Untitled Linux Show 252 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-free version of the show.

Jonathan Bennett [00:00:00]:
Hey, this week we're talking about Resolute Raccoon, the latest in core Utils, the Ryzen 9 benchmarks that you don't want to miss. And oh yes, pour one out for the Linux drivers killed by AI. All this and more, you don't want to miss it, so stay tuned.

Rob Campbell [00:00:18]:
Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twit.

Jonathan Bennett [00:00:28]:
This is the Untitled Linux show, episode 252, recorded Saturday, April 25. Full send. Hey folks, it is Saturday and it's time for Linux. It's the show about Linux, whether it's software or hardware. We talk about open source stuff, we talk about all kinds of stuff. And I've got the guys here today, and we've got Jeff, we got Rob, we've got Ken, and we are going to talk about the news. And off the bat, everyone's favorite distro. Actually, I don't that it's anybody's favorite distro here, but it's some people's favorite distro.

Rob Campbell [00:01:04]:
Now we'll talk about one of the

Ken McDonald [00:01:06]:
flavors is definitely one of my favorites.

Jonathan Bennett [00:01:10]:
We like to razz on this distro, but truth be told, they are one of the important ones. One of the ones that we recommend to people, it's Ubuntu. And Rob has the scoop.

Rob Campbell [00:01:19]:
And later on in the show we'll talk about Jonathan's new favorite distro.

Jonathan Bennett [00:01:23]:
Indeed. And we might discover something about Rob's favorite distro too.

Rob Campbell [00:01:30]:
What's that about? So anyway, Ubuntu's latest long term support release, Ubuntu 26.04 LTS has officially arrived and as expected with an LTS, this one sets the tone for Linux desktops and servers for the next several years. On the surface, it's a typical LTS release with the canonicals stability, long term support and incremental improvements. And another fun animal name, a Resolute raccoon. But under the hood, there are some meaningful shifts. One closest to my heart is the continued transition away from the legacy X11 display system. Ubatu's defense default desktop environment, Gnome now runs fully on Wayland by default. No X11, none of that old Croft signaling that the long anticipated move away from Xorg is complete. And that change carries across most of the Ubuntu ecosystem, including the popular Kubuntu, which Jeff used to love, but you know, even he's moved away from that Kubunto being with the KDE plasma desktop, which I know that piece of it, a lot of people here still Love anyway, that is also leaning into Wayland as its primary session, reflecting a broader momentum across all major Linux desktops.

Rob Campbell [00:03:05]:
But not every Ubuntu flavor is moving at the same pace. Lubuntu, known for its lightweight LXQT or LXQT design, continues to rely on Xorg as its default. Unfortunately, these more legacy desktop environments based on older code that just keep ticking and going around are often the hardest ones to keep up to date with modern technology. But you know, often their niche is, is having been designed for older, slower systems. You know, they were designed back in the day and now running on modern systems, they're just blazing fast, which is one reason a lot of people love them. And they just seem so snappy in today's technology. Often, not always. Sometimes they don't keep up even at that.

Rob Campbell [00:04:03]:
But eventually that comes at a significant cost of decreased security and features. And we're starting to see that, see this hit across many older desktop environments now. But beyond the desktop, one of the most significant and controversial changes is happening deeper in the system. Ubuntu 2604 is aggressively adopting memory safe components written in Rust. That includes replacing traditional GNU tools with Rust based alternatives. You know, we've already talked about these, but this is an LTS now, it's going to be around a long time. And some of these alternatives, you know, such as the Rust core utils for common commands like LS and CP or copy and sudo RS replacing the long standing sudo implementation. And as I said, this kind of marks one of this.

Rob Campbell [00:04:57]:
Well, I just, I didn't say it. But this marks one of the first time a major Linux distribution has moved core system utilities away from gnuc based implementations. In an LTS release, the goal is improved security and memory safety. But it also represents a philosophical shift in the Linux stack that's likely to spark debate. You know, there's always the argument of Linux is an os, that's the kernel, it's GNU Linux. Well, does this mean Ubuntu eventually won't be GNU Linux anymore? Maybe. So what are we going to call them then? Rusty Linux? I don't know. Anyway, Ubuntu 26.04 brings a newer Linux 7.0 kernel kernel, TPM backed, full disk encryption enabled by default, expandable AI and GPU tooling, and broader adoption of modern system components like systemd and Cgroup V2.

Rob Campbell [00:05:59]:
So, depending on your beliefs, there is some good news and maybe some bad news with the new Ubuntu release, but they are definitely all steps forward in the long run, you know, and funny thing is, I caught an it's Floss article this week titled Five Reasons to Upgrade to Ubuntu 2604 in parentheses and Three Reasons to Stay away. And arguably in my mind, those three reasons to stay away aren't really that bad, but I can see them being reasons to at least hold off and maybe wait for a bid. And as I said, you know, I mean, I've already mentioned some of these at least, but those three reasons they gave are pseudo being replaced with pseudo rs, you know, that rust replacement. And I mentioned being fairly new. Maybe it's. Maybe you want to hold off until you really know. That's good. I think they only put that in the first interim last fall.

Rob Campbell [00:06:58]:
Fall for the northern hemispheres, I guess that's spring for the southern hemispheres. And I know there were some bugs then, so I could see that being a reason to hold off, but not a reason not to date. Eventually. And, and then also no more x11 sessions. That was their second two for Ubuntu's default GNOME desktop, which is a hundred percent a good thing that we are getting rid of that legacy tech debt. You got to get that tech debt out of there and move on. I mean, that's not even. I mean, okay, that's not even something to bother waiting and seeing for.

Rob Campbell [00:07:33]:
We did the waiting and seeing a good several years ago. We're there. Just. That's that, that one. Take that off the list, guys, what's wrong with you? And then the third one on the list was too many changes under the hood in one go, which I agree that an LT's is at the time for big changes, but is there really that much coming to 2604 to be afraid of?

Jonathan Bennett [00:07:57]:
I don't know.

Rob Campbell [00:07:57]:
Maybe there is, but I don't know in full transparency, Parent C, I, I will be waiting at least a few months minimum. At least before I upgrade my Ubuntu servers that are running the previous LTS before I upgrade them to 2604. And, and I don't use Ubuntu on the desktop, so it'll be at least a few months. Ah, maybe I'll even skip this LTS and wait for the next one. Who knows? But I'm not jumping on it today.

Jonathan Bennett [00:08:29]:
Maybe you'll skip it. Oh my goodness.

Rob Campbell [00:08:33]:
LTS is last for a while. You could skip every other one and be just fine. That's true with some of these.

Jeff Massie [00:08:41]:
I'll probably upgrade my server to the LTS, but I usually wait for the 0.1 release. That usually comes out about juneish.

Rob Campbell [00:08:49]:
I know. What all these new scary things under the hood. You might want to wait till 0.2 or 3 even.

Jeff Massie [00:08:55]:
Yeah, well, we'll see. I don't know if it's that scary. I don't have any Windows.

Rob Campbell [00:09:02]:
It's a server. What's. What's dual booting going to do for you?

Ken McDonald [00:09:05]:
I'm talking about for the desktop.

Rob Campbell [00:09:07]:
Yeah, yeah, we're talking about Jeff's servers here.

Jeff Massie [00:09:11]:
Full. Full send it.

Jonathan Bennett [00:09:13]:
Full send.

Jeff Massie [00:09:14]:
Full send it. Yeah, we're running with scissors here, as Ken says.

Rob Campbell [00:09:18]:
Backup, backup, and backup again.

Jonathan Bennett [00:09:21]:
I mean, that's true. You got to do an upgrade. Be prepared that things can break.

Ken McDonald [00:09:26]:
Now's definitely the time to do a backup before you do that upgrade.

Rob Campbell [00:09:30]:
My servers aren't a vm, so I just do a snapshot every time.

Jeff Massie [00:09:35]:
Yeah. And, you know, I used to run Kubuntu all the time, which is Ubuntu, with kde. I was running into a little bit of issues. Now, maybe they fixed it because I haven't been on it for six months now or so. But sometimes Kubuntu gets restrained by library and program versions that Ubuntu has. And they're important for kde, but they're not as critical for Ubuntu. And so sometimes Ubuntu really lags behind. But because they're an official release, there's certain things you are limited to.

Jeff Massie [00:10:07]:
You can't just. Oh, we'll just grab the newest version of whatever, like qt, some of that stuff. You have to stay aligned with the mothership, and it kind of hamstrings them a little bit sometimes.

Jonathan Bennett [00:10:20]:
Yeah. So I. I was just pointed out that we have the next code name for Ubuntu. It is stonking stingray. That is 2610 stonking stingray. And the question was asked in the chat and I. It's the same thing. What in the world is stonking? I know, I know.

Jonathan Bennett [00:10:42]:
Stonk as the misspelling of stock in, you know, meme speak. Apparently, stonking is British slang used to mean something that is exceptionally large, impressive, or very good. So there you go.

Rob Campbell [00:10:58]:
Stingray.

Jonathan Bennett [00:10:59]:
Yeah.

Ken McDonald [00:10:59]:
Buntu is definitely getting especially large.

Jonathan Bennett [00:11:04]:
Is it.

Rob Campbell [00:11:04]:
Are they.

Jonathan Bennett [00:11:05]:
Are the installs bigger than they used to be?

Ken McDonald [00:11:08]:
According to Keith. 512. He says that the ISO is a bit bloated. I'm gonna disagree with you. It's fat.

Rob Campbell [00:11:19]:
Many people call Ubuntu bloated. In general, but, well, I mean, think

Jonathan Bennett [00:11:23]:
about what they're trying to do, though. They're trying to put everything in that people are gonna want that they can put on a single ISO and it makes sense. That's sort of what they're after.

Ken McDonald [00:11:31]:
If you think Ubuntu's bloated, wait till you see how much space the ISO for Ubuntu Studio takes.

Jonathan Bennett [00:11:38]:
Yeah, they put the kitchen sink in that version.

Rob Campbell [00:11:41]:
Yeah, well, you know what, and you know what? I'm. Look, what I'm looking forward to with the names is once they get past the zz actually what. I don't know what they're gonna do for zz, but.

Jonathan Bennett [00:11:49]:
So some kind of zebra.

Rob Campbell [00:11:51]:
Oh, sure, a zealous zebra.

Jonathan Bennett [00:11:53]:
There you go.

Rob Campbell [00:11:54]:
Easy. But I want to see the three letter ones when they get to aaa. That's.

Jeff Massie [00:12:02]:
No, they'll just go back to the two letters. Because I remember running Wiley Werewolf back in the day and I was just disappointed that was a dot 10 release because it was like, it was cool to go, what are you running? I'm running Werewolf.

Jonathan Bennett [00:12:14]:
But you know, been a DOT four should have been an lts.

Jeff Massie [00:12:17]:
Right, it didn't last. It was wily Werewolf.

Jonathan Bennett [00:12:20]:
All right, let's talk Core Utils. Ken has the scoop. And this is not Russ Core Utils, is it? This is the og. Well, not the original original, the almost

Rob Campbell [00:12:30]:
OG Core Utils, the boring old fashioned ones.

Ken McDonald [00:12:34]:
I don't think you can call them OG anymore. Because this week Bobby Borisov and Michael Larabel wrote about the GNU project's release of Coreutils 9.11. Now, according to Michael, it's not only the Utils Rust Core Utils project seeing performance improvements with this release of Core Utils 9.11. The WC command is up to multiple times faster is the way he put it. And even CAT can be up to 15 times faster thanks to the 0 copy I O, which improves throughput. Now, according to Bobby, Coreutils 9.11 addresses issues with Cortex utilities that had difficulty handling multi byte characters such as UTF8 symbols or emojis by making cut, NL and the expand or unexpand commands fully multi byte character aware. Now, several tools also received updates to enhance compatibility with other Unix versions and modern workflows. For example, Date now supports parsing delimited dates in the DD MM YY format.

Ken McDonald [00:13:52]:
Checksum's check flag now uses more robust file naming name quoting to prevent errors or security issues when processing files with unusual characters. Now, bug fixes do include dd, which now Always diagnoses partial writes correctly upon write failure and PWD and ancient systems own agent systems will no longer overflow a buffer when operating in deep paths longer than twice the. This is a path max or path underscore max system environment variable. Now I do recommend reading Bobby and Michael's articles for more details because I've just touched on it.

Jonathan Bennett [00:14:42]:
Yeah, you know, it's interesting to me to see so. Because Core utils has been around for a long time like core Utils is not the same core this. It's not the same code base going all the way back to like the original Unix days. But it does go back to when GNU came along and started rewriting tools to make, you know, to make their spin of Unix, which is now what we most of us use for Linux.

Ken McDonald [00:15:04]:
When Richard Stallman would take the code that UNIX was providing for the core utils that they were giving, break it down and rewrite it for GNU Corner utils to be. So it could be a free version.

Jonathan Bennett [00:15:21]:
Exactly. And it's interesting to me that it's not a done project. Like there are things that they are finding now. Some of these is because of outside changes, right. So like multi byte characters. That's one of the big ones there is like emoticons but also you have your flag icons are multi byte utf, things like that.

Ken McDonald [00:15:44]:
International characters.

Jonathan Bennett [00:15:45]:
Some of your international characters. Yeah. And then one of the other ones that we talked about here was Neon support. Well, that's over on arm. So they're optimizing these core utils for other architectures that are not x86 or x8664. So they're working on ARM. I'm sure there's similar work going on for RISC V. It's just, it's fascinating to me to see these old code bases still being actively maintained and the changes that are still being made to them.

Ken McDonald [00:16:13]:
Code that used to be run on the PD11 or PDP11.

Jonathan Bennett [00:16:18]:
I don't, I don't know if. I mean, I'm sure somewhere somebody has run GNU Core utils on the PDP11.

Jeff Massie [00:16:25]:
It's probably a little newer than that, but I'm trying to. I think it's going to be like

Ken McDonald [00:16:29]:
the deck systems called King thinking Alpha Deck.

Rob Campbell [00:16:35]:
Alpha Deck Alpha.

Jeff Massie [00:16:39]:
Actually it's going to turn into like the NTFS file system like we talked about in the last show, where. Well, yeah, you had this one, but then there's this other version that came in and then it got replaced by this other. But then that didn't so now we're on. We got the Rust rewrite. We got.

Rob Campbell [00:16:57]:
Yeah. I wonder if the Rust rewrite will replace this one ever.

Jonathan Bennett [00:17:02]:
I don't think it's going to universally replace it. I think what actually will have. What'll happen is that, you see they exist side by side. And part of what's. Because I interviewed Wilverton, I think, is who's behind the Rust rewrite utils. They work together on things like a unified test suite to make sure that all of these, like there's a defined way that the programs are supposed to work and they all work the same way so that, you know, you run cats on the Rust version of cat, you run the, you know, the old C version of cat, they do the same thing. And whenever they find something that's different between the two, they make sure it's in the test cases and if it's not, they'll add them. I think in some cases, you know, when it's not defined what's supposed to happen, they'll end up sort of working together to figure out, you know, which of these is the correct behavior.

Jonathan Bennett [00:17:52]:
So, you know, the way it works right now, I think it's how it will continue to work for quite a while, is that there's, there's cooperation and you have just multiple versions of it exist side by side.

Rob Campbell [00:18:00]:
I mean, I could see that. But eventually, if, if, you know, the Rust versions generally have. They're, you know, objectively better, I guess, because maybe they're exactly the same except for they have the Rust safetiness. Anyway, if that time comes and like all the distros are using the Rust ones, are. Are the GNU ones just going to keep making their things even if nobody's using it?

Ken McDonald [00:18:25]:
All the distros using the Rust version,

Jonathan Bennett [00:18:27]:
I mean, you'll probably have at least some distro that their, their thing is that they don't use Rust code. Who knows?

Ken McDonald [00:18:33]:
And I bet it's going to be

Jeff Massie [00:18:34]:
Enterprise distro and they'll have X11 as their display server.

Ken McDonald [00:18:41]:
They run on the latest CPU.

Jonathan Bennett [00:18:46]:
I'm sure they'll be able to. What Ken is trying to do is segue to the next topic, and that is Jeff's got the scoop on the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D2. These guys need to work on their naming schemes.

Jeff Massie [00:19:05]:
Yeah, exactly.

Ken McDonald [00:19:07]:
You need to hire somebody to come up with their names.

Jonathan Bennett [00:19:10]:
No, I'm pretty sure they did hire somebody. And that's where the problem comes from. I had to Stop catching my breath after getting that one out. All right, Jeff, take it away.

Jeff Massie [00:19:18]:
I think everybody knew that this story was going to be at the top of my list of things to talk about. You know, I'm kind of Mr. Hardware here. AMD released their Ryzen 9 9950x3D2 chip. And for those that have not kept on the hardware, the 3D chips are a series of chips that AMD has released with that have extra cache, which turns out games love and there's, you know, some of the best gaming chips out there that you can get. Now they also have other uses and specific applications. But in this, in this case you have a 9950X chip and that's a 16 core 32 thread chip with no extra cache other than what's normally. Normally the cores come with, you know, the L1, L2, L3.

Jeff Massie [00:20:03]:
Then they have the 9950X3D which has half of the cores with extra cache. So it's only half of the chip has the extra memory on it. On the 12 and 16 core parts, AMD breaks them up into clusters of 6 or 8. So for the 12 and 16 core parts, they not had historically 3D cache on both clusters of chips. The idea being that for gaming, the scheduler will route the workloads to the 3D cache and for normal productivity threads, that'll go on the non cached cores because they're able to clock those a little bit higher. The cache kind of slows the cores down just a little bit and there's some heat issues and memory access stuff. But anyway the regular cores are a little faster. Originally, AMD said that adding cache to both sides would not have any real benefit and the cost would make it prohibitive.

Jeff Massie [00:21:04]:
Now for those who've looked at most of the tech reviewers, you know, on the chip, and they're on Windows pretty much universally and that's pretty much true. It's, you know, if you look at the normal hard reviewers, hardware reviewers, they say that while the chip is the fastest gaming chip and even for a lot of productivity workloads, the 9950x3D2 comes out on top. It's by low single digit a lot of times and the cost alone makes it prohibitive. It's going for almost $900 right now, as in a lot of cases, that doesn't apply to Linux now because the first article linked in the show notes has the 9950 x3D 2D or x3D 2 coming out about 10% faster than other chips. Why is that? Because a lot of the Pharonics benchmarks, which is the article linked, are not focused on gaming and they're focused on productivity now, not Excel or word processing. Things like a lot of the other site, the Windows sites review, but things like database access, compression, decompression and code compiling. There's a lot of modeling tests like openfoam, which is an open source program for computational fluid dynamics. So the first article has a link to more than 300 benchmarks comparing several CPUs to the 9950x3D2.

Jeff Massie [00:22:30]:
The second article linked in the show notes, Michael over at Phronix again takes a little bit of a dive into the 300 plus benchmarks and he does some summaries of the data per workload. So for example, and this is the same set of benchmarks he's just organizing a little more. So for example, he has the geometric mean of all the timed code compilation tests. So basically each subcategory is summarized. So when you're looking at your application that you like to run, you can decide what kind of performance benefit you'll see whether it's simulations, code, compiles, whatever. Now Michael does talk about how he thinks things are really interesting. Now why does he say that when pretty much every other hardware reviewer says the chip is a terrible value and the performance versus cost is terrible? Basically a lot of the other reviewers say, especially for gaming, just get a 9800x3D, you're like 95% of the performance at about half the cost. Well, for, for the Linux side and for the Pharonics article, the answer is workload.

Jeff Massie [00:23:42]:
Most of the reviewers are very, like I said, most reviewers very window based and customer software testing based. So that's your, you know, like gamers, Nexus hardware unboxed and so on. So if you're looking at this chip for games and normal computing, it's going to be a big letdown unless you're rich and have money to throw around and you want to brag how you have a really cool new machine and ooh, look at me, look at me. But the testing Michael does is very server based. Now, I don't know is he even ran a single game? I don't remember seeing a game benchmark in there. But he did do things like he ran a bunch of Fortran tests.

Jonathan Bennett [00:24:22]:
Why?

Jeff Massie [00:24:22]:
Why Fortran? Well, because that's the type of thing you might run on a server. So in server workloads, Fortran is still a Thing. Now some are going to say the price versus performance is terrible versus the other chips out there, which I would kind of agree with that. But if you look at this from a server standpoint and start comparing this chip versus a threadripper or an AMD EPYC chip, it's a lot cheaper. Now I'm not even going to say it, you know, it's not going to outperform those chips. They have massive amounts of cores, they are going to be way faster. But if you're budget constrained and you can't really justify a full server style setup because if you're getting even threadripper epic, I mean the motherboard, the memory, the stuff you have to have to work, make it work is that can get into quite a bit of money. Well this might be the solution for the very low end and if you don't have the need of the speed or workload parallelism that those higher core chips can, can support like you know, your workload, you know, you don't have to have a threadripper, maybe this chip will be good enough for you, then it becomes quite the value.

Jeff Massie [00:25:46]:
So basically in summary, home use doesn't make sense. Like I said, unless you have money to burn and you just have to have the best, it's just not a good value. Personally, if I was focused on gaming I'd get a 9800x3D, call it a day. If I was looking at a little more productivity in gaming, I would probably look at the Intel 270/X or X +, I don't know, whatever the two. Then when they released the 270 that's where I would go. But if you're looking low end solution low, I mean low end server, it could be the solution you're looking for. And so you know, think about your value proposition that way. Take a look at both articles linked in the show notes and see if a new system is in your future.

Jonathan Bennett [00:26:34]:
Yeah, super interesting. You know there's some of us that compiling code is what we do all day long and saving a few seconds on that might be worth it. I do not have enough money that I need to buy a new computer for the status. I can't imagine having that much money. I can imagine a lot but that's a lot of money to have.

Rob Campbell [00:26:55]:
Some of us are compiling all day long and others like me are just playing video games all day long. So I'm looking at more than video games. But just like that one, the one he was talking about, it has no extra Cash. Neither do I. So I don't know.

Ken McDonald [00:27:09]:
But that should work with my gigabyte B650 gaming x AX motherboard. Shouldn't.

Jeff Massie [00:27:22]:
Will work with the current motherboards, but I'm trying to think, is this sick? You said 650. Is that an AM5 socket?

Ken McDonald [00:27:29]:
Yeah, it's got the.

Jeff Massie [00:27:30]:
Yeah, it'll. It'll work there.

Ken McDonald [00:27:32]:
AMD 77000 series.

Jonathan Bennett [00:27:35]:
Check that your motherboard manufacturer has released an updated BIOS that claims to support it.

Ken McDonald [00:27:41]:
Yeah, so in other words, wait a year or two.

Jonathan Bennett [00:27:46]:
It shouldn't take that long.

Ken McDonald [00:27:47]:
But no, it's going to take me that long to get the money put

Rob Campbell [00:27:51]:
aside and check to make sure you have a big enough case because I ran into that and I'm sure I talked about that on shows probably three years ago now, but I remember Jeff saying. Oh, just, just Dremel it.

Ken McDonald [00:28:02]:
I never pictures put up, did I? Of my system.

Jonathan Bennett [00:28:06]:
Have I shown you guys pictures of my system? I'm on my wife's system. We both have water block, CPU coolers, the all in one systems. And on both computers the cooler, the actual radiator side of it is sitting outside of the computer. On hers it's like out the front like a Bonzo or Gonzo car. And mine, it's rack mounted with the cooler sitting on top. They're both great in their own unique ways.

Rob Campbell [00:28:31]:
I have no idea what any of your computers look like.

Jonathan Bennett [00:28:34]:
I'll have to get some shots.

Jeff Massie [00:28:36]:
Yeah, you're just one Sawzall away from the perfect solution.

Jonathan Bennett [00:28:39]:
I didn't even have to. Well, one of them I Sawzall. The other I just popped the. Just pop one of the CD spots out and the two, the two cables come out through there. It's great.

Jeff Massie [00:28:49]:
I just heard a Sawzall was involved.

Jonathan Bennett [00:28:51]:
A Sawzall was involved. Here's some pictures.

Jeff Massie [00:28:55]:
But going back. Going back to your question, Kent, really. You know, I don't even know if you would double check, but I'm not even sure you'd need a motherboard BIOS update because it's not different that much different than the 9950X or the 9950X 3D. So it's got the same number of cores, just one more little bit more cache. You might not be able to control the cores as well, but all your scheduling should be in your operating system. So it's. It should work. The biggest thing would be it wouldn't know the microcode naming convention and might make it confused, but it shouldn't be A major overhaul.

Jeff Massie [00:29:39]:
Firmware wise, it shouldn't be a major

Jonathan Bennett [00:29:42]:
overhaul, but I would still strongly say don't spend the money until your motherboard

Ken McDonald [00:29:48]:
manufacturer has come up in my system. Back up and find the revision number on the motherboard again.

Jonathan Bennett [00:29:54]:
There you go.

Jeff Massie [00:29:55]:
Well, the thing I would be most concerned with is on a, especially on a B, is how much power, you know, how are your power VRMs? Because this one does take a little more power.

Jonathan Bennett [00:30:06]:
True.

Jeff Massie [00:30:08]:
I mean it's probably fine, but you know, just, just be aware of that as well. But, but it should be easy to, to look up and search the Internet and find out what probably the big

Ken McDonald [00:30:24]:
drawback on this one is. It came with a PCIe 4 so.

Jeff Massie [00:30:31]:
Huh. That's not a, that's not a drawback.

Ken McDonald [00:30:35]:
As opposed if, if they have newer motherboards out that support PCI5 it is.

Jeff Massie [00:30:41]:
Well, but what, what are you going to run with PCIe 5?

Rob Campbell [00:30:44]:
Actually nothing.

Ken McDonald [00:30:47]:
Nothing right now.

Jonathan Bennett [00:30:48]:
Nothing's going to use that much speed.

Jeff Massie [00:30:52]:
I'm running a 4090 in my machine right now and it's only PCIe 4 and it doesn't saturate the bus at all. Not even close.

Ken McDonald [00:31:03]:
Well, Jonathan, can we take a break while I check to see what my motherboard revision number is?

Jonathan Bennett [00:31:09]:
Well, that's exactly what time it is. It is indeed time to take a break. And then once as soon as we get back, ironically, we're going to go to. No, we're going to go to Rob, not Ken. Rob has a story about how AI is ruining everything. We'll be right back after this. Here you go, Rob. Tell us what's going on in Linux land.

Rob Campbell [00:31:32]:
So I think we've touched on the benefits of AI a lot, about being able to find undiscovered bugs and fix issues we didn't even know we had. Well, a new development in the Linux kernel community is highlighting an unexpected side effect of the rise of AI generated content. And this isn't necessarily a good one. As Jonathan pointed out, the bad part of AI as it may lead to the removal of some very old hardware support. So according to reporting from LWN.net and Pharonix, Linux kernel maintainers are actively discussing the removal of a number of legacy drivers and subsystems that have seen little real world use in recent years. These include support for things that Ken is probably running like older networking technologies such as isa, ISA and pcmcia, Ethernet cards, certain legacy PCI drivers, as well as more niche subsystems like amateur radio protocol under AX25, ATM networking and even ISDN. Under normal circumstances, aging code like this would remain in the kernel for years, even decades, largely because Linux has historically prioritized broad hardware compatibility. And you know, it wasn't causing any issues or work to just leave it there.

Rob Campbell [00:33:13]:
So they just left it there. But maintainers are saying a growing issue is changing that equation. The problem is an increase in low quality or difficult to verify bug reports, some of which appear to be generated or assisted by large language models. These reports often reference obscure outdated components, rather require investigation and consume maintainers time even when the underlying hardware is no longer widely used. Because many of these legacy drivers have few if any active users or maintainers, each report creates overhead without clear benefit. In some cases, maintainers cannot easily reproduce the issues due to a lack of available hardware, making triage even more difficult. As a result, kernel developers are weighing whether it still makes sense to even keep these subsystems in the mainline kernel. An initial pull request has already been proposed to begin removing portions of this legacy networking stack, signaling that the discussion is moving beyond just theory and into action.

Rob Campbell [00:34:27]:
This would mark a shift in how the Linux kernel balances its long standing commitment to backward compatibility with practical realities of maintaining a massive and evolving code base. If these removals move forward, they would primarily impact very old or highly specialized hardware, much of which is no longer in mainstream use. So for most users out there listening to this, besides Ken, the changes would likely go unnoticed. But for a niche few out there using old and niche hardware, you may also be stuck using old and at some point, niche Linux kernels. You know, and for the kernel community, this discussion reflects a broader issue. How to manage complexity, maintenance and contributor time in an error where generating bug reports is easier than ever.

Jonathan Bennett [00:35:29]:
Yeah, it's, it's, it's interesting, you know, we talked about this a couple of weeks ago that like the bug reports are getting better from AI, right? And I guess this is sort of a inevitable outcome of that.

Rob Campbell [00:35:44]:
Yeah, good bug reports are good. More bug reports should be good. But when you get too many, if they're. Even if they're all good, that's, that's just a lot of work, I guess,

Ken McDonald [00:35:54]:
especially for hardware that I don't even think you're going to find installed in any of the current operating systems unless you've got an old token ring network running in your.

Jonathan Bennett [00:36:09]:
I've been in a place that has token ring cabling, but they had adapters to be able to push Ethernet over it.

Ken McDonald [00:36:17]:
Still using the three comms, three C509s?

Jonathan Bennett [00:36:22]:
No, they were Running Ethernet over their old token ring cabling. It was pretty cool though, to finally see some of that in person. The token ring connectors, they'll connect to themselves. The term that they use is they are hermaphrodite connectors. They're genderless. They will literally connect to themselves. It's pretty interesting.

Rob Campbell [00:36:42]:
It's pretty clever what they did.

Jeff Massie [00:36:45]:
Yeah, I was gonna say some of the, some of those too. Like the ham radio. It doesn't mean that ham radio is dead for Linux. I did a little research because I found out that really the modern stuff, it's all running it in user land. It doesn't need to be in the kernel. So just because they say, oh, we're taking the radio stuff out of the kernel, doesn't mean it kills it. It's just transition to user land because everything's so fast now. You don't need it in the kernel.

Jeff Massie [00:37:15]:
It doesn't make any sense to have it there.

Ken McDonald [00:37:18]:
Especially if you're using FPGAs to maintain do a software defined radio.

Jonathan Bennett [00:37:26]:
Yeah, that's not even user land, though. That's pushed out even further out into the external hardware.

Jeff Massie [00:37:31]:
And there's some of that too where it's just. Oh, it just runs over USB or something like that. You know, things like that. Where it's like, okay, we don't need a kernel driver for that.

Jonathan Bennett [00:37:40]:
Yeah, absolutely. And in fact, some places the kernel driver gets in the way. I have a story. Not a story, a tip. I have a tip about that here at the end of the show.

Ken McDonald [00:37:51]:
Does it have to do with FireWire?

Jonathan Bennett [00:37:53]:
No, it does not. Ken, though, you have something here that's. Wait, not FireWire does it? Is there FireWire in here? You got a story about pipe wire. See, Ken's got a story about pipewire and then the one below that is about Firefox. And so if you just glance at it, you see FireWire. Ken, what is the scoop with PipeWire and are we talking FireWire on this one?

Ken McDonald [00:38:20]:
Well, not directly. This week Bobby Borisov and Marcus Nestor wrote about the fourth maintenance update in the latest Pipewire 1.6 series. Yes, I mean Pipewire 1.6.4. According to Bobby, the primary improvement is in enhanced compatibility with Jack. Pipewire now avoids emitting ports that jack does not support resolving glitches in Ardor and other Jack applications. Additionally, it ignores non DSP ports to prevent unnecessary callbacks. According to Marcus, Pipewire 1.6.4 improves ALSA sequencer port names as Pipewire failed to recognize a client name from a Jack Midiport name created by Midi Bridge due to a missing second colon character in the naming template. Bug fixes also include removing the Bluetooth Sync loopback node which was causing issues with KDE and gnome, fixing default audio source selection to never automatically use Audio sync nodes as the default source unless explicitly selected by the user, and fixing BAP Bluetooth device set channel properties where audio position was incorrectly serialized as a pointer address instead of the Channel Away array.

Ken McDonald [00:39:52]:
For more details, I recommend reading Bobby and Marcus's article, but one of the previous release updates did include providing for support for the FireWire devices that I

Jonathan Bennett [00:40:06]:
think Jonathan has yeah, it is something they've brought out. I've not actually tried it recently. I will have to again because I know it's been something I've been working on. I also see fixes for Ardour and other Jack apps that definitely useful if if you need to run Ardour in Jack mode here. Recently I've actually been running Ardour in like Pulse audio mode because I'm just doing editing with it.

Ken McDonald [00:40:33]:
Actually running Firefox today to get the audio into the stream. For some reason the latest update for Opera GX wasn't recognizing my audio device that I use for capturing all the other audio devices and putting it into the stream.

Jonathan Bennett [00:40:59]:
Yeah, imagine that Meme browser has problems. Color me surprised, but the latest update

Ken McDonald [00:41:08]:
to Firefox is working great today.

Jonathan Bennett [00:41:11]:
Yeah, we'll be very glad when everybody finally gets on the pipewire train and all this stuff works the way it's supposed to. Not quite there yet.

Jeff Massie [00:41:22]:
Yeah.

Jonathan Bennett [00:41:22]:
All right, let's. Let's take another quick break and then Jeff is going to talk about Surprise, surprise, Firefox. We'll be right back after this.

Jeff Massie [00:41:32]:
This story I have is actually four articles and they're all linked in the show Notes. Now the first two are about Firefox 150 being released. It comes with some new features and bug fixes. It contains things like a new GTK emoji picker. So now to insert an emoji, all you need to do is hit Control plus period and that's your keyboard shortcut. Now you can immediately have a little emoji screen pop up because you know that's important these days. Now something I think is really cool is now you can use the PDF editor to reorder, copy, paste, delete and export images in a PDF without relying on an external program. So they beefed up internally what the PDF viewer or editor I guess now can do.

Jeff Massie [00:42:20]:
Now Split View, which was introduced in version 149 has been given a little love. And you can right click on a link and you can see in the pop up menu when you right click on it, open link in split view. And that's an option. And when you hit that, it will select, it will split the screen so your current web page and the new link will share the other half of the page. Now if you do that and you have them in the wrong order, you can right click on the group tabs. It'll show them as both highlighted at the same time. You right click on that and you can select Reverse to swap their order. And if you want to break them apart, there's a split option.

Jeff Massie [00:43:00]:
So you can have each tab then have its own window. And you know, I think it's really cool and nice when you want to compare something and you don't want or need to pull a tab into its own window and have a whole second complete window next to it. It's just a quick little way to view. Now there's a lot of bug fixes in there as well. There were a total of 40 security fixes and of those 12 of those that they were high impact, which would be considered critical bugs that were fixed, none were known to be exploited in the wild that we know of. And the rest of the security fixes are the rated medium and low. Now something else they have now is to share multiple tabs in a single step. So you can select several tabs, you right click and choose Copy X Links.

Jeff Massie [00:43:58]:
Then when you paste it into another app that supports rich text, links include both the page title and the URL for easy reading. So it's an easy way to send a group of links to somebody when you have, oh, I got four of these open. Well now you just click, click, click, click, copy, paste and you. And you've just sent everything that you're looking at something, something else they have. Let's see. Oh, sorry. To make things a little easier for RPM based distributions, there is a new RPM package that Mozilla is supporting. So this means the distribution maintainers don't need to do the work of packaging up an RPM because Mozilla is doing the work for them.

Jeff Massie [00:44:43]:
So if you have a, you know, fedora or another distribution that's RPM based, they just made that little smoother. So you're, you're not waiting on package managers to repackage. Security got a boost as well. Firefox now extends local network access restrictions to more users, so websites must now request permission before connecting to devices on the user's local network or to apps and services running on the device. Mozilla has previously limited this protection to users with enhanced tracking protection set to strict, but now it's being rolled out more widely. So if you don't have your security set to enhance tracking protection strict, you're still now covered. Now we've talked about this in the past, but the change is part of a progressive rollout. So not every user is going to see this immediately.

Jeff Massie [00:45:41]:
We've talked about how some of these, sometimes these features, they, they go out to different groups at different times. It's kind of they're easing their way into some of these new features to make sure it doesn't totally break everything overnight and they can kind of. It's kind of almost like a release candidate, I would say it's past beta testing, but you can think it almost like a release candidate. So that's why they roll it out progressively. Now, once enabled, it adds another layer of control over how websites interact with nearby devices and local services. And that could cause issues for some people. So that's why they're being careful. Now there are a ton of other changes with which have made it into Firefox 150, but I suggest everyone take a look at the first two articles in the show notes to get full details and look at the link of the official release notes because it's also in there as well.

Jeff Massie [00:46:31]:
Now the second two articles are talking about how Brave, which is a browser based on Firefox, but it's more privacy based now has code going the other way. Now Firefox quietly put Brave's Rust based ad and tracker blocking engine into Firefox. It was no big announcements, no big fanfare, it kind of just quietly went in. I mean there was a little release notes, you know, it was in there, but it's kind of, you know, way down and didn't really highlight that it was ad and tracker blocking engine. It isn't turned on by default right now and there's a few steps to take to turn it on is it still seems a little experimental and maybe not ready for full release yet. The article listed in the show notes show the couple of steps to turn it on and describe how to test it. It's turned on in the dot config menu and there's already a built in ad blocker that needs turned off so you can be sure you're testing out the Brave engine. Not to mention if you have Ublock origin, you should turn that as off as well.

Jeff Massie [00:47:42]:
If you're testing this new rust based ad blocker. Take a look at all the articles linked and get up to speed on Firefox. And if you're not a Firefox user, I would love to hear in the discord why and what would they need to do to win your favor so you be it becomes your main browser.

Rob Campbell [00:48:00]:
Happy surfing for those who are Firefox users. One of those new features actually caught me off guard real recently. The one that where it has to access your current network. And I have things I access on my current network like my Proxmox server. So I had just updated Firefox, I went to my Proxmox server and it's had a pop up that said do you want to allow this access to your network? And my default reaction anything that pops up is to click no. And then all of a sudden I couldn't load my Proxmox server and I had to figure out how and why and how to fix it because I didn't even look at the pop. I just said nope. And so then I.

Rob Campbell [00:48:49]:
And it was so new that I had trouble finding anything on the Internet to help me find where to where what what happened, what I did. So just be careful if you have Firefox and you access local things, especially that first time.

Ken McDonald [00:49:03]:
Read before you automatically answer.

Rob Campbell [00:49:05]:
Yeah, maybe that first. That's good advice all the time.

Jonathan Bennett [00:49:07]:
This was Rob's. So anyway, I started blasting moments.

Rob Campbell [00:49:13]:
Yeah, maybe you should read before you click things. But you know I don't have time for that.

Jonathan Bennett [00:49:17]:
Read before you click.

Ken McDonald [00:49:21]:
Sometimes you won't need to make time.

Jonathan Bennett [00:49:24]:
Yep, that's. That's actually pretty good. That's. That's a pretty good advice for life.

Rob Campbell [00:49:32]:
There's just so many pop ups on everything all the time. It's like do you want this site to give you notifications? No, I don't.

Jonathan Bennett [00:49:38]:
I have an idea. I have a killer app idea. I'm going to make millions. We get a local AI that reads the pop ups for you and tells you in like one sentence what it is that it's doing.

Rob Campbell [00:49:50]:
Yeah. Or even better, the local AI that knows me and knows that hey, you access things on your network. Let's just allow this.

Ken McDonald [00:49:59]:
I have to actually go in and disable pop ups for some of the websites that I use because I've got this pop ups disabled by default.

Jonathan Bennett [00:50:10]:
Yeah, very few things get to do pop ups on my machines.

Jeff Massie [00:50:15]:
And I stand corrected. Too Brave is based on chromium. I was confusing it with what's the one Based on Firefox.

Jonathan Bennett [00:50:24]:
There is one like Zebra Wolf, Zen Browser, I think.

Jeff Massie [00:50:29]:
Oh, maybe. No, it's like, I was thinking like

Jonathan Bennett [00:50:33]:
there's a, there's, there's one.

Jeff Massie [00:50:35]:
I thought it was like Wolf or something.

Rob Campbell [00:50:36]:
Or Libre Wolf.

Jeff Massie [00:50:37]:
Libre Wolf. That's what I was.

Jonathan Bennett [00:50:39]:
Yeah, I think Zen Browser is also based on Firefox, if I remember.

Jeff Massie [00:50:43]:
It is. Yeah, yeah, there's librewolf, Waterfox.

Ken McDonald [00:50:48]:
Yeah, I think Waterfox was mentioned in one of the articles you had linked

Jeff Massie [00:50:53]:
Florp and Zen Browser.

Jonathan Bennett [00:50:56]:
Florp.

Jeff Massie [00:50:58]:
Yeah.

Jonathan Bennett [00:50:59]:
I don't remember what that's from, but that's a reference to. But it is to something. All right.

Ken McDonald [00:51:04]:
It's got to be from a Hanna Barber or a cartoon maybe.

Jeff Massie [00:51:07]:
Well, before everybody listening to this goes, oh, I bet I'm gonna roast Jeff for this one. It's like, okay, yeah, I know. I, I got confused.

Rob Campbell [00:51:14]:
And if you want to roast them anyway, at the end of the show we'll show you how to connect with us and then you can send him messages and roast him.

Ken McDonald [00:51:22]:
And just remember, they've got to go through you first. Rob.

Jonathan Bennett [00:51:26]:
Yelp.

Rob Campbell [00:51:27]:
I'll actually throw. If you want to roast them, no problem.

Jonathan Bennett [00:51:33]:
All right, so we've got. I teased at the beginning of the show that we were going to talk about Rob's favorite browser, his favorite os, his favorite distro. And it is now time. I didn't realize that Rob was the one with the story. I saw this during the week. Rob, your favorite distro from your favorite company is absolutely getting a refresh coming soon, isn't it?

Rob Campbell [00:51:59]:
Yes, this is going to be your new favorite distro. So Microsoft is considering releasing a new Fedora spin. Yep, you heard it. Well, sort of. Okay, sort of new still Fedora spin. Kind of maybe not official spin anyway, it's actually just rebasing of their Azure Linux previously known as CBL Mariner, rebasing itself on Fedora. And honestly I'm kind of surprised they didn't go with the rebasing on Ubuntu considering how close canonical Microsoft have been over the years. But I guess it makes some sense considering Azure Linux was already an RPM based Linux distribution like Fedora, so it's an easier change form.

Rob Campbell [00:52:46]:
So Azure Linux, for those who don't know, is Microsoft's internal open source Linux distribution that powers a range of infrastructure across Azure, including container hosts and cloud services, and is designed to be lightweight, secure and tightly controlled for Microsoft needs. I have demoed a little bit of the CBL when it was CBL Mariner on the show been a few years I don't think I've touched it since they've renamed Azure but anyway up until now it's been been maintained as its own independent distribution. But you based on with the RPMs using RPMs but according to reporting from Pharonics, Microsoft is now exploring a shift to align Azure Linux more closely with Jonathan's favorite distro, Fedora as an upstream base. Fedora is known for its fast release cycle and for introducing newer technologies early. But what we know it most for is Jonathan's preferred distro. It often serves as an upstream testing ground for enterprise Linux platform forms, which means it receives frequent updates to the kernel tool chains and system components. By rebasing onto Fedora, Microsoft could reduce the amount of engineering effort required to maintain core packages while also gaining faster access to upstream improvements. I mean, like I always wonder why redo something from scratch when there's already someone else out there doing pretty much what you want to do anyway? At the same time, it would still be able to customize Azure Linux for its own cloud focused workloads.

Rob Campbell [00:54:30]:
This move would represent a shift in how Microsoft approaches its Linux platform. Less of a fully independent distribution and more of a downstream adaptation built on an existing rapidly evolving ecosystem. At this stage, the Fedora based direction is still in development exploration I guess I'd say, and details are continuing to emerge. But if it moves forward, it would mark a notable change in Microsoft's Linux strategy, particularly given its long standing partnership with Ubuntu in the cloud space. And I know bringing together Fedora and Microsoft is a change that Jonathan can get behind.

Jonathan Bennett [00:55:18]:
I would love to go back and review because we've talked about years ago, cbl, Mariner, and then more recently Azure. Same thing, different name. We've talked about it in the past and I know we've commented on it being RPM based and I don't remember if we've called out the idea that others should just make it Fedora based, but it does make a lot of sense.

Rob Campbell [00:55:37]:
Yeah, I don't recall if we ever said that, but makes sense.

Jeff Massie [00:55:43]:
It was pretty close is why they did it.

Jonathan Bennett [00:55:45]:
Yeah, well, I mean Fedora is. Fedora is a real solid base obviously, but I think if you count the RHEL clones in RHEL itself, probably the majority of the world's servers run on Fedora based Linux. Yeah, and not real close to it.

Rob Campbell [00:56:05]:
Most RPM based distros are based on one of the RHEL derivatives, right? Like except for Open SUSE is one of the, the rare ones that isn't.

Jonathan Bennett [00:56:17]:
I think, I think the SUSE is the, the, pretty much the other RPM stream, really the only other one, so. All right, speaking of Fedora, I'm gonna, I'm gonna sneak this one in. Fedora 44 is indeed going to happen next week and if you want to get an early view of it, the RC1.7 that is slated to be the release is available. So you can go right now and download Fedora 44 candidate RC1.7. Now of course if someone finds some huge game breaking bug, they will delay it and do another rc, but the current plan is that it will release basically a week from when we're recording here. Let's see if we have the exact day.

Ken McDonald [00:57:06]:
28th, isn't it?

Jonathan Bennett [00:57:09]:
Current final target date 428. Yes. So you can go ahead and update to this if you want to. Just do be warned that once the 28th hits the next couple of days after that there's going to be a lot of churn with new packages because they're in a feature freeze. As soon as the freeze goes away, everybody can dump their packages in. So as we say with Ubuntu, same thing is true with Fedora. You might want to give it a few days and then do the update. Unless you really like living on the edge.

Ken McDonald [00:57:42]:
So wait till the 4th of May.

Jeff Massie [00:57:46]:
May the fourth.

Jonathan Bennett [00:57:47]:
May the fourth be with you.

Rob Campbell [00:57:51]:
The very first time I installed Fedora I jumped the gun and I got to them when they're still in the, the pre release stage or whatever they call it before it actually came out and I had no problems, but doesn't mean, doesn't mean that you should do that.

Jeff Massie [00:58:09]:
Yeah, yeah, exactly. You know, realistically though, I've jumped on some early betas and things have run just fine I think anymore. In the Linux ecosystem if you're not a mission critical type set up and it's just your, you know, a crash isn't going to be the end of the world, a lot of times it's solid enough.

Jonathan Bennett [00:58:32]:
Yeah, it's, it's not as scary as it used to be. Like in Fedora Land, running Rawhide used to be a real harrowing experience.

Ken McDonald [00:58:39]:
And unless it's you're trying to do an update on a remote system that you can't physically reach.

Jonathan Bennett [00:58:45]:
Been there, done that.

Rob Campbell [00:58:46]:
Yeah. Production remote systems updates are always a little bit scary. At least if you can't do a snapshot. If it's bare metal, it's. Yeah.

Ken McDonald [00:58:55]:
Is that where you'd want a KVM over IP device.

Jeff Massie [00:59:00]:
That's where I want a guy I can call up and go, hey Bob or Becky or somebody. Go, go. Hit the go. Hit the power button on that.

Rob Campbell [00:59:07]:
And I think, I think now I think Ken's got the right idea here and I think Ken has a device that might just be perfect for this. I took a look at this earlier this week. I thought about mentioning it, but I left it for Ken. It seems like a nifty little device I may have to get my hands on.

Ken McDonald [00:59:24]:
Do you want to take a break and get some popcorn before I go into this?

Jonathan Bennett [00:59:27]:
Yeah, we're going to take a quick break and then we're going to talk about Ken's solution for the remote server. We'll be right back.

Ken McDonald [00:59:35]:
Well, this week Jonathan, Giorgio Mendoza and Saurav Rudra wrote about a flexible, flexible KVM remote control with support for wireless connectivity. It's called Leaf KVM and its crowdsource page says it's a compact, modern, fully self contained wireless KVM for anyone who needs reliable remote access to computers, servers and even some professional cameras. According to Surov, Leaf KVM is packed inside a CNC milled aluminum enclosure that also doubles as a passive cooling heatsink and is powered by a RockChip RV 1126B SoC with a quad core Cortex A53 CPU and 512 megabytes of DDR3 RAM. According to Giorgio, Leaf KVM captures video through a CSI bridge and supports HDMI and DVI input with optional VGA support via an adapter. Video streaming is handled using H.264 or H265 encoding, with support for resolutions up to 4K at 30 frames per second or 1080p at higher frame rates. There's also a 2.4-inch IPS capacitive touchscreen which lets you configure networking, preview the HDMI input, manage USB emulation, and check device status without needing a separate computer. Remote access is handled through a browser based interface with additional support for remote desktop access using rust desk. Leaf KVM's web interface is even optimized for mobile devices, supporting touch guessers, allowing you to move or drag the cursor and perform left and right clicks directly on the tablet's canvas, according to the developers.

Ken McDonald [01:01:51]:
Source code and build configurations are planned for release along with hardware schematics under an open hardware license. Now, as always, for more details I do recommend reading Giorgio and Surov's own article. Now I do want to ask who will pay 119 for the Leaf KVM.

Rob Campbell [01:02:12]:
I was wondering if you were going to leave out the most critical thing that I liked about this and you left a right for the end, that price tag.

Jonathan Bennett [01:02:20]:
It's really not bad.

Rob Campbell [01:02:22]:
No. Whenever I've looked for KVM devices like pikvm ones that are pre made out there and other things, they're always like 2, 300. I think 119 US dollars is pretty good. That's what I really liked about it. And there's a lot of nice features that are supported there for remote desktop. And for those who don't know what a KVM is. I mean basically it's a remote tool like remote desktop even in this case, except for it's before the computer. So you don't even have to have the computer running because basically views whatever's on the console or display coming out of the display of the computer and then also has other connectivity for the mouse and keyboard.

Rob Campbell [01:03:12]:
Which keyboard? Video mouse is what KPM stands for. And so that allows you to reboot and even like fix a remote computer that won't even boot up through, through a KVM type device. So they're always, usually you think of

Ken McDonald [01:03:29]:
a KVM being used so you can use one keyboard monitor and that's a

Jonathan Bennett [01:03:37]:
KVM switch where you can use one mouse, one keyboard with multiple computers. Yeah, so here we're talking about KVM over the network, over Ethernet. A lot of server motherboards have a KVM over IP built into them. And I have always been skittish about plugging one of those into the raw Internet, giving them an IP address. And you know, there's been enough stories about these things getting popped that, you know, don't do, don't do that, don't, don't plug your motherboard KVM into the Internet because it's a really bad place where you can get malware. It does happen and it's, you basically have to throw the server away.

Rob Campbell [01:04:17]:
Yeah, you want, you don't want them on the public Internet. You want to have them isolated. But using them like Dell has idrac, HP has the ILO Lights out interface. And yeah, if you use an enterprise server, it basically has this KVM already built into it. But if you're just running a, a little desktop as your home server or, or whatever, or Raspberry PI, they usually don't have that.

Jonathan Bennett [01:04:43]:
So there, there are other options for this. There is the pikvm, which is a Raspberry PI with a hat on it to give it KVM support. This, this is a pretty cool option though. I like this.

Jeff Massie [01:04:55]:
Make sure your system supports it because my server will not recognize a keyboard or anything on a kvm. It's a known bug.

Rob Campbell [01:05:06]:
Oh, weird. Never seen that.

Ken McDonald [01:05:08]:
Well, that's the interesting thing is the. With the inputs and outputs on this, it would just see it as a USB device for the keyboard and mouse.

Jeff Massie [01:05:20]:
It's a problem in the actual implementation. It's something in the hardware. They can't just fix it in bios because. Let me ask you, it's a known problem.

Rob Campbell [01:05:31]:
Is it only a problem like booting up? Like it says no keyboard recognized or even after it's booted up.

Jeff Massie [01:05:36]:
Even after it's booted, it cannot.

Rob Campbell [01:05:37]:
It won't even see it.

Jeff Massie [01:05:39]:
Yeah, it sees it like as a broken device. Well, my other systems have no problem with it.

Jonathan Bennett [01:05:46]:
I would say that's going to be dependent upon the individual thing. Right. So like it is possible that you could buy this and it would work. Yeah, because they all. They're all going to implement that just a little bit differently.

Jeff Massie [01:05:59]:
Possibly. But it's like I said for that motherboard I have. It's a known issue and It's. They say KVMs don't work with it and. But there's no fix other than you'd

Ken McDonald [01:06:13]:
have to switches or KVM over ip. Like this is.

Jeff Massie [01:06:19]:
Well, maybe that because it's. I've only used KVM switches and it refuses to.

Jonathan Bennett [01:06:24]:
Yeah, a KVM switch is gonna. Is gonna work pretty differently from how this works. The KVM switch. You've got actual like physical leads that switch back and forth and forth between one USB and the other. Whereas this is more like. We've got a chip that emulates a keyboard. It's probably like an Arduino chip in there or you know something, something like that.

Rob Campbell [01:06:46]:
And I want.

Jonathan Bennett [01:06:47]:
There's a few of those that'll. That'll be programmable and you can make them act like other things.

Rob Campbell [01:06:51]:
Yeah. So I wonder if the KVM switch is really only a problem if it like maybe if it boots up while it's not selected as the device so the leads aren't going to the mouse and keyboard.

Jeff Massie [01:07:05]:
It still won't see it. Even if you have it set to that. You bring it up, it'll show the video just fine. But it says no keyboard or mouse detected.

Jonathan Bennett [01:07:16]:
Interesting stuff.

Ken McDonald [01:07:18]:
Leaf kvm, that's got two USB type C ports. Port one is a USB device mode. So it can act as keyboard, mouse, mass storage emulation and keyboard two is the serial console Or UART debug option.

Rob Campbell [01:07:35]:
Well, I'll tell you what, I'll buy this and you send over your server and I'll test it out, see if it works.

Jeff Massie [01:07:41]:
You're such a good friend, Rob.

Ken McDonald [01:07:42]:
I appreciate you, Rob. Just buy it and have it shipped to his house and he can hook it up for you.

Jonathan Bennett [01:07:49]:
But then Rob doesn't have the toy to play with.

Rob Campbell [01:07:52]:
Yeah, well, remotely I could.

Jonathan Bennett [01:07:54]:
Yeah, that's true. There you go. I see it. All right, let's see, what do we have next? Jeff. Oh, Jeff. Yeah, Jeff's gonna try to convince me to spend money because there's a new framework. Yeah, there's a new framework 13 out framework 13 Pro. And man, have I been.

Jonathan Bennett [01:08:16]:
I was already thinking about a new framework 13 and this one I have been looking at. Okay, Jeff, my wife may never forgive me.

Jeff Massie [01:08:23]:
Well, but you have a framework 13 now, right?

Jonathan Bennett [01:08:26]:
No, my wife has a framework 13.

Jeff Massie [01:08:28]:
Oh, okay.

Jonathan Bennett [01:08:29]:
I have a framework 16, which is very nice. That's what I'm doing this show from. So, honestly, my wife said the chat. Honestly, the framework 16 is a pain to travel with because it is large and I have started doing a lot of business travel. So I'm.

Rob Campbell [01:08:49]:
Ken's already convinced.

Ken McDonald [01:08:50]:
So you're going to buy this new one for her and take her old one?

Jonathan Bennett [01:08:55]:
No, that was not.

Jeff Massie [01:08:56]:
Well, that was going to go. Now, actually in the story, I might have a solution for you that's. That's cheaper.

Jonathan Bennett [01:09:03]:
All right, all right, all right. See, See, hun, He's trying to save us money.

Jeff Massie [01:09:08]:
I'm doing it. I'm doing it for you. Wife of Jonathan. So Framework is a name we've talked about in the show several times and this week we're going to talk about the changes to their Model 13 laptop. The original Framework Laptop 13 launched back in 2021 and the company has redesigned the chassis from the ground up. The result is the brand new framework Laptop 13 Pro, announced at Framework's Next Gen event in April of 2026. Now framework has moved to a CNC machine 6000 series aluminum chassis, which dramatically improves rigidity. Earlier Framework laptops were known for slightly wobbly screens and a bit of flex.

Jeff Massie [01:09:53]:
Well, this new design aims to eliminate that. The laptop keeps the same overall dimensions, overall dimensions as a previous 13 inch model and weighs about 1.4 kg, or just over 3 pounds. There's also a new graphite color option alongside the classic silver. Now, before anyone gets nervous about this Pro version and worries that it's not, you know, and worries it's not completely different. And if you're worried it's not going to be compatible with the old version, that's mostly not true. The only incompatibility is the battery, keyboard and touchpad assembly now, and that's due to the new chassis geometry. Now there's a new bottom cover so you can put the new bigger battery into your older framework. And there's a top cover kit which will let the keyboard and touchpad assembly work on the old system.

Jeff Massie [01:10:49]:
Now I have a couple articles in the Show Notes and one of them has a link to a nice page on Framework's website which lists the compatibility. So it really lays it all out real nice. If you're, you're unsure or you know, you're thinking about the story here and you're like, well what about it covers it all, but basically almost everything is compatible. The Laptop 13 Pro now jumps to a 74 watt hour pack battery pack up from 61 watt hours, so it's roughly a 20% increase. Now framework claims up to 20 hours of battery life when streaming 4K video and early testers seem to confirm that there's a huge improvement. Also, the laptop now has a 100 watt charger instead of the old 60 watt brick. Now we mentioned the touchpad assembly isn't compatible with the old version as the Pro has a new haptic touchpad. It's from Light on and it uses four piezo elements to simulate clicks without moving parts.

Jeff Massie [01:11:56]:
Now Light on is also the company which supplied the previous mechanical touchpad and this is one of the things also that frees up some internal space for the battery that we just talked about. Now supposedly this new touchpad is supposed to be very like MacBook Pro ish. So if you're coming from a Mac, supposedly it's going to be very very similar and you'll feel right at home. The display is new and for the first time it's custom made for the Framework Pro. Rather than just being an off the shelf model, it does have a touchscreen which is, you know, which is a first because it hasn't had a touchscreen before. It has 700 nits of brightness which is up from the 500 of the previous model. And the contrast ratio is also up to 1800 to 1 from the previous 1500 to 1. Now it does have square corners instead of the rounded ones.

Jeff Massie [01:12:51]:
The old one it has 30-120Hz variable refresh rate and a per unit color calibration. And it comes with an anti glare coating. Now here's Something for the show is Framework is now offering Ubuntu pre installed on the Laptop 13 Pro. Now this is the first time the company has shipped a laptop with Linux out of the box and the model is officially Ubuntu certified. Interestingly, now this is from Framework themselves. The Ubuntu configuration sold faster than the Windows version right after launch. Now that was from Framework themselves, but they didn't say how much or, you know, give any real ratios or numbers. So it's just, we just know that Ubuntu versions were going faster than Windows.

Jeff Massie [01:13:44]:
Now there is still the standard swappable memory configurations. You can get it with a few different AMD and Intel CPUs and the normal ports like USB and the various outputs can be configured as always and they've not changed, they're compatible from the old version to the new. So take a look at the article in the show notes for more details and head on over to Framework and maybe order a new laptop. I will say though, depending on configuration, you could be waiting until August to receive your order as they've sold out a several builds. The laptop is wildly more popular than they expected. So with that in mind, have patience and happy computing. Yeah, in your case, Jonathan, you know what I would do? I would take the framework 16, I would give it to your wife, I would take her framework 1613, throw some of those upgrades in it and then you're good to go.

Jonathan Bennett [01:14:39]:
You we could do it that way. I will say it is nice to have a laptop that lives here on this desk, and it's nice to have a laptop that lives out there for her to use. And it might be nice to additionally have the laptop that is in the bag ready to go. Because breaking a laptop down and then setting it back up here to do this show is a pain. So there is something to be said for having one that just lives in the bag.

Ken McDonald [01:15:10]:
Sounds like your business needs to buy a third laptop.

Jeff Massie [01:15:14]:
That's what he's saying.

Jonathan Bennett [01:15:15]:
Yeah, that might be what happened.

Jeff Massie [01:15:17]:
Jonathan's wife I tried, I tried to save a little money, I tried to help you out, but. Sorry, looks like I'd prefer to have

Rob Campbell [01:15:24]:
a desktop at the desk, but.

Jonathan Bennett [01:15:27]:
Well, I have a desktop behind me. I just. The desk, this desk that I'm sitting at kind of sits out in the middle of the floor, so there's not really a good place to put a desktop.

Rob Campbell [01:15:35]:
It's pretty awesome though that Linux outsold the Windows model so far. But you know, imagine if they would have actually used one of the Good Linux distributions instead of Ubuntu. How big of a difference that could have made?

Jonathan Bennett [01:15:50]:
Well, so, so it's actually worth talking about that they've had for the longest time the bring your own. The bring your own distro option. And you know, I don't know that they've come out and given a whole lot of statistics about who's buying which. But you got to know that there's been a lot of Linux fans that have bought Framework laptops over the years. There's a bunch of us.

Jeff Massie [01:16:14]:
Well, and there's the philosophy just match

Rob Campbell [01:16:16]:
as well to Linux.

Jonathan Bennett [01:16:17]:
Absolutely.

Jeff Massie [01:16:18]:
And there's probably a lot of people like Rob that just, you know, so against Ubuntu that he goes, I'm buying the Windows version so I can reform it at it. And they don't get credit for it.

Jonathan Bennett [01:16:29]:
Goodness.

Ken McDonald [01:16:29]:
Gr.

Rob Campbell [01:16:30]:
Yeah, it be. See it do even better.

Jeff Massie [01:16:32]:
Well, he talks about Microsoft all the time. We know he's on the payroll. So he get, he gets all these free operating systems from Microsoft anyways.

Jonathan Bennett [01:16:39]:
He's on the payroll.

Rob Campbell [01:16:41]:
Yeah.

Jonathan Bennett [01:16:43]:
Goodness.

Jeff Massie [01:16:45]:
Yeah, we like to have a lot of fun here.

Jonathan Bennett [01:16:47]:
Yes, yes, we do. Yeah, we'll see. We'll see if a framework laptop, the 13 Pro, is in my future. Give me, give me a couple of weeks and we may, we may have some news on that.

Jeff Massie [01:16:58]:
Well, and there, you know, the thing is too, there's a lot of configurations. I, I was playing around with it a little bit. The AMD seem to be more in stock and you could maybe get one by June, but it, some of them are, you know, like, some, some of them are just flat out sold out. And you cannot get certain CPUs and certain, certain things because they just.

Ken McDonald [01:17:19]:
Or you could do it a piece at a time.

Jonathan Bennett [01:17:22]:
It'd be like that, that old Johnny Cash song where he works at the car dealer. No, he, he works in the car factory and he decides to smuggle out a car one piece at a time.

Rob Campbell [01:17:32]:
There was a story about intel moving further away from open source that I was going to do but didn't. So, you know, just based on that kind of things, I'd rather have the AMD version anyway.

Jeff Massie [01:17:46]:
Well, AMD is kind of doing the same thing. They, they're not really. No, nobody's championing open source right now.

Rob Campbell [01:17:56]:
Yeah, they've never, they haven't gone all in like intel did. But it's more about the trend and direction of things that I don't like.

Jonathan Bennett [01:18:05]:
I, I love what I like. Says here, let's see. I may Actually be able to pull the. Let's see if I can pull this

Rob Campbell [01:18:12]:
up because it's great.

Jeff Massie [01:18:13]:
Here we go.

Jonathan Bennett [01:18:14]:
Ilag framework. You can reuse your laptop for ages. Framework users us. I want to buy the whole thing. I want to buy it whole. I want the new one. Yes, that is exactly how that is going. All right.

Jeff Massie [01:18:30]:
They make nice machines though. And really the concept is great.

Rob Campbell [01:18:34]:
I want one for every room of the house.

Jonathan Bennett [01:18:36]:
There you go. The concept is really good. The build quality is good. They're. They're actually reasonably priced too. Like they just hit all the marks.

Ken McDonald [01:18:47]:
Just start with twelve hundred dollars initially and then buy the other other stuff and put it in as you need it.

Jonathan Bennett [01:18:53]:
Yeah. One of the interesting things about the 13 Pro is that they are going to the new LP Cam. The like zero insertion force memory which is. It's nice that it's not soldered on compression attached memory module. That's what it's called. And that may only be the intel version. I'm not sure if that. If they're doing LP cam on the AMD motherboards as well.

Jonathan Bennett [01:19:20]:
I got to do some more. I got to do some more looking at this. But anyway.

Ken McDonald [01:19:25]:
Yeah, really show first.

Jonathan Bennett [01:19:26]:
Well, I, I suppose, I suppose if we want to get out of here.

Jeff Massie [01:19:31]:
You're breaking his heart, Ken.

Jonathan Bennett [01:19:33]:
Yeah. Anyway, one of the other interesting things about the 13 Pro though is that it's. It's moving to CNC aluminum for the sort of the base of it which again if you're going to be on the road, that extra oomph, that extra strength. Yeah. Might be useful.

Ken McDonald [01:19:50]:
And I think one of y' all mentioned about the flexing of the display earlier.

Jeff Massie [01:19:59]:
Yeah, yeah. It can flex a little bit too on the original one. And that was one of the complaints that you know, people really loved them. And so sometimes, you know, when reviewing people had. I gotta say something bad. It's kind of flexi and it's, you

Rob Campbell [01:20:13]:
know, if you want to say something bad, you know, aluminum bodies, they will dent and it stays in there.

Jonathan Bennett [01:20:20]:
Well, I mean but so will plastic. So I had. Years ago I was running a. It was an Asus. It was one of their netbooks. It was not the Asus E. It was the, the version after that. So not the white one.

Jonathan Bennett [01:20:34]:
It was a. It was a black colored netbook and I took it out to a job one time and went to, you know, took it out of the bag, opened up the screen and I have no idea how it happened. Middle of the screen there's this big. The Screen was broken. Like it took a hit from the outside. And so, you know, ever since then I've had this thought like, well, you know, I want to, I want. Not exactly a tough book, but I would like my laptops to be a little bit more robust than that. That, you know, you don't want a

Rob Campbell [01:20:59]:
tough book, but you want a book, that stuff.

Jonathan Bennett [01:21:01]:
Yeah, yeah, I want to know when I broke it.

Ken McDonald [01:21:05]:
You want a hard.

Jeff Massie [01:21:07]:
Yeah. Your aluminum frame, when you're talking about, oh, that dent is there. No, it's not. It's aluminum. Go take it to an auto body shop. You can have it custom design and painted. And

Jonathan Bennett [01:21:21]:
there you go.

Jeff Massie [01:21:22]:
Tig welder and pull a dense. I mean you. To me this is like aluminum. Now you can go nuts with the customization.

Jonathan Bennett [01:21:31]:
Nice. All right, let's take one final break and then we're going to get into some tips. We'll be right back. All right, let's get into some command line tips. We're gonna let Rob kick us off from his lofty perch. Yes.

Rob Campbell [01:21:50]:
So my command line tip is a simple one called Perch. This is a rust based program. So it's a simple cargo install. Perch, that's P, E, R, C H. And what you will have after you install that is a command line based or tui that for it's a client for Mastodon and or Blue Sky. And for those watching, I went ahead and I logged in with my Blue sky account, not my Mastodon. And yeah, I mean it's just a simple. You can see what's on your timeline right at the top.

Rob Campbell [01:22:30]:
I have a, a twit one right there. What is trending at Apple is not always what matters. Obviously there's no pictures on here because it's a command line 2e. So I don't know if there's a picture that went along with that, but you just arrow through and see what, you know, what all is on your Blue sky. And hey, there's, there's Jeff Jarvis saying thanks to somebody, I don't know who, but hey, there's a nice simple command line to a way to keep up with a couple of the, the social media services that I'd like to look at. Cool.

Jonathan Bennett [01:23:11]:
No, no news yet on when they're going to support that other microblogging social network.

Rob Campbell [01:23:16]:
Yeah, I don't care.

Jonathan Bennett [01:23:19]:
The network that shall not be named.

Rob Campbell [01:23:21]:
I don't use that one either. I mean, I have an account and I tell people to go there, but I don't really use that one because like I said I'm moving away from x, xorg, x11, xx, x, whatever. It's all wayland.

Jonathan Bennett [01:23:39]:
All right, Ken, tell us about F3.

Ken McDonald [01:23:43]:
Well, F3, this week I'm bringing a Linux alternative to Steve Gibson's valid drive utility. The Linux alternative is called F3. It's actually a set of commands used to test the capacity and performance of external storage devices and see if they live up to their claim specifications notifications by filling the device with pseudo random data and then checking whether it returns the same data on read. Now all these commands require being run as root and will destroy any previously stored data on your device. So I'm not going to demonstrate this one today. I'm just going to talk you through it. But the one, the first command that I'm going to cover is F3 Write. You use it to write large files to your mounted Disk disk and F3Read will verify that that in most cases you're doing this with a flash disk or maybe an SD card, but it contains you.

Ken McDonald [01:24:47]:
It just verifies that the disk contains exactly the files you wrote. Now you can also quickly test your Device's capacity with F3 Pro. It operates directly on the unmounted block device. F3 probes output can be used with the command F3 Fix to create a partition that fits the actual size of. If you find it's a fake drive and it doesn't store as much as it advertised then there's F3 Brew which will assess the media of a block device writing blocks, resetting the drive and reading the blocks back. I've got a link in the show notes to it that where you can download it from.

Jonathan Bennett [01:25:37]:
Very cool. So this is, this is for like boy, it's been years ago the first time I heard somebody talk about this and it may have been Steve the first talked about this that I remember. But this is like you buy a too good to be true deal on Amazon or ebay and it's like you know a. A four terabyte flash drive and you plug it into your computer and it says it's 4 terabytes but you start writing data to it and then you know, before you know it, something doesn't add up. You know you can't get your data back.

Rob Campbell [01:26:06]:
I do.

Jonathan Bennett [01:26:07]:
That's. You have some of these, don't you Rob?

Rob Campbell [01:26:10]:
I have a story. I may have shared it, but I will share it again back in roughly, I don't know, 2014. It's been a while now. One of the. One of the Chinese sites where you can buy Stuff really cheap, had some on there. I think at the time they might have been 2012 even. But anyway, I think they were 128 gig little flash drives and they were cheap. So I bought six of them and I put them on ebay with a pretty decent markup.

Rob Campbell [01:26:41]:
I just tried to beat whatever was on the market at the time and they sold out within 30, 45 minutes. And I am like, oh my, I am gonna be rich. So I went and bought 30 more. 60 more. 30 or 60 more. I bought a whole bunch more before I even got that next batch. I started getting reports, I saved one for myself, but I started getting reports about problems, things not working here and there. So then I looked into it, did some tests, found a thing that test and, and it showed that these 128 gig flash drives were only 2 gig.

Rob Campbell [01:27:20]:
So they were flashed. So you could, you could, it would let you put 128 gigs worth of stuff on there, but you cannot get it back off. And so to, can you continue that funny story. When I got them I, I went and told him I, I went back on the same okay, these are all scams. I want my money back. He's like, like I don't know. He said no, I'll give you half your money back. I'm like no, these are fake, I want my money back.

Rob Campbell [01:27:50]:
And he's like, and, and he's like okay, you know, I pulled them in and, and you have to, you had to print an actual shipping address. So I, I got his address. I'm like, you sure this is right? This seemed weird. I don't know what Chinese addresses look like, but it seemed more like directions like six blocks down from the waterfall on the left that roughly seemed like that it was weird. So I sent it, sent it back, got my money back and about three or four months later they came back on my doorstep undeliverable as addressed. I don't know what happened to them all. I did not sell them, but I thought, I, I, for years I thought I'd try to fix them and never could figure out how to get them reflashed to work right. But this,

Jonathan Bennett [01:28:34]:
it would at least try to do it. Yeah.

Jeff Massie [01:28:36]:
Yeah.

Ken McDonald [01:28:37]:
So they'd was setting up Ventory to make a new with the newest version of Ventory for one. Is that about four of them? And when I started loading I'd set up a partition aside when I was setting up the Ventoy that I could use as another additional partition on it in addition to the two that Ventor Creates for its boot up and for storing the ISOs that you want to boot from.

Rob Campbell [01:29:16]:
Yeah, I'll have to see if I can find anything those, I mean, I think I maybe gave a few away like here, see if you can do something with this. I, but there's no way I, I,

Jonathan Bennett [01:29:25]:
I, you didn't give away 30 of

Rob Campbell [01:29:27]:
them, that many of them. So I got to do that and try this tool maybe. And I don't know, I mean one stat I read back then after this started happening is apparently a very high percentage on like ebay and, and stuff, they're all fake. So if you buy it from ebay, be very careful.

Jonathan Bennett [01:29:45]:
Yeah, Ken, that will, that drive you've got there, is it a fake as well?

Ken McDonald [01:29:49]:
No, actually it came. Yeah it is, yeah.

Jonathan Bennett [01:29:53]:
If it's a real sand disk then of course it's going to be for real.

Rob Campbell [01:29:56]:
After that experience, I only sold stuff on ebay that couldn't not be fake. Basically non electronics, I mean like, like things like that. I thought I'd be rich for a while, make a whole bunch of money reselling. But when you're selling, you know, really cheap things, it's hard to get rich. And I got sick, I got tired of.

Ken McDonald [01:30:13]:
People don't pay double what it's worth.

Rob Campbell [01:30:16]:
Oh, they will pay double what it's worth, but when double what it's worth is like $2, that's a lot that you have to send out before you make a living.

Jonathan Bennett [01:30:25]:
You gotta set up, you know, your postman real well.

Jeff Massie [01:30:28]:
And those drives, basically all you could do with them is just flash them as a two gig drive. Yeah, and the way, the way that works for people that don't know there's a little memory controller in front of your actual storage NAND chips and you have to have the right firmware to say, okay, here's what I actually have versus it either. You know, sometimes it keeps the first two gigs and it just dumps the rest. Sometimes it does a circular write. It's kind of unknown how it's going to handle it, but that's what's going

Jonathan Bennett [01:31:06]:
on because physically you've got address lines that are just floating. They're not connected to anything because the memory doesn't, the memory is not addressable there. So you've got bits of your address line that just don't connect to anything. So it doesn't matter if you set them to high or low, it's still going to go to the same memory.

Ken McDonald [01:31:23]:
And my recommendation is before you stick it in, use the LS block or block ID either one to read what devices you system recognizes. Then stick it in and read so you can identify it before you start trying to set it up.

Jeff Massie [01:31:44]:
Jonathan got a lot of punchlines going through his head right now, but we're not that type of show.

Jonathan Bennett [01:31:51]:
Oh my. All right, Jeff, take it away, save us from this. Let's talk about egit.

Jeff Massie [01:31:57]:
EGIT is a little tool to get pre built binaries for your favorite tools, the little apps or like what Ken just talked about. So you can just get it easily. It downloads and extracts pre built binaries from the Releases section on GitHub. So to use it, provide a repository and EGIT will search the assets from the latest release in an attempt to find a suitable pre built binary for your system. If one it is found, the asset will be downloaded and EGIT will extract the binary to the current directory. Now EGIT should only be used for installing simple static pre built binaries where the extracted binary is or where the simple static pre built binaries with extracted binary is all that's needed for installation. Now you'll still have to move the binary yourself to somewhere in your path, but it just simplifies getting it. Now you can use it for more complex installations, but you'd use the download only option and then you just perform the installation or the extraction manually.

Jeff Massie [01:33:06]:
So if it comes in the release as a.deb package or something, that's where you would go and you would say download only and then you'd go ahead and install it that way. Now if you look at the article linked in the show notes, it goes through and install methods if you don't have it in your repositories already because there's many different ways you can install it. And then it gives some examples how to use it. Now they also talk about switches and they give examples of that too. You know, like being able to check if there's an upgraded version and if there's an upgrade it'll download it. So it's smart enough to say, oh, there's not an upgrade, I'm not doing this. Or there is, we gotta get it. Or you can also pick a specific version of a binary to grab, or you can even grab a pre pre release if that's the version you want.

Jeff Massie [01:33:58]:
You know, it's kind of a handy little tool. It's, you know, not gonna save the world or anything but you know, it's for people that don't like trudging through GitHub and going to releases and figuring all that stuff out. This kind of automates that. And you know, as always, install with care. But, you know, have fun and I hope this simplifies things a little.

Jonathan Bennett [01:34:25]:
Yeah, very cool. Looks like a great thing, a great way to go out and get software in a hurry. All right, I've got a tip that I've been playing with more last week than this week, but we'll definitely be doing more with it. And that is Sdra angel, or as one of my meshtastic co conspirators has cursed me with every time. Now, strangle. I believe sdrangel is the preferred pronunciation, but it is. Here we go. I'll show it to you.

Jonathan Bennett [01:34:56]:
I've got an RTL SDR sitting on my desk and this is doing a live capture of the spectrum. And so this is what's going on in the radio spectrum. This is a. I think it must have been written by hams because it's kind of not the easiest program to work with. Ham radio operators are sort of known for that. No shade guys, but it's true. So you first set it up with. You configure the device you want to use.

Jonathan Bennett [01:35:28]:
That's the little arrows back and forth here and it'll give you a list. I've already got mine set up with my sdr. Then this is also not easy to find. It took me a while to figure this one out. Right here you've got an option to add channels inside of here. That is where you've got all of the different data. Well, it uses the term demodulator. What it's talking about here is this is pulling data off the airwaves and recombining it into something that actually works, that actually does something.

Jonathan Bennett [01:36:02]:
And one of the ones that I've been using this with, and this is the latest version has this, the meshtastic demodulator. And I don't know if I'll be able to get this. Probably won't be able to get this working here live. Yep, there we go. I crashed. May have some bugs still, but I have had that working where you can actually go in and you give it your password and you can demodulate and see raw meshtastic traffic. Which is pretty cool. Yeah, SDR angel and I was running, I hate to admit it, the snap version of it there on Fedora.

Jonathan Bennett [01:36:38]:
Because the Fedora version. Well, no, the Fedora version was a couple of. Was a release behind it. Didn't have the features in it that I wanted. So I spent way too long fiddling with the Fedora Version trying to make it work, and then finally just went and grabbed the snap and worked right away.

Jeff Massie [01:36:53]:
So, you know, snap.

Rob Campbell [01:36:58]:
I mean, go snap.

Jonathan Bennett [01:37:00]:
I'm sure the snap part of it was why it was broken and not working, right, I'm sure. Absolutely. That's what it was. Anyway. All right, it's been a lot of fun, guys. I will give each of these yahoos the last word if they want to. Rob's going to plug his socials. Jeff is probably going to give us some poetry, and then Ken has a article that didn't make the cut.

Jonathan Bennett [01:37:24]:
We'll do the three in that order. Rob, what you got?

Rob Campbell [01:37:29]:
Yeah, so as you hinted, I have my socials. So if you want to connect with me and give me some shade, tell me I'm wrong. Tell me you love Mint and I'm bad for not liking it. Or as, as Jeff will tell you, connect to me. I'm a filter for him to connect to him. And then you can give him shade about being wrong about the Brave browser. The way you can do that is go to Robert P. Campbell dot com.

Rob Campbell [01:38:00]:
That is my website. There's information there for me. There's also links near the top with my socials to LinkedIn, Twitter, Blue Sky, Mastodon, and a spot to donate coffee. So if you really have something serious to say to me or these other guys and you really want our attention, go to that coffee link and donate and put your money where your mouth is and. And tell us, nah, mint is the best. And here's my $5 that. That that says it is. Or, Jeff, you should know better that Brave isn't based on Firefox.

Rob Campbell [01:38:35]:
Here's the $5 to say that you should know better.

Jonathan Bennett [01:38:41]:
You should know better. Absolutely.

Jeff Massie [01:38:45]:
All right, Jeff, there's a coffee pun in there somewhere. Like, you really would be roasting me, you know? And yet LinkedIn is where you connect with Rob, and then if I see you're connected to Rob, then I get way too much spam on LinkedIn, fake accounts, whatnot. But as Jonathan said this week, I have a little poetry, or I guess haiku, technically aborted effort close all that you have. You ask way too much. Have a great week, everybody.

Jonathan Bennett [01:39:24]:
All right.

Ken McDonald [01:39:25]:
And Ken, I just wanted to share a link with you to Bobby Borisov's article about Ventory updating to version 1.1.12. Just couldn't seem to make it longer than a minute to talk about.

Jonathan Bennett [01:39:42]:
Yep, understood. All right, I'm sure. And take. Check that out. Thank you guys for being here. Appreciate each of you made it a fun show. And yeah, I will plug really quickly. Of course you can find my stuff at Hackaday, which these days is Floss Weekly.

Jonathan Bennett [01:39:59]:
We did have an episode this past week and I am planning on an in person interview this week. Hopefully we make that work with all of the technology, it'll all cooperate. That should be a lot of fun. And then I've got a stack of business cards here from people I need to start contacting. So Floss Weekly, you can check that out. And then of course there's also the meshtastic stuff. Hopefully next week I will have a link for you guys to catch my talk at the Ubuntu conference in a month. That is coming quickly and I believe they are about to start publicizing that so that should be fun as well.

Jonathan Bennett [01:40:33]:
Looking very much looking forward to that. But other than those two, those few things. Just want to say thank you. Thank you to everybody that's here. Whether you watch or listen. Get us live or on the download. We are glad you are here and we will be back next week on the Untitled Linux Show.