Untitled Linux Show 166 Transcript

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

00:00 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Hey, this week we're talking about Microsoft breaking your grub install, about some Zen 5 gaming questions. Then the Linux Foundation is backing an open source LLM initiative. Ubuntu 24.04 is making some changes with .1, and LibreOffice comes out with an update and lots more. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned. Podcasts you love.

00:25 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
From people you trust. This is Twit.

00:32 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
This is the Untitled Linux Show, episode 166, recorded Saturday, august 24th. Update at your peril. Hey folks, it is Saturday, and you know what that means. It is time for the Untitled Linux Show. It's where we get geeky with Linux and open source and all things fun. Some hardware, some software we throw all kinds of stuff in here. We just we have a blast with it, though, and we appreciate all of you all coming along with us to have some fun today, and it is, of course, not just me. We've got the crew a crew, a group of people. We have individuals, and, uh, we're excited to have all of them here. Of course, we've got rob, we've got jeff, we've got david, and, uh, we've got some stories, we've got some news to talk about, and we are going to let rob kick us off with the, uh, the, the, the dual boot apocalypse that's a good name for it, because it is confirmed.

01:26 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Microsoft breaks dual boots. So I've heard dual booters complain about Windows updates breaking their dual boots for years, but I've never actually seen it myself, never had a problem myself and, to be fair, I still have not seen it myself. But Microsoft admits that a recent update indeed breaks some dual boots. And here's the kicker. They kind of did it on purpose, but with good intentions maybe I don't know. So here's the deal.

02:02
Grub has had a CVE vulnerability. It was back in 2022, two years ago about, labeled CVE 2022-2601. That could allow a maliciously crafted PF2 font to cause a buffer overflow when calculating the max glyph size value. And you know this has been, like I said, it's been in Red Hat's Bugzilla system for two years now, but it was fixed about a year ago in Grub 2.06. So Microsoft decided it's time to apply a secure boot advanced targeting update that would block Linux bootloaders that haven't been patched against the CVE. But apparently this patch isn't supposed to be applied to systems where dual booting has been detected. Not sure why, else you'd have grub, but anyway they. Also they acknowledged that the dual boot detection did not detect some customized whatever customized methods of dual booting means and then it applied the patch anyway. Bleeping Computer says this has reportedly affected systems running Ubuntu, linux Mint, zorin OS, puppy Linux and other distros.

03:30
Microsoft provides a registry change that you can make to stop the patch from being applied. But if you already applied the patch, the only confirmed way to fix it is to disable secure boot, install the latest version of your distro and then re-enable secure boot, though I'm guessing you could probably boot into a rescue USB disk or whatever, go to command line, maybe install just the newer version of grub. I don't know if that's what that installing newer version of your distro is doing in that step. So maybe you don't have to go all the way if you know how to follow those advanced steps. So this is your PSA.

04:17
If you dual boot Windows, be careful out there and maybe hold off on updating Windows for a bit, or hold off booting into Windows for a while, or wait. Let me start this PSA over. Right PSA, don't use Windows. Alternatively, making sure Grub is 2.06 or newer would probably help us as well, but you never know what Microsoft is going to break. Making sure Grub is 2.06 or newer would probably help us as well, but you still you never know what Microsoft is going to break. It's what they do.

04:51 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
This is a weird story. It's a vulnerability in Grub that Microsoft decided to do something. It's so weird, right I got to wonder. Did they find this in the wild, where some malicious rootware is installing Grub to be able to root Windows? It's odd. It's really odd to me. Just format that Windows partition?

05:22 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I guess man it is odd If you have valuable data there, you can leave. Leave it there just don't boot into it.

05:30 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
I mean, all joking aside, first, it being as old as it is, the fact that it's still breaking stuff is not a good sign on on the uh keeping the linux updated side of things. And then, yeah, how many Windows? Because it was supposed to not affect dual boot, how many non-dual boot users of Windows are running Grub Exactly?

05:56 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Well, that's why I say. That's why I wonder is this a part of someone's malicious workflow that they've discovered that once an attacker has owned a Windows machine? Part of someone's like malicious workflow that they've discovered that once uh, you know, once an attacker has owned a windows machine, once they've they've taken it over, do they then go and install grub to be able to use this? I could, I could, see that happening in some attack chain, right they could install grub and hide it too.

06:20
You don't have to actually show that, yeah yeah, bootloader, and because and so the other part of this is interesting is Microsoft signs the shim that makes grub work on secure boot machines, so I suppose that does give them a little bit more skin in that game. It's still. It's a very. Everything about this is just weird. This is the direction that Microsoft is going to fix this. It's very surprising to me.

06:48 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Or they hit the third E and they're on extinguish. Now we're all about the conspiracy theories. Come on.

06:56 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
The third E. We've hit the third E.

06:59 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, yeah, I got you All right. Well, so while we're talking about conspiracy theories, there's apparently some lost performance in Zen 5?.

07:09 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
There is, and this story is going to be a little different than we're used to, because we're going to talk about Windows, window, insider and Linux all in one story. Now, don't worry, this isn't a complete Rob story where he's going to go on and on about Windows, like I think our previous story showed. Rob's story, where he's going to go on and on about Windows, like I think our previous story showed. What we are going to compare and contrast is the gaming differences on the new AMD Ryzen 9000 CPUs and see what the performance differences are. So last week's episode, you know, in last week's episode where I talked about the 9000, 12 and 16 core CPUs, I did make mention of how there's a difference between Windows and Linux and Linux seems to be better prepared for the new silicon. Now I even mentioned Wendell over at Level One Techs how he thought there was an interesting difference between the two operating systems.

07:56
Well, this week he's put out a 40 minute video on the differences and basically digging into more data and find out what he could. So now I will start this out and I'll probably I'll say it later too. You should check out this video. It's 40 minutes and it's really packed full of information. So I'm just hitting a few of the high points in here. There's so much more detail in the video, but Wendell does start out the video saying that much more detail in the video. But Wendell does start out the video saying that he thinks now and this is just an educated guess on his part, not an actual, proven fact that there might be an issue in the branch predictor in the chips which show up in Windows and it's less likely to show up in Linux. And this is just from all the testing he's done and purely an educated guess. Nothing beyond that and it's his guess. Nobody from AMD said anything like this. No other channel has said anything like this.

08:53
Now, when you watch the video, he talks about virtualization-based security and on and off he's testing Windows Insiders build and ideally there's a fix in the software to help get around the issue in the branch prediction. Now he's testing that alongside the latest consumer Windows 11 build. So that's what the latest, greatest we're all running and Linux in general is still doing better than both versions of Windows and with all the different VBS settings, a lot you settings it didn't matter and some things it mattered, some things it didn't, but Linux was always coming out on top, and a lot of this is going to be based on around a 5% improvement, but things vary based on the games you're playing. He even has some tweaks where he goes into the BIOS which helps Windows pull ahead. But if you do the same, tweaks on Linux and Linux is the leader again. Now I should state, just as Wendell does most of the frame rates in the games he's looking at are not going to be enough to really see a difference. These are also 1080p performance measurements, because those are the ones likely to see changes in the frame rates due to the CPU. If you're running high-end settings and especially higher resolutions, then your GPU is the bottleneck and you're not really going to see a difference because most of the weighting is on the GPU, not the CPU. Now, for those who'd like to do their own testing on Windows, you need to disable SVM in the BIOS, because if you're running the Windows subsystem for Linux, it also uses the virtualization and you can't get away from the virtualization with running Linux on your Windows. Now it should be stated that the virtualization should only add 1% to 3% overhead.

10:46
Wendell does go on and say that that's what he's seen over his many years of testing this stuff in an enterprise-type environment, but it's just something to keep aware of. Now what's kind of interesting is some games are about parity with Linux and with Linux still being a little faster. Don't get me wrong, linux is not the slouch here. I mean parity is about the best you're going to get. But there are some older games like Shadow of the Tomb Raider where Linux just crushes Windows in frames per second. I want to say it's doing about 100 frames per second more on Linux than it is in any version of Windows with any kind of setting tweaks Wendell does bring up it's hard to do A-B testing with Linux because it's possible that things aren't rendering identically, and it also should be mentioned he's using a 9700 8-core CPU on a lot of these because he didn't want to mess with the core parking.

11:43
That's done on Windows on the 12 and 16 core chips which ideally you park to some cores because it should speed up games, because they don't have the cross NUMA node delay. But Linux does not do that and Linux relies on their scheduler to make the best decisions. Now Wendell said he's already dealing with so many variables. He tried to just simplify his testing somewhat. So he acknowledges there's a lot more to this and it's more than what he could do in one video and he's even hoping other people join in and help try to figure this out, why things are so different. He also goes on to say, rather than directly comparing Windows to Linux, one should look at the previous generation of the processors to the new generation and compare the uplift by doing it that way. So you have a true A to B testing.

12:42
Now he did some of the testing and found that Linux still had a better performance improvement than Windows. He had that somewhat limited because on the Windows side there was all sorts of other complications and it kind of got messy versus Linux. You just load it up and go. Now Wendell does mention that gaming on Linux is not as easy as Windows but has made great strides in the last few years. And he does mention that other handhelds are getting the SteamOS to play games and it shows the advantage Linux can have when playing in a power and hardware constrained environment. Variables and levers you can pull and tweak that. You can customize it better to the hardware and what you need, versus the inflexibility he said of Windows.

13:33
Now just to add to this and it's not in Wendell's video, but AMD has made a blog post where they rolled back their expected game performance and admitted they were running in an administrator mode not running the games in admin mode but running the entire OS as an admin. So there's a difference there. There have been a few more rumors coming out as relating to these gaming chips and we should see the X3D chips after about the first of the year at Computex. If nothing pushes, we should see the x3d chips after about the first first of the year at computex. If nothing pushes, we should see them in about five to six months on store shelves. Take that with a big grain of salt. That's just the current latest rumors.

14:16
Now take a look at the link in the youtube video in the show notes, because again I've only scratched the surface of all the information he's given you. You know Wendell is a very big Linux fan. You know I will say he does give it fair criticism when it's merited, but overall he's very positive on the future and the current status of Linux gaming. He even had a graphic showing, just kind of I think, his thoughts on it that maybe not this year but very soon, kind of I think his thoughts on it that, maybe not this year, but very soon, the gaming on linux is going to cross over the parody of windows gaming and linux will be a much better gaming platform.

14:51 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So definitely, uh, keep your eyes and ears out so I went ahead and added your uh, the the link from amd their blog post to our show notes. Take a a look at that too. There's a real interesting line in here. They say the Zen 5 architecture incorporates a wider branch prediction capacity than prior Zen generations. Okay, that's to be expected. Our automated test methodology was run in admin mode, which you noted that about. You know the OS running in admin mode and some different things there which produced results that reflect branch prediction code optimizations not present in the version of Windows reviewers used to test the 9000 series. That fascinates me a lot, yeah. And then he says the blog post says we have a further update on accessing this performance for users below, so they're going to dig into it some more. I'm still reading through this blog post too, but it's just, it's real fascinating the way that they put that.

15:55 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
Yeah, there's an article over on TechSpot that references Steve Walton at Hardware Unboxed and he actually went back and forth with AMD on this problem because he saw a 4% performance difference running games as administrator versus running them as a limited user. And AMD said that yeah, there's a bug in Windows that's preventing some of their code, some of their performance code, from running as a normal user. That they didn't realize because all of their tests were done as an admin account. So they're investigating it and right now they're tentatively kind of pointing at Microsoft. But it's definitely interesting.

16:39 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, yeah. So further note here apparently in Windows 11 version 24H2, as a preview through the Windows Insider program build 26100, there is going to be some AMD specific branch prediction code that lands in Windows. So I think part of this was that they were running it in their benchmarks. In their benchmarks it sounds like they were running this special code, this special flavor of Windows that other people didn't really have access or didn't know to go use until now.

17:11 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
And that's why Wendell was using the Windows Insider version to test as well. But Linux was still doing better. Linux just ate it up. And you know I should mention this is all for games that we're talking about. If you're running a scientific workload, especially AVX 512, the 9000 series just is a huge step ahead, just not gaming.

17:34 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
Yeah, interesting stuff. Now the difference in performance on Windows and again, this is not a Windows show, so I'll let Windows Weekly handle that. But it wasn't just games Anything, that was graphics intensive Photoshop, premiere Blender. They were seeing the same performance differences between running as admin and running as a user.

18:02 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Weird. So it's something about talking to the gpu, then some sort of uh, either extra layer of security or some kind of contention on the pci express bus, probably. Well, it sounds like a microsoft problem side note about running as admin.

18:18 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
You know, some of us have been playing once human, a little bit lately, and I got my uh, one of my kids, to start playing it on a windows computer and it wouldn't run and I had to look it up and the only way to get to run is to run as admin the game, not the whole system, but you had to run the game as admin. Eek, oh, that was a fix online, oh, oh you know, it's really bad steam had to run. Steam as admin actually. Okay, so two quick things.

18:49 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
Um, not about games, but I've got a doctor's office where their medical record system has to run as admins. I've seen that um, yeah, I mean, it's just like you're going hippa, you know all this, you have to fill out all these requirements and yet you require admin, okay, whatever. But then you also mentioned, jeff, that he I don't remember exactly how you put it, but Wendell will criticize Linux when it's due. When is it ever due?

19:21 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Well, in all fairness, you do have to tweak a little bit. But you know, honestly, I remember that in a lot of you know, a few years ago, even in Windows gaming, where you had to get more performance, you had to tweak and had some settings and whatnot to play with. So I mean anymore, you just got to play a little.

19:40 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
This is once human, once human. A perfect example. On Linux, all I had to do is check run it run with proton. It worked. Windows I had to dig in that for uh, I don't know an hour or so yeah, I get the heebie-jeebies the idea of running a video game as admin just gives me the heebie-jeebies.

20:02 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I think I would just go install linux on the kid's computer oh, and he's 512.

20:08 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
He had a question about if uh or he said I thought wendell tested it and that it made no difference. Uh, it really depended on the game. Yeah, it was, it was, and that was one of the things he. He only had a handful of games, but it it was all over the map, so it did help. Overall it was a little better, but it's still missing performance from Linux.

20:31 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, Interesting stuff. All right, let's talk about the Linux Foundation, what they're up to and some large language models.

20:41 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
Yes, yes, I mean, you know we've got to talk about AI Take a drink, so N got to talk about AI.

20:45 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Ai, yeah, big drink.

20:48 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
So NUMA nodes and AI? Now everybody's drunk. I don't have anything about NUMA nodes, I just you know, that's the other word. So I have an article from the New Stack talking about how the Linux Foundation has adopted the Open Model Initiative, or OMI for short, and it is continuing to figure, working to figure out ways and what does open source large language models mean, and that's something that everyone's still trying to figure out. So it's good to see progress being made.

21:29
There are three founders of OMI Civit, ai, comfy Org and Invoke who are continuing to work through what does open model large language models look like? So they're trying to figure out what kind of licensing works with that and deal with the fact that, up to this point, pretty much all of the AI models that have any power behind them are under restrictive licenses. And then not to belabor things that have been talked to to death at this point. But if large language models are consuming public information, which all of them are pretty much I mean there are some exceptions, but you know then how does that affect what comes out of them? So the OMI's top goals are stop restrictive non-commercial license agreements, avoid compromised capabilities, block barriers to collaboration and innovation. In other words, work toward allowing creatives and businesses to build on each other's technology, prevent the concentration of power and then eliminate the reoccurring costs and deletion clauses that are around some. So it's a big job, but they're continuing to work on it, which is always good to see. Go ahead. Oh no, I thought you were done.

23:03 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I was going to jump in, but if you have. Oh no, I thought you were done. I was going to jump in, but if you have more go.

23:07 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
Well, my second link. So that covers what Linux Foundation is doing. My second link is actually to a register article. That is kind of a hands-on walkthrough and I'm not going through the whole thing because let's leave that as an exercise to the listener if you're interested in it. But they just walk through how you can use the technologies out there to spin up your own local code assistant, very similar to Microsoft's GitHub Copilot, which is a subscription service using open, large language models, and so they actually walk you through implementing it using Ollama and VS Codium. But you can also do it with Jetbrains, ide or visual studio code. So anyway, just I didn't really want to talk about that article because it's a lot of how to, but just point it out and saying, hey, you know it, this, this isn't just talk.

24:19 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
You can do this today yeah, it's been on my, it's been on my to-do list for a while now to go because, especially with like fedora 40, fedora 41, they've done a really good job of packaging up the uh, the, the amd driver code and all of that table to actually run some ai stuff with the amd open source drivers. And so going and trying to set something like this up whether it be an llm for, you know, helping with vs code or image I find both of those to be really interesting. Try running it locally and I'm looking forward to spending the time. I don't have the time yet to do it, but I'm looking forward to spending the time to make that happen because I think that could be really cool. Last time I tried to do it, the drivers just weren't there.

24:58 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I thought you were quite a bit against AI, no matter what form it came in no, no, some things are great.

25:05 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I am I.

25:08 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I think ai is a bit of a bubble right now, but I think it has proved itself to be useful enough that it is going to stick around in some ways I think it's going to be kind of like spell check, where people instead of thinking, oh, it's going to take over all this stuff, it's just an assistant, it's a, it's a tool in the toolbox to help clean things up or do make make things simpler. But I think the intelligence and self-awareness is you know, people are getting way ahead of themselves.

25:39 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, we did have an interesting comment, uh, from one of our listeners. Uh charger says, personally the models being open is immaterial if the software that created them are proprietary or a business license, bsa like Lama. And I think that is actually a really interesting point that there are two separate problems here that you can run into with closed models, closed source models, and that is the generation software. You've got the model itself, software like all. You've got the model itself, and then you've got like the ecosystem of software around it and ideally you would have both of those things be open yeah, and that's my understanding.

26:15 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
Is that's what oh my is working towards?

26:17 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I mean, I can't imagine them not pushing for that. That's kind of their thing. Yeah, yeah, all right, well, cool, uh, let's see. Oh, rob, you're gonna cost me money.

26:32 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I'm about to spend some money, dear, if you're watching, it's rob's fault that I'm about to spend some money so while checking out the news this week, I came across something pretty cool on OMG Ubuntu called the CrowView Note. So the CrowView Note is a laptop without a computer inside. Sounds pretty dumb when I say it like that, but it's cool. So it may. Just, it may look like a regular laptop, but this laptop you can connect a Raspberry Pi to the side of it For those watching you may be able to see a little image behind me with that from their Kickstarter page but you could connect that Pi and use that notebook as your interface to the Pi, that notebook as your interface to the Pi. You can connect an Android smartphone like Samsung DeX or using the Samsung DeX features it could hook that up to it for the computer power. You know.

27:35
Here's a list of all the things they mentioned. You could connect PC or laptop, use it as a secondary monitor, game consoles like the PS4, handhelds like the Steam Deck, tablet and compatible iPads to work on a bigger screen. Android smartphone to use in desktop mode Features with a keyboard. Amazon Fire Stick, chromecast, miracast dongles to stream content. Digital cameras to preview footage or use as a field monitor blu-ray or dvd players or anything else as hdmi or I think, if you just if you want to like, build your own laptop with the raspberry pi, you could do it for as low as right now, about 180 us dollars, that's if you get the lowest 50 raspberry pi 5. Um, I believe that also just came out. But because the pi actually attaches to the outside of the laptop, which seems a little wonky, but it it looks pretty stable from what I've seen, you could still swap it out for other devices when needed, swap it in and out, have different pods for different uses.

28:48
The case is it's plastic. It comes with a 14.1 inch screen, a full-size keyboard, touchpad, usb, hdmi ports along the sides and, while you can't see it, there's also a built-in battery on the inside, along with some the inside, along with some attachments. It comes along with some attachments to attach to the Raspberry Pi, so you can just cleanly snap that right into the side of the QoRU, and there's a video on the Kickstarter page showing it. I thought it was pretty interesting. So, even though the compute is outside this laptop, the function keys still integrate with the device to allow you to do things like change the brightness of the display, check on the internal battery all this on an on-screen display.

29:40
One downside maybe about the battery is it doesn't really give you a warning about that internal, internal battery for the display, so you just kind of have to keep checking it. Apparently. So this, this device, the msrp they have for it is 169 us dollars, but if you think when I looked earlier it there was maybe $20 left and prices keep going up as the early adopters got it for $119. I haven't ordered mine yet, but I've clicked that back this project on the Kickstarter several times this week and really thought about it Because I don't need it. Man, that's cool.

30:36 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I don't know that I have the right credit card in here to do this. I'm trying to figure out how to order this in the middle of the show. Oh wait, wait, wait, ha ha, there we go, got it, got it.

30:54 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Sorry, wife of Jonathan.

31:00 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
You know, wife of Jonathan, if you would slip me a few coffees once in a while. I try not to bring these kinds of shows to everybody.

31:10 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
Well, in all fairness, at that price point I, I think is cheaper than giving you coffees over time I, suppose over time oh dear, looking at it though it's kind of interesting little device because basically what it's been sold as is just a portable keyboard, touchpad and monitor. In fact, one thing they're showing is you using it with a mac mini or a phone.

31:40 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So it's it's interesting yeah, it's cool, um, and I like that they've got the custom board to be able to connect the raspberry pi 5. Um, I think that's uh, I think that's super cool. Yeah, no, I am. I am definitely getting one of these. I'm kick-starting one of them. I will pledge.

32:01 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
As long as they send them out, they've way, way past their goal. I think it says they passed their goal in the first 12 hours, or something like that.

32:15 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
These are not first timers.

32:20 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
What's that? You were frozen up, so I was just going to make a comment about you being speechless about it.

32:24 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Oh well, I am a little bit no, so this I was going to say this is from Ella Crow, so these are not first timers like these guys already out there doing it. Uh, I look fine to myself.

32:38 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, I could hear myself they had a previous device just like it, but it was uh, it was significantly more, I think almost 300 us dollars, and it was more bulky because the the boards, like the pie, could go on the inside of it.

32:55 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I believe is what I read yeah, interesting stuff, um, but yeah, ella crow's. Ella crow's a known brand. They do a lot of iot stuff and uh, things like that. I've got several of their products for doing other things, so I I don't I don't have a whole lot of doubt that they'll be able to make this thing happen, so that's pretty cool. All right, let's see what is up next. I think it is Jeff talking about Torvalds.

33:23 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, and nothing chaotic this time or no large rants. So in Hong Kong at the Linux Foundation's Open Source Summit China conference, linus Torvalds talked to Dirk Handel, who is Verizon's head of open source programs office. They talked about Linux development and the current and future state of the Linux kernel and they touched on aspects of the Linux development, including the release process, security and putting Rust into the kernel. Now I'm just giving a few highlights here. But, like Dirk asked Linus about long-term future plans. But Linus replied the real development is about getting all the details right and you don't look five years ahead for that. You look one or two releases ahead. He further said some features take longer than that. Later this year we'll have the 20th anniversary of the real-time Linux project. This is a project that's literally started 20 years ago and the people involved are finally at the point where they feel like it's done, well, almost done. They're still tweaking the last things, but they hope it'll soon be ready to be completely merged in the upstream kernel this year. Linus also said that even though Linux kernel is 33 years old, you'd think with all the basics would have been fixed a long time ago, but they're still dealing with basic issues such as memory management. He said the work is never done Now.

34:50
The article also mentions how the Linux kernel is on a very structured schedule and, despite being complex, the release has been reliable over years. Linus went on to say that in the beginning the process was very chaotic and people laughed when he said he'd rather than do one or two large releases a year, he'd rather do small release every six weeks. So people thought that was just crazy and hilarious. Now that brought a statement from Dirk saying you typically change the major number around 19 or 20 because you get bored. Linus said it's because when I can't count on my fingers and toes anymore, it's time for another major release. So he also did have details in there about. The numbers don't really mean anything. You know the major numbers anymore, so it's not tied to any major rewrite or anything like that.

35:46
On the subject of bugs, linus said that bugs will happen and that anything can be a security bug if someone is clever enough just to figure out how to use it. And it's one reason why he stresses that all security issues are just bugs and that there's a tendency in the IT industry to treat security issues as something really, really special and that actually ends up harming everybody. And when he finally went to the topic, when the topic of Rust came out, linus said I was expecting updates to be faster, but part of the problem is that old-time kernel developers are used to C and don't know Rust and they're not exactly excited about having to learn a new language and that is, in some respects, very different. So there's been some pushback on Rust. Another reason has also been that the Rust infrastructure itself has not been super stable.

36:41
When Dirk brought up other technologies like cloud, linus said that the only thing matters, that is the kernel. Dirk then added that's sure to be taken out of context. Dirk then added that's sure to be taken out of context. So take a look at the article in the show notes for further details about what Linus said and other topics like AI. I on purpose skipped that section. I didn't want this to be a two-hour show and so you just have the highlights, but get all the details in the linked article.

37:10 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, good stuff. I always enjoy hearing Torvalds and his take on things because he looks at, he looks at the world just a little differently.

37:17 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
But torvalds, with no rants, are we sure it's not ai?

37:22 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
torvalds, it's not really him, it's his body doubles you know, and I think you know there's a couple other places where they kind of ask long term and he said, you know, he's just kind of an engineer, you know, chugging through this and I think that's a good way to look at the kernel Rather than try to have long-term direction, it kind of lets the contributors have the direction and they're not having big multi-year initiatives, they're kind of just making sure everything's nice and good and whenever somebody adds something they get the details to make sure that thing that they're somebody's adding is, you know, not bad code or going to have a bunch of mistakes in it, and he doesn't worry about the long term yeah, I, I think part of that is that in the kernel itself, like they don't make I guess they occasionally do, but they don't make huge changes.

38:18 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
They don't make huge changes of direction, right. Like there are some very long term things that come into the kernel like long term efforts, but those almost always happen from outside. Like I think the real time kernel is a good example. That is something that has been being worked on for a very long time, but that's been done by an outside company and then eventually, you know, intel came along and threw them some money to be able to keep doing it. But yeah, it's interesting. I was also fascinated by the talk about CVEs, and so Torvalds once again comes at it with this idea that, well, for one thing, bugs happen Of course they do, but the other side of that is, any bug in the kernel can be a security problem.

39:15
Of course is true, um, but there's also just this little bit of malicious compliance going on in the way that the kernel is just throwing out every bug as a cve, it's like they're all cves you get a cve, you get a cve and, uh, that does kind of make it difficult on some downstream companies like red hat and and oracle and all of those guys, because they're having to backport some of these and you end up with lots and lots of backports for all of these bug fixes, and so I think it's just funny that, uh, you know, greg, greg kh says well, you should probably just update to the newest kernel.

39:43 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
It's like yeah, yeah, there's a little bit of malicious compliance going on with that and and he does, he does go into more about backporting into older kernels and stuff in the article as well.

39:55 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, I mean. So, like the rest of the story, there is the kernel team put together this series of like okay, well, if you guys want to be able to run old kernels and here's what we're going to do we're going to maintain like seven old kernel versions and we're going to keep them backported for you for like seven years and none of the vendors used them. Nobody used them, nobody used them. And so the kernels are guys that were like okay, fine, whatever, y'all are on your own, which I mean I guess it's fair, don't waste the time doing the work, nobody's going to use it yeah, because I think it.

40:26 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I think it's the end of this year. There's going to be several kernels that are falling off the lts support yeah, but it's kind of one of those.

40:35 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
it's a tree falling in a forest with nobody around to hear it. Does it really matter? Yeah?

40:41 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Nobody's using it? Does it block your path if nobody's on the nobody's out walking?

40:45 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, we thought nobody was using our older versions of the grub, but I guess they are, so I guess somebody is.

40:52 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I guess somebody is. All right, Speaking of kernel versions.

40:57 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
David, what's up with Ubuntu? Yes, I flopped some stories around because I felt like this Ubuntu news made more sense right here, since we were in kernels anyway In kernel. So I've got two articles. The first one both of them came out this past week. The first one's from the register and the headline is Ubuntu 24.04.1. Will be late, but fresher kernels are coming and they go into some depth down in the article.

41:24
Which is kind of interesting such a fast release cycle as, as we were just talking about, um software releases like canonical with ubuntu, red hat with um, the red hat uh product line, they run into a problem where by the time they actually fully vet and release their software, the kernel they're releasing is already in extended support or out of date. So Canonical is reworking their distribution system for Ubuntu to get it closer in line with the kernel releases. So they will not be as far behind with the kernel releases. So they will not be as far behind. And basically what they're using is they came up with this set of stages of kernel maturity. It's something that they're using.

42:28
I haven't seen this used anywhere else, but they're calling it tight, unstable bridge and late phases and basically they're considering anything that is in the merge window, or RC1 through RC3, as being unstable and so they will not build on that.

42:46
But starting with RC4, they expect that there won't be any breaking changes at that point.

42:52
So they will use the latest RC4 available when they start building their next version so that hopefully by the time they're actually ready to release it will either be right at or right after that kernel has actually been released. So they're working on getting that lined up. And then there's a second article from Pharonix about the fact that Ubuntu put out a very simple press release but I would expect it's related saying that they are going to be skipping all non-critical Linux kernel updates for September and the reason for that is they are doing a critical infrastructure change. They don't go into details on what that is, but they're focusing on ensuring a smooth and stable transition and so they're going to pick their cycle of releases back up in October. And just kind of reading between the lines and this news coming out, I'm thinking that this infrastructure change is a big part of getting them aligned with those kernel releases. So we always pick on Ubuntu about being so far behind with kernels and it looks like they finally listened to us and they're trying to get caught up.

44:10 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, well, I mean the CVE thing might be part of it. So because the kernel guys are pushing out so many cves now that their work is stacking up and people that want to use their kernels are now coming to them, you know, with their, their software bill of materials in hand, they've got the s-bomb in hand. It's like you've got 320 cves outstanding because you use this old kernel. I mean, that is kind of the point. So we had a speaking of kernel work. We had something pointed out in the chat room Let me get it pulled back up Keith Keith's 512, linked to a story, and I thought it was quite fun and so I will cover it real quick, and that is Torvalds is ticked. Uh, there's a, there's a, uh, relatively weekly well, it is fairly weekly.

45:03
There's a relatively new file system in the kernel, it's bcash, fs and uh, part after the merge window, part way through the bug fix window, they sent in in a like thousand-line patch for Linux 6.11 and said, oh well, it fixes some things. But Torvalds looked at it and said, yeah, no, this is way too big. This is just normal development. Guys, these are not fixes, this is just normal code development. I am not merging your thousand thousand line patch in the middle of the fix it window. Wait for the next merge window. And uh, he, he, he kind of, uh, he kind of tore into him a little bit. It was fun, um, but there was, there was one. There was one particularly scorching line in here that I got a kick out of. Torvald says nobody's saying uses BcashFS and expects it to be stable. So every single user is an experimental site. He's not wrong, but ouch, all the same.

46:08 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I know it shows a lot of promise, but yeah, it's still really early in development. Yup, or polishing, anyway it yes yes, kent says no.

46:21 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
No, bcash fs is definitely more trustworthy than btr fs, maybe, maybe, just. I mean let's just just use XFS or EXT4. Those are the two really to go with your lovely.

46:37 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Fedora uses ButterFS by default, isn't it?

46:42 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Probably Not me, but Fedora might.

46:47 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I thought they went to XFS.

46:49 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
They may have. I know upstream is XFS these days. If you install Red Hat, it was ButterFS may have. I know upstream is xfs these days. Uh, if you install um red hat, it was, it was butter fs. I don't think red had ever went to sit. This is the um enterprise version. I don't think it ever went to better fs, I think it's. I think it was probably ext4 and then went to xfs. Anyway, let's see what's up next. That's gonna be is it rob? Rob? Are you Rob? Are you back? Are we back to Rob? You're back to me again Making pop culture references.

47:18 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I am. So, for those following me on social media, you may have seen my warnings that winter is coming and one day we will also see GIMP 3.0. And just like the Game of Thrones, where all they spoke about for years and years was winter coming, I feel like we have also been talking about GIMP 3.0 coming for years and years as well. Yes, you know, four years ago. Well, back at the beginning of the show, I feel like it was like oh, 3.0, it's on its way. Here it comes.

47:58
You know we continue to warn you, even to this day, that GIMP 3.0 is coming.

48:04
So this week they've inched a little bit closer, maybe a lot closer, because the open source alternative to Photoshop has been working on GIMP 3.0 for more than a decade as a transition to from Python 2 to Python 3, gtk 2 to GTK 3, even though the rest of the world has moved on to GTK 4 already along with working on improvements to much of their user interface.

48:36
This week, they've announced a string freeze, which maybe that's also what I was referring to when I said winter is coming, but a string freeze. This is a point where they stop adding new features and focus on bug fixes, testing to get their final release out, so the last release they had back in February. After that we were expecting the final GIMP 3.0 to be released in May, and that date came and it went, like many other expected dates before that, and spoiler alert for the game of Thrones If you haven't seen the end yet. But in game of Thrones it's Winter did eventually come and so will GIMP 3.0. And with the years of development put into it, it should be a good one.

49:34 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
We hope. So I tell you, something that really comes to mind is GIMP is the opposite of the kernel in this, because the kernel it's. Every like six to eight weeks you get a new major version, doesn't matter what's in it, as long as it's relatively stable. Here it is, guys. You get a new major version, doesn't matter what's in it, as long as it's relatively stable. Here it is, guys. And in GIMP they've just been toiling along over time, fixing things, making things happen, and eventually it'll be done. Then we'll let you look at it, then you can see it.

50:01 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I mean you can do the beta today. It's 2.99. I don't know what point what they are on today, but I don't know what point what they are on today. But if you do that, available for Linux and Windows only, so you Mac users can't use that Out of the cold, but you can try it out today and see what it looks like. There are some really good positive things coming, like non-destructive editing, where there's a layers that you work on instead of destroying the layer you're working on when you're editing things, and that's probably, from what I've seen, one of the biggest. Most. What's the word Looked forward to? There's a better word than that, but I can Anticipated, that is the word the most anticipated features.

50:53 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, yeah, it's interesting, david, what do you have?

51:00 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
It doesn't really matter at this point, but I was just going to say not to do too much into the pop culture reference. But technically Game of Thrones ended before the author finished writing the book. So is it really ended and what does that mean for DIMP?

51:16 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I guess, I guess, if you're talking about the book versus the, uh, the show, yeah, the book, the code, the code, winter never came, but uh, the actual the, the visual product, they did, I don't know yeah, fine well.

51:32 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
So let's say there, there was something in there too that we talked about a while back. You know, on one of the it's coming. If someone says gtk3, why are they going to that?

51:42 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I want to say there was some rewriting and stuff, so that going to gtk4 was going to be a much quicker, easier process than one would hope two to three well, also they've, from what I've read, they pretty much have started from the ground up and rewrote a ton of this at least. And you know, if they started when gtk3 was out, they couldn't start with gtk4 at that time because it wasn't a thing. So they had to start with gtk3 and you know they at they got five, six years into it and gt4 is. I was like, well, should we scrap this and start over and and and not have a version? You know, they just had to keep going where they're at. I think they should skip to gtk4 and just, uh, wait for five and, as soon as that comes out, start working on it.

52:28 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
But I mean that you you may be joking, but I could see that being a thing.

52:33 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I'm not, but they should just skip it at this point because so far into it so two things.

52:38 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
One, the reason for a string freeze and people may not realize this if you're not involved with developing and developing things that get translated the point of a string freeze is so that your translators can get to work on translating all of your strings and then you can have your I18n, your internationalization. That's why we use the term I18n, to get all those files squared away. And you know that, like your strings are not going to change, so the English version of this is not going to change, you don't have to retranslate it between now and the release. That's, that's the point of a string freeze. Um, and then the other thing that just humors me so much is gtk is the gimp toolkit, like it is the graphical engine for the gimp project, and it's it's hilarious that they're this far behind in it.

53:25 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I it's, it's was it originally created for gimp? Is that I mean?

53:29 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I know the name is there, but I think so. I think that was the origin of gtk and obviously it has life beyond that yeah, it's, it's gone well beyond it, yeah yeah, but I'm pretty sure it was originally for gimp, so all right, well, let's talk. Let's's talk why Jeff was late to the show today. Jeff, why were you late to the show today? Was it green?

53:57 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Kind of Now. So an exciting release. This week NVIDIA released the 560 Linux driver and it comes with OpenGPU kernel modules by default. I mean, okay, let's look at the blast story. We got NVIDIA to open source their kernel modules before GIMP 3.0 came out. Holy cow, if NVIDIA can do it, they can do it. Come on, we're rooting for you guys. So we have talked about this in the past.

54:27
There are some older versions of gpus which cannot handle the open kernel modules, and the open kernel modules are supported on touring, ampere, ada, love, lace, blackwell, grace, hopper and hopper architectures. Now this is supposed to be a stable release and not a beta. More on that later. Features include in this release are EGL extensions on x-wayland excuse me, a pipe wire back end which allows it to work with Wayland compositors and support screencasting via xdg desktop portal. Variable refresh rate support has been added for Wayland on pre-vololta GPUs and support on laptops when using OpenGPU kernel modules. There's also reporting Vulkan information in the NVIDIA settings control panel. There are updates in the functions which allow it to be more efficient and further reduce frame stutter in some KDE Plasma configurations with GSP offload, and 560 has a new requirement for Vulkan header files when compiling NVIDIA settings from source.

55:36
Bug squashing has also been happening, such as a crash when attempting KMS operations through DRM if the NVIDIA DRM module was loaded with mode set equals zero. We had a bug that caused a widespread crashing when x-whalen comes along, and with a bug causing memory corruption while handling ACPI events on some laptops, and even a regression that caused the NVIDIA power daemon to exit when the NVIDIA Dbus config file wasn't present in the correct directory. Now those have all been fixed. More noticeable fixes are bug squashed where some DVI outputs wouldn't work with some HDMI monitors, kde Plasma users have hovering over opening applets and when running Wayland compositor mode could lead to plasma freeze. And finally, a bug causing display freeze when presenting, when presenting windows using Wayland direct scan on multi-monitor setups.

56:35
Now I have two, two articles linked in the show notes and it might be something to look at. If you're you know a really into open source modules or b you're running, you know a recent fedora or other distro that's running KDE Wayland, you know version six, you know you might want to look at this driver update. Now here's. Here's a side note.

56:58
I was late, or had late, to the show because I loaded 560 and I lost hardware acceleration in Chrome. I couldn't get some of my Steam stuff to start. It wasn't allowing games with the Proton and I tried different versions of Proton, it wouldn't start and OBS couldn't run either. I wound up rolling back to the 555 driver and had to reload some things and it's working fine now. But be warned, there could be some rough edges around 560. If you just want to have it load and go, maybe give it a couple more weeks, let a new revision come out, a few bugs or letting other programs get some updates needed. But take a look at the article. I'll say take a look at the articles in the show notes and it'll show you how to get it, or your distribution should have it in a short amount of time.

58:04 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That. That almost sounds like you were running either NoView or the. The NVIDIA driver just didn't load properly. It didn't load all the way, so you were either running fallback mode to VESA or NUVO, something like that. When you get to the point where all of your everything is turned off like that and games wouldn't even start up.

58:33 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
You know, I feel like whenever I think Jeff needs to change his poem. You know it used to be blah, blah, blah, update down the hall, whatever. Now it's like don't update that, don't update this, don't update anything.

58:46 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Unfortunately, that is how it works.

58:52 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
It wasn't. It wasn't, it wasn't nouveau. That I because I did. I did check the version and 560 by the nvidia tool showed that it loaded in. So I tried to reload it as well. I tried to purge it and reinstall it and it rebooted and something in there isn't right. So maybe it's in the graphics PPA for Ubuntu. Something's a little funky.

59:19 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Did you check that the open source driver, the out-of-tree open source driver, was actually inserted into the kernel? The module was loaded.

59:27 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I didn't.

59:28 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's what I would look for.

59:30 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
That's kind of what it sounds like to me I was kind of running out of time and I'm like, okay, I'm just rolling back, I get it.

59:35 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
But that's fair. Well, I'm sure you will continue to work on it and let us know next week what happens your nvidia driver and your gaming rig, your windows down the hall.

59:45 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Don't update, don't update, don't update well you know, not every, not everything can be a success story. You know, sometimes you, you fall down a little bit, you learn some things and you get back up and you keep going I've never had an amd, so I have a couple of times now bought a new amd card and slapped it in my desktop.

01:00:17 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Well, I'm not as rich as you, and and gone. I don't have any amd tpus. Over the years it's happened a couple of times. You buy it and it's like, oh wait, the firmware is not out for that yet. Oh wait, the driver support's not fully baked.

01:00:32 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I can't afford the latest and greatest.

01:00:34 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I'm usually a few behind because you know uh see, I, I, I don't buy one for a very, very long time, and then I'll finally, you know, pull the trigger on a new one oh, me too, but it's still two versions behind. Oh fun. Anyway, let's see.

01:00:56 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I got a question of which one I installed. So the version on the Ubuntu graphics PPA is 560.35.03. So that is the one I installed. Stable, stable, stable yes, it's supposed to be stable.

01:01:17 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
All right, let's talk LibreOffice. What is new in 24.8?

01:01:22 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
Oh, a thing or two. So LibreOffice 24.8 has been released. Their numbering scheme is year and date, so 24 is for 2024 and 8 is the month August. It rolls up six months of development since LibreOffice 24.2 was released in February. Month number two month number two includes 5,591 commits from 171 developers, 115 of whom are volunteers.

01:01:55
So a lot of bug fixes and security tweaks, some new features. But a couple of the new features are pretty interesting. They've added a new privacy option. If you go into Tools Options, libreoffice Security Options, remove Personal Information on Saving and turn that on, then it's going to strip out details when you save it, like author timestamp, editing duration, printer names, document template titles, comment, metadata and timestamps, so basically anything inside the document that might give more information than you want about that document creation. It strips it out. So that can be useful.

01:02:42
They also it's now the article that I link to says that LibreOffice 24.8 also adds password-based encryption mode for ODF files. And then they say that this is more performant, tamper-resistant and stuff, and I was like more Well, what are you comparing it to? So I actually went and followed the link to the actual article and it is not adding it, it is updating it adding it, it is updating it and the interesting thing about updating it is they do go into the technical reasons why it's better. It's more tamper resistant, it's got higher resistance to brute forcing and it hides metadata to reduce information leaks. But it also means it's not backwards compatible.

01:03:24
So if you have LibreOffice 24.8 and it is either on and you don't realize it or you turned it on because you want that, and then you encrypt something and send it to someone who does not have 24.8 yet they will not be able to open it. So there is a setting in settings and you can turn that off. You can turn that off. Beyond that, each of the built-in apps Writer, impress, calc and Draw Draw only has two significant updates, but they all have a variety of updates to their functionality and a whole bunch of fixes. As I mentioned, there's some new chart options, so now you can do pi of pi and bar of pi, so that you can actually do a chart that then goes deeper into a specific section of that chart. And there's more improvements to interoperability between between um, both docx and the ooxml formats. So just, uh, continuing to move that ball forward.

01:04:34 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Does the bar of pie option come in pumpkin? Um, maybe pumpkin the color okay, pecan, lots of options there, Good stuff. Yeah, you know I don't pull LibreOffice open very often anymore. I've just gotten to the don't stone me here. I've gotten to the point where if I need to write a quick document, I will just do it in Google Docs, because that way I have it everywhere.

01:05:07 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
I hardly ever use the Google Office anymore, mentioning that some of the changes to Calc I think yes, they quote hugely improved the copy and paste between Calc and Google Sheets. Oh, cool, because Google Sheets when you do the copy paste in Google Sheets, what it's actually doing is it's adding additional attributes to the HTML to identify what the number types are and different input functions in there and stuff, and so they've added that into Calc so that you can copy and paste between Google Sheets and Calc and retain all that data.

01:05:46 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's cool. That's cool. And retain all that data? That's cool. That's cool. You know, I don't know if, if google provides the apis to be able to do this, but what would be a really a kind of a killer feature, honestly, for the libre office applications would be to be able to open um google drive files while it's still in drive and do the live editing, but with a desktop version of it, like that would be awesome, I don't. I don't know, though, that uh, google has enough api exposed to be able to do that, but that that might get me back to using uh liber office applications. That's a big ask, though. That's, that's one of those, you know, you, you, you toss that idea out to the liber office developers and they're like oh yeah, we could do that. Are you going to fund us to do that? That might be a seven-figure funding for that one, but sure we'd be glad to do that for you.

01:06:43 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
It's a five-figure amount of coffees.

01:06:45 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, how many coffees. Is that A lot of coffee?

01:06:48 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yep, yeah, how many coffees is that A lot of coffee? Y'all good Caffeine poisoning right there.

01:06:57 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
We've got a uh, we've got an often asked for feature in in the mesh tastic project, one of the apps. Some people always come in and ask for something in particular and the guy that does the app is like I don't want to do it, I don't have the time to do it, I don't have the energy to do it, I'm not going to do it. And finally he just said look, if you really want this twenty five thousand dollars, you pay me that I'll take a sabbatical for my job. I will add the feature 25k. Nobody's taking him up on it yet.

01:07:22 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
So but has the asks quieted down I think he just points.

01:07:29 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
He points people to the open bug bounty oh good, he's like, here you go and yeah, people just come, go away and stop bugging him after that one.

01:07:38 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Uh, it's fun start to go find me for him yeah, I guess we could uh all right.

01:07:44 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Well, I think it's time to get into some tips. Let's talk tips, hopefully some command line tips. I know mine's a command line tip, I know David's is a command line tip, but it's not Linux. I guess it can be Linux.

01:07:57 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
Let's start with Linux.

01:07:58 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Well, it can be Linux. It's not only Linux. Let's start with Rob, though. And what is? No More Secrets. This sounds like a Robert Redford movie.

01:08:08 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
No More.

01:08:08 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Secrets.

01:08:09 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
This sounds like a Robert Redford movie from the 80s. No More Secrets. Think more of the old movie Sneakers.

01:08:15 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Exactly the Robert.

01:08:17 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Redford movie from the 80s. So no More Secrets is a data decryption effect, kind of like the C-Matrix one. It's an effect seen in the 1992 movie sneakers. So with this um, you do have to do it, you have to have um, make and gcc to build yourself. I, I, I could have found any packages, at least maybe I didn't look very hard either. But uh and, and with that it did go down a little uh, uh, tangent. Today I was gonna see if I could like package that up and maybe a flat pack and a flat hub and and it was more complicated than the afternoon was gonna uh do it and I thought it'd be easier. But so no more secrets is just the one I'm going to show you today, or NMS. So with that you know, for example, for those watching, if I do a LS-L it shows the directory structure that I'm at here and this is a clean install of Ubuntu server. So I have no more secrets on this server. It's on the server.

01:09:34
Now, if I do ls-l and then pipe that to nms and I'm going to use the dash c flag after that, because that'll clear the screen, that'll start at the beginning. If I do that it's going to do the same thing, but look like it's encrypted Now. Let's decrypt that. Now. You could use this. You know, maybe you want to make a video or a movie scene or whatever. Let's decrypt this. I'm going to get this and there it is. It has decrypted it. That's great, all right.

01:10:06
So also, I made a little file for everybody and with this I'm going to cat this text file that I made, pipe that to NMS. Dash C to clear. And you know what I don't like? That blue on black. I feel like it's a little hard to read. So I'm going to do dash F white to change the text. I'm going to do that. Hmm, what does this message say? Let's decrypt it now. And it's decrypting Almost there. Oh, I got it. Boom. It says the Untitled Linux show. Tell your friends, like, share, subscribe and write reviews to spread the word. Thank you, uls.

01:10:48
So it's just a fun little command. You can pipe any kind of text to it. There's a dash A flag if you want to auto-decrypt right away. There's a dash S flag if you want to mask the blank spaces in between. So it's just long lines the dash F, as you saw, and then a color sets the color of the text. Dash C, as you saw, will clear it. So it starts at the beginning of the screen instead of just continuing on in the terminal. And there's a dash V for version, and I didn't check this. But, nms, is there a dash help? There is not a dash help.

01:11:29 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
There's no dash help. There you go, Rob. If you're looking for a project, go add a dash H option for them.

01:11:36 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
It seems like it's a simple enough program. I probably could handle that DNC too. I haven't worked in C in decades, literally. But either way, there's not a whole lot to it. It's those four flags five if you count the dash v um great, it's nms version 1.0.1. So yeah, fun little thing. No use for it, but it's fun.

01:12:03 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Oh no, that's great.

01:12:04 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I like that a lot the well saying those, those on uh audio. Only the effect is almost similar to the zoom in on a license plate and it's all blurry and somebody goes enhance enhance and it just kind of comes in. You know a bunch of squiggle, and then also yo, yeah, or the we got to have the password and it's showing stuff flipping, you know the characters changing or whatever, and then they keep just appearing in different colors, the right characters.

01:12:34 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Ah, there it is, and if you can't watch the video of this for some whatever reason, go watch the great film sneakers, and you'll see the same effect there.

01:12:46 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
Yep.

01:12:48 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I have told people by the way, this is totally an aside. I've told people that Sneakers is actually one of the most accurate depictions of the security industry and red teaming, because they don't actually do any hacking in the movie. I don't know if you've noticed that they have the MacGuffin which allows them to decrypt things, but other than that, they don't do any hacking in the movie.

01:13:10 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
it's all like um script kitty well, no, no, not even that social engineering.

01:13:16 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yes, it is all social engineering I haven't seen in years. It's so good, it's such a good movie, but it's literally it's all. It's all social engineering and physical access and that's real hacking these days.

01:13:26 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
And that is literally what real hacking is Almost all of the time Most hacking is 90, some percent of it is people getting tricked and if you want to watch it, it looks like currently today it's on Apple TV and Amazon Video.

01:13:46 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
You can always buy the DVD or Blu-ray. I assume they have a Blu-ray. I know they have a dvd version of it because I own it. I enjoy it quite a bit I'm sure 1992 all right, let's see what is uh next up on the tips. I think it's jeff. Jeff is next. What's what? Qt? Proton up, qt? Yes, who you call a QT?

01:14:13 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
So this week's command line tip is because I had to tweak a game a little bit to make it run better. So normally Proton on Steam does what I need perfectly, but one of the games I was playing and this game being Once Human that Rob mentioned earlier it was giving me some lag and when I looked at the Proton database it said I need to run Proton GE, where GE stands for Glorious Egg Roll. Ge is a version of Proton that takes a standard Proton, adds a bunch of patches which have not made it into the official version yet. Think of Glorious Egg Roll, similar to the staging branch for wine. Things will eventually make their way in and, you know, maybe even patches that don't meet certain requirements and might not make it in are all added to the mix.

01:14:59
You know we've talked about glorious egg roll before so I won't go into any more details. But what I do want to cover is proton up dash QT. Now I have the ability to go into the command line and place Glorious Eggroll wherever it wants to be. But it's kind of nice when I have a more automated way to place it and easily pick versions that I want. That's what ProtonQT does when you download and install the program. It asks for your Steam directory location and then you can choose the version of Glorious Egg Roll you want and it will install it for you.

01:15:33
You can select the option for the Glorious Egg Roll version there now because you can select it in Steam, because now it's on the list and it's part of the Proton. You just find the GE-GE version and you can force it for whatever game you want, or all games if you so desire. There's also a show game list option where it will bring up the Proton database compatibility of the games that you have installed on your Steam instance and the Proton versions, which are verified on their database and their database rating. So you can see oh, this is a gold, this is platinum, whatever it is. So I mean, it's a really simple tool. But take a look at the link in the show notes and for those that need a glorious egg roll, now you have an easier way to get it, so you can happily keep gaming.

01:16:27 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That is actually extremely useful, because it is kind of a pain to install the Proton GE versions. You've got to do it manually without this and it is a little bit of a pain. So, thank you, I will definitely use this one.

01:16:40 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, it's just a simple drop down.

01:16:44 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
And thank you, Quippy, for showing us a gif of an egg roll, which is making me really hungry now.

01:16:51 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
A glorious egg roll. There you go.

01:16:53 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
That is a massive egg roll.

01:16:55 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
This big egg roll. All right, David, what?

01:16:58 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
is your tip. I'm too hungry. I'm leaving now to go get an egg roll.

01:17:03 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
And some coffee.

01:17:06 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
So my tip is brew coffee, so my tip is brew and as so I got to learn about brew about two weeks ago on um floss weekly and it focuses a lot on mac. But it's not just mac, it's also linux and, as we established in that show, I'm more of a whopper guy because I'm not a big mac guy um, a little bit of inside joke there, um, but one of the. So I looked into brew after um, after being on that show, and into using it on linux specifically, and I it's. I've got a link to the homebrew page because I'm not going to actually show any examples of using it because it's much more involved than that.

01:17:49
But one of the really cool things about Brew on Linux is, if you've ever done any programming in Python, primarily it's the one I'm most familiar with. But you're used to the idea of virtual environments where you need to keep certain versions of packages or certain development environments separate so that you can work on different applications simultaneously or different projects, and Brew allows you to install developer tools into separate locations. So not just only user, but you can actually put, you can specify your installation prefix or your folder prefix, and so you can keep, you can use brew to keep entire different application stacks, basically, or development stacks, in different locations on your machine. So I haven't started using it myself. I'm still researching it to get comfortable with it, but it looks like I'll be able to tie it with the virtual environment functionality in Python to actually build a complete dev stack for different applications that I need to work on at the same time. So it's pretty interesting and has nothing to do with Macs, it's all about Linux.

01:19:15 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
When we had him on the show, the guys were telling us that apparently some people use Brew for I believe they said their development stacks or, excuse me, their deployment stacks too. Like using Brew to install everything you need on your servers to get a stack exactly the way you want it, and then use brew to be able to run the exact same stack on your development machines. I thought that was really interesting too. Pretty cool stuff. All right, uh, I've got a tip too, and this is this is a command line uh option, a command line, uh executable binary that I had no idea existed until not too very long ago, and that is control, alt, delete. Well, you don't spell it all the way out. Use the abbreviation, so C-T-R-L-A-L-T-D-E-L, and if you just run that, it's going to tell you whether you're in hard or soft mode, and then there's also an option you can set it so you can run control-alt-delete hard or control-alt-delete soft and what this is supposed to do.

01:20:18
Now I don't know for sure whether this actually works on GUIs, so like, if you're running KDE or what have you, whether this gets in the way and interrupts, but and I'm not going to test it on my machine right now because it turns it off.

01:20:31
But what it does is it changes the behavior of the control alt delete. You know, three-letter salute to either soft, which is what it's almost certainly going to be by default for everybody, and that is where you start the process of doing a shutdown, to do a reboot, that is. Or, if it's hard, then when you hit Control-Alt-Delete down you go and right back up, which I don't actually recommend doing for anybody's systems. But I found it particularly interesting that it was there as an option and I'm actually wondering if this hooks in at a pretty low level to where Control-Alt-Delete might once again bring back, or to force, to reset, I suppose, uh, an otherwise hung system. So I I did some interesting stuff here and again. Like I said, I never knew this command existed, but it was already installed on, at least on the laptop. So now, now.

01:21:25 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
You know it is on this fresh install of Ubuntu server and I did the minimal, the bare minimal, so it's on there.

01:21:33 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, I think it's probably just about everywhere. It's probably.

01:21:36 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
It might be. Is that part of core utils?

01:21:38 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
maybe I was just thinking about that. It may be part of core utils. That would be interesting.

01:21:43 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
That hard shutdown. Maybe that'd be good for uh a development environment or something. If you uh knew you may want to just kill it or I don't know.

01:21:55 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
Yeah, like something you don't care about yeah, I could also see it if it, if it is low enough, I can see it being useful in a data center, like if you've got a machine that you've got to walk into and plug keyboard into because you can't get into it any other way, and then it's not responding to the monitor, but you can hit control, delete, yep, before actually pulling power.

01:22:15 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, no, don't they have those little keyboards that just have the control delete buttons on them? Probably?

01:22:22 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
amazon does that's, that's great um yeah, I'm sure they do but, there's been some. There's been some fun. You know single or or you know just a couple of button keyboards like that. All right, well, I think that's. I think that's about it. That's our show, that's our tips, that's our news stories. I'm gonna let each of the guys get in a last word, or if they want to plug themselves or something else, they certainly can. We start with, rob, what do you have to plug?

01:22:52 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
uh, just my usual. Uh. Come connect with me at robertpcampbellcom and on my website. There you can find links to my linkedin, my twitter, my maston and a place to donate coffees to me.

01:23:10 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Look forward to it. All right, and David.

01:23:15 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
Oh, I don't have anything specific. I don't have any cool links here or over here, so I would say that if you're watching this live or somewhere else or listening to it later, and you are not a Club Twit member, come join us and have all the fun.

01:23:35 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, absolutely, and Jeff.

01:23:39 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
A couple things. I'm not a Whopper guy or a Big Mac guy, I am a Five Guys Burger guy, and this almost ties in with Rob's command command line tip those who know, do not speak. Those who speak do not know. Your cmos is corrupted. Have a great week everybody oh, fun, all right.

01:24:04 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
One last one, last word from me is uh, it is part of the util Linux package. So it's not core utils, but it is part of the Linux utils package. So that is fun. And then, don't forget, you can follow me my work over at Hackaday. We've got the security column goes live every Friday morning. We've got Floss Weekly, which records on Tuesdays and goes live on Wednesdays on the site. And then, if you care to, I've also got the YouTube channel that is youtubecom slash at JP Bennett. I was looking before the show. Can you leave the at out? No, you must use the at sign there. It throws an error if you don't. But youtubecom slash at jp bennett. And right now it's a lot of mesh, tastic stuff, because that's what I've been up to in my in my off time. But there will be even more fun linux stuff there to come. So if you want, if you want more there, more is there, there is more to be had.

01:25:06
All we appreciate everybody that has been here watching us both live and those that get us on the download. And, as David said, if you're not part of, if you're not part of the, if you're not part of the club here at Twit. You should really think about it. Club Twit, it's about the price of a cup of coffee per day and it helps keep the people you love doing the stuff you love per month. Yes, a cup of coffee per month. Thank you, disembodied voice. A cup of coffee per month, not per day. That would be expensive. No, it's not expensive. It's only the cost of a cup of coffee per month and it keeps the people you love doing the stuff you love. Again, appreciate everybody being here. We will see you next week on the Untitled Linux Show.