information on the command line, or even if you are using a graphics user interface, you may still find this handy for formatting it before sending it into that graphics user interface.

Jonathan Bennett [01:37:36]:
Yeah. Honestly, I didn't know printf would. If you gave it more inputs than you have placeholders, I did not know it would just repeat the string. That's. That's pretty cool. I didn't know that was a thing.

Ken McDonald [01:37:51]:
You could actually take and set up a. For next loop to have it read in each line of a file and then use the printf to set up to print out that very format line.

Jonathan Bennett [01:38:06]:
Yeah, very cool. I like that a lot. All right, I have a command for you. This is actually just a bit of fun. I've spent way too much time messing with this today. Actually, we're going to capture the entire screen here. Yeah. So I have Cataclysm, and specifically this is Cataclysm dda.

Jonathan Bennett [01:38:36]:
Dark Days Ahead. And this is a game that you can play on the command line. So.

Jeff Massie [01:38:44]:
Oh, that's cool.

Jonathan Bennett [01:38:45]:
You can play it over. Ssh even. And it is. It's sort of a hybrid between something like Dwarf Fortress and Rogue. So, you know, it's got a version here that. Here I'll turn off the safe mode. It's got a version here that is completely terminal based. This is literally running on the terminal and so I can run around.

Jonathan Bennett [01:39:15]:
I'm about to be attacked by a zombie. I don't know if I'm. I have a steel chain. I'll probably be fine. Let's get after this zombie. We're going to attack it. I did 14 damage. I did 16 damage, but it did bite my left hand.

Jonathan Bennett [01:39:29]:
I did another. This chain is great. 13 damage. 17 damage. The last enemy holding you collapses. I believe I have beat the zombie. Let's see if it's got anything interesting on it. It's got a bikini top and a cigarette back.

Jonathan Bennett [01:39:43]:
It has a friendship bracelet. Nothing terribly great here, though. So no loot from this zombie. So this is the ASCII mode. There is another. This is fairly recent inside of the Cataclysm project. They have a tiles mode. And when you first Launch it.

Jonathan Bennett [01:40:04]:
It looks about the same. Start a fresh game. When it comes up, though, you'll see that this is a little different. This version is not running in the terminal. This actually brought up its own window and it does take just a moment for this to chew through and set everything up. Because I told you to do a new game and so we're actually generating a new world. But here it's actually got tiles and this game is pretty cool because it does also have a dynamic lighting system. So when you open up windows, you get sight lines and you get light inside.

Jonathan Bennett [01:40:42]:
Zoom back out and show you. So then you get to see a radius that you can see. Open up some more windows here. There's another one. Boom. More light inside of here. And it is sort of a zombie survival mixed with a roguelite sort of game. It's really interesting and like I said, I've spent more time than I intended to today fiddling around with this, but it's really cool.

Jonathan Bennett [01:41:13]:
It is open source and like I said, there is the version of it that does run completely in the command line. So you can SSH into a server and play this if you want to. It's.

Jeff Massie [01:41:22]:
It's really.

Jonathan Bennett [01:41:23]:
It's pretty cool. And I've got a link off to the website, which from there has links to where to get the game. Yeah, Cataclysm.

Jeff Massie [01:41:31]:
Yeah, Briggs said. Reminds me of old BBS games and I was thinking the exact same thing. Or like some of the old muds.

Jonathan Bennett [01:41:39]:
Yeah. I don't think they have multiplayer built into it, but yeah, it is. It is kind of that Mud feeling reminiscent of. Yes. Yeah, for sure, for sure. All right, well, hey, that is the show. Those are our command line tips. I'm going to let each of the guys get in the last word if they want to.

Jonathan Bennett [01:41:58]:
We'll let Rob kick us off with that. What you have for us, Rob?

Rob Campbell [01:42:03]:
All right, Just my usual. Nothing special here. If you want to find more me, you can find information and links at my website. Website is Robert P. Campbell.com and on there near the top, you can find links to my LinkedIn, my Twitter, my Blue Sky, My Mastodon, and a place to donate coffees to me or leave a note if you want to donate to the other guys too. And I will make sure to get that to them.

Jonathan Bennett [01:42:34]:
Interesting. All right, so up next we have Jeff. And Jeff might just have some poetry for us if we're lucky.

Jeff Massie [01:42:45]:
I do. I don't have anything else to cover, so. Another poetry corner. This. This is about something as well. So as you can tell, we kind of got a theme going here. Inside many laptops, you'll discover this hardware for video chat lovers. But much.

Jeff Massie [01:43:01]:
But with much malware creeping hackers might use for peeping. To be safe this thing, you should cover front facing cameras.

Jonathan Bennett [01:43:11]:
Yeah, absolutely.

Jeff Massie [01:43:13]:
Have a great week, everybody.

Jonathan Bennett [01:43:15]:
All right. And Ken.

Ken McDonald [01:43:19]:
Despite Halloween coming up, I'm going to still recommend, or maybe because Halloween's coming up, that you do. Back up, back up. And don't let it burn.

Jonathan Bennett [01:43:34]:
Good stuff. All right, thank you guys for being here. Appreciate it has been fun as always. If you want to find more of me, there is of course, hackaday. That's where Floss Weekly lives these days. That's where my security column goes live on Fridays. You should also check out where I was on the Twit D and D special. We recorded that just yesterday.

Jonathan Bennett [01:43:55]:
And for those that are a part of Club Twit, you know where to go to get that. And we had a lot of fun with that. Hopefully part two coming up soon. Sooner or later, we were all definitely game for it. So we'll see when we can get that done. Thank you everybody for being here. Those that watch and listen, those that get us live and on the download. And we will see you next week on the Untitled Lending Show.