Before we get started today, I have like a little announcement, but I don't want to tell everybody. I just want to tell like you guys and like the really long time listeners. Wednesday morning over at jupiterbroadcasting.com, we're launching something special for the long time community. So go grab yourself the all show feed, maybe check out Jupiter Broadcasting during like, you know, your Wednesday moment of downtime, because we'll have something special for you.
Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris.
And my name is Brent.
Well, hello, gentlemen. It is great to be with you. Today, we're going to update everyone on how the FreeBSD Challenge is progressing and which one of us might be awfully close to installing Windows. Plus, a special guest will join us later in the show to talk a bit about Planet Nix and what's going on over there. And then we'll round out the show with some great booths, some picks, and much more. So before we go any further, let's say time-appropriate greetings to that virtual
lug. Hello, Mumble Room. Hello. Hello.
Always great.
It's nice to have everybody in there. Thank you for being here. And a big good morning to our friends at Tailscale. You've got to go to Tailscale.com slash unplugged. Support the show and get yourself Tailscale on 100 devices and three accounts. for free. Tailscale is the easiest way to connect your devices and services to each other, wherever they are. It is modern networking.
I think we're outnumbered today, boys.
And it connects all your devices and your applications directly to each other. I have it on my NAS. I have it on my mobile devices. I have it on my home assistant system. I have it on the Apple TV. I have it on the Android TV. I have it everywhere. And all of it on a flat mesh network that is protected by... That's right. What else could you ask for? And it's fast, really, really fast. Privacy for every individual and every organization.
I started using it with the free plan. In fact, my personal account, I'm still using the 100 free plan. No credit card required. But then after using it for more than a couple of years, I realized, well, we could actually fundamentally improve the way we do some of the network for JB. And so now we use it as a business, too. And so do thousands of other companies. There's lots of ways to just plug it in with your existing infrastructure,
too, and it's programmable. So you can manage it like a private network the way you would expect. It's really very powerful. Try it out for yourself. Go get a free plan, 100 devices, 3 users, and support the show. Head on over to tailscale.com slash unplug. The easiest way to connect your devices and services wherever they are, tailscale.com slash unplug. Now, gentlemen, it is time for us to update everyone on how the BSD challenge is going.
And should we start with a reminder of the rules, Brent?
I think that's a good place to start. So if you'd like to join us in the free BSD challenge, I'm not sure why we have subjected ourselves to this, but it lasts two weeks. So we're just coming up on week one anniversary. And so you have one week left to join us in this challenge. I think you can get it all done in one week.
Yeah.
So just a reminder of the free BSD challenge rules here. So, number one, you can use hardware or a VM if you can manage to get that working. All good there. So do what pleases you. Also, you have about a week left to join us. And I think you could fit all of these challenges into a week.
Yeah, I think a week. You've still got time to join us.
So please join us. And importantly, we want to know how it went. So there are a few points here. You can self-score yourself or just tell us and we can just give you better points.
And we'll have this linked in the show notes. It's up on our GitHub.
Now, if you install BSD and get it online, you get two points. For another two points, you can record audio of yourself and send it into the show from a working desktop. Of course, a desktop of your choice. Again, for two points, you can get a server or service running that's accessible via the LAN.
Wow.
But you can also petition for some extra credits, five points each, if you want to go this far. So some possible options are getting an app running inside Podman or jails, installing, configuring a firewall, get Tailscale running on a BSD system. You can also try out two BSDs, maybe like a net BSD or ghost BSD and free BSD.
Yeah, that was still really early.
There's also this project, Nick's BSD, which if you're feeling extra adventurous, you can dive into that or get a non-BSD native video game running.
There is one thing that everyone needs to be aware of if they decide to participate in the challenge, Brantley.
There is a caveat. If you so choose to join us in the challenge and you do not get this working, there are some consequences. So if you bail from the challenge, you must, and I think Chris is on this route, you must install and run Windows 11 for a week following the challenge. And your font system-wide must be Comic Sans.
Podcast classic.
So not only Windows, but Windows with Comic Sans.
It's the double punishment.
Wow. Well, you know, I was a little concerned this might be me. I'll be honest with you, because I was surprised at how little it was like riding a bike. Just getting started.
Wait, you've BSD'd before, right?
I have. And I was trying to remember when. no yeah it was before a lot.
Of podcasts were on youtube but it was sort of like a well people are on here you know this gets me a couple thousand extra views for folks that like don't listen to podcasts otherwise.
I was digging through my kind of like notes from when i was doing some it contracting oh and i want to say just based on the timeline that i was looking at I was probably experimenting with FreeBSD between FreeBSD 7 and FreeBSD 9. So kind of that era of FreeBSD. So FreeBSD 7, if my research is right, came out in February of 2008.
Okay.
Yeah. And FreeBSD 8 came out in 2009 and FreeBSD 9 came out in 2012. Okay. And I do recall ZFS kind of coming along right as I was kind of leaving and just going full-time Linux. And I initially had a problem to solve in that I was having real performance issues with a NAS. And it was over Samba, and the users would connect to it, and the throughput was just abysmal. And it would cause login delays and all these kinds of problems.
And it was kind of a stressful situation because I had convinced upper management to bail on Windows NT because it was having a similar problem. It was hitting the wall much earlier. But then it turned out the Linux server, while it could go further, this was a SLS, SUSE Linux Enterprise server, while it could go further and handle more connections, it was also hitting the wall. And I went through everything trying to figure out what is this, what's causing this.
And one late night working you know bringing in the overtime i decided screw it i'm gonna set up a free bsd server i'm not gonna even tell anybody because i have to get permission for all this stuff and go through a change control committee and all that it's also i don't have time for that i need this fixed tomorrow morning if you so i set up free bsd and i also had to have what is the model for that and then i wrote a bash script to like manage all of the
acls and permissions because things didn't directly map to like the same UIDs and whatnot. So like all of the company's user data and everything was under totally different UIDs and GIDs that all had to be swapped over. And I don't remember. I don't think there was a direct one-to-one to extended attributes either. It was tricky. And the next morning when the users logged in, it didn't hit a wall at all. There was never a limit.
The disk performance was exactly what I expected from the system and expect it for. And so I was like, okay, there's something here. Why is free BSD so much better? And I initially, for some stupid reason, expected it was something to do in the networking stack or something like that. So I started looking into the differences in the networking stack thinking maybe BSD has some sort of optimization here. And it's like a, it's a connection.
It's a TCP connection limit that I'm hitting on Linux. And BSD doesn't have that. And I dug into it, and it simply wasn't the case. And what I discovered after about two weeks of kind of coming back to the issue every couple of days, trying to figure it out and doing different testing, is that it was the Dell SCSI driver. And on Linux, there was just simply a bug. And on BSD, that version that they wrote for BSD didn't have the bug in the SCSI driver. And so it was affecting disk performance.
but during that time i had and then i had to go i had it and it was working so i kept it and i left i left it running i went through a couple different upgrade cycles so i got to manage a free bsd box in production doing some samba and nfs file sharing stuff nothing too serious but you know probably eight nine hundred users concurrent and uh it was interesting and it was a really really solid system and it turned out the reason why it was all fast and better
wasn't necessarily because of some crazy optimization they'd done, but just the differences in drivers. And inevitably, that problem was solved in a patch in Linux. And from that point forward, we just deployed Linux.
Given that positive experience, I'm curious why you didn't kind of go down the FreeBSD road a lot further.
You know, part of what we're going to get into today, I think, it affected me back then too, and it's still part of the issue. You know, time is precious. But let's get into that. So let's talk a little bit about the hardware you tried FreeBSD on so far and how it's going.
Yeah. In setting up our little BSD battle station here at the studio, Chris, you and I just found whatever hardware was around and figured, hey, that's going to be fun.
Let's try it. People go on podcasts and then people talk about it on social media.
This is the little keyboard integrated Pi. and number one, I had never used this thing so I was excited to use the hardware but also I thought, hey, this is going to be an interesting little challenge, and a challenge it was a challenge it certainly was You know, I realized...
How much we were starting at zero because i thought to myself i don't even know how you get, a free bsd image for raspberry pi is it an image file is it an iso like you can do with some linux distros you know like with susa and others or fedora it can just be like a standard linux install yeah which right Right. But then on top of that, like with Linux distributions, you just assume if it is an ISO with an installer, it's going to be a graphical installer.
But then I realized, well, that's not necessarily the case with FreeBSD at all. And so I said, wow, we're really starting at zero here. So what was the image route? Was it a pre-made image? Was it an ISO?
Well, they did have two options, actually. They had ARM ISOs that were more generic, but they did have Pi-specific images. And so I figured, well, I should probably go down that route. But I did try the ISOs first on a variety of different. We tried Ventoy. It didn't quite work for me.
Yeah, Ventoy gave us like a boot loop.
Oh, yeah. I mean, that's my personal experience with Ventoy every time I try it. But we're always trying weird things.
That is like a two or three release behind version of Ventoy, too.
Oh, well.
Maybe newer versions are better with FreeBSD.
Why does everybody always tell me that? And we get to start slacking off.
And he goes to work.
I'm trying Ventoy. Anyways, Ventoy has not worked great for me. although we hear in our community constantly that it's amazing.
So Brent hates Ventoy.
No, it's just the bug field, I think. I tried Ventoy with BDSDF. Brentoy. But that said, I tried a bunch of those routes and ended up trying the image, which also ended up locking up on boot for me. And I was surprised by that, because it specifically said on the image, raspberry pi 4 so i figured this would be pretty compatible so.
It wasn't a pi 400 image but you shouldn't need one it should if it's a pi 4 image it should work just fine on the 400.
Because i ran into this does depend on your particular client which was a little uh disappointing i ended up needing to figure out how to get this thing worked because i wasn't going to give up at that point i was like on step one of our challenge so with.
Freebsd where do you even begin to figure out did you go like re-release notes like what do you do.
Well i ended up reaching out to um perplexity to say hey i don't know what i'm doing clearly the confidence i came into this thing with is all vanished and i need some help and i did discover just just like a few reports that a newer bsd version wasn't working on the pi 4 like.
Just in like forms or whatnot you saw this.
Yeah, what I read was that FreeBSD14 wasn't working and FreeBSD13 would work. Oh. And so I thought, okay, well, I'll give that a shot.
So go back one release.
A whole release. And I gave that a shot. Sure enough, it booted. Okay. So I was making progress. That said, I was trying 14.2 and there was a 14.1. So then I re-imaged and tried 14.1 and that worked. So it seems like 14.2 for me on the Pi 400, just locked up. But 14.1, sure enough, went through and booted, and I was able to get that working just fine.
So at Boots, do things like graphics work and Ethernet and all of the standard stuff on the Pi? Did it all get detected and supported?
Mix bag.
Oh, really?
Let's say.
Okay.
So it seems like Ethernet worked out of the box. I did have to, you know, turn it on and configure it. But I think that's pretty standard for FreeBSD. So that was nice. After that, the graphics were certainly in a safe mode, like massive fonts.
Like 640 by 40 or 1024 by 768.
I could work with it, but I knew if I was going to try to run a desktop on this, which I was, that that would likely be an issue.
I bet you that must have been frame buffer mode. I think FreeBSD just uses frame buffer mode by default.
Okay.
Yeah.
Well anyways it got working and i was excited by this point because like i had spent an hour and a half just trying to get the thing to boot that said it you know i don't have to install because i'm running an image so i didn't have to go through that install method right yeah oh i'm i'm realizing now that one of the points specifically says install bsc so maybe i disqualify myself from that yeah there's a lot of.
Future room here yeah one of the things was I.
Feel like we're going to end up with a giant checklist of all the things we forgot to do and we're going to have to do this week.
I'm just going to do them all, so that's what I'm going to try to do. I don't want to run Windows really, really bad. I don't necessarily want to run FreeBSD either, but I don't want to run Windows even harder. I just, I feel like it haunts me, you know, in the distance I can hear, you know.
So sweet.
So you also, when you were experimenting with it, noticed performance was a little lackluster, right?
Well, I got some help because I needed it, it seemed, on how to run this on the Pi. And there were a few specifics that seemed to be defaulting, you know, similar to the video, just defaulting to bass. and get it running, but this is not optimal. And one of those things was the CPU itself. It was just constrained to 600 megahertz and would just sit in there. That's it. That's all you get.
So one of the configurations I had to make, which was fairly easy to do, but if you didn't know about this, then I think you'd feel really disappointed about the performance of your little Pi 400. So I was able to bump that up to like a reasonable CPU frequency, but it was just locked by default to 600. I'm not sure why.
That was just like add to your RC.conf?
Exactly, yeah. You can add a little, you know, you could just change your RC.conf and add, you know, pretty much triple the CPU frequencies in there.
One thing that you had a problem with that I have not had a problem with, but I think it's because you're on ARM, Firefox just does not work for you.
Well, it installs.
Yeah, and it gives you a warning about a bunch of stuff that doesn't work.
I got a massive list of off-by-default compatibility. So basically it said, well, if you're expecting Firefox to be like it is on Linux or Mac OS or Windows.
It doesn't support any DRM video, so there's no Netflix.
Yeah, you're actually not going to get a bunch of stuff.
Obviously, there's no Wayland support. There's a lot of things. Honestly, my comment when I saw the list was, oof, it really feels like the world is not building for FreeBSD at all.
Well, and to add insult to that, I could really only get it running for 10 seconds and then it would crash.
Now that I did not. See, at least for me, I could browse the web and whatnot.
I think it might be specific to the Pi itself.
Yeah, maybe the ARM build on FreeBSD just isn't that stable yet.
I do realize I'm pushing in a few different directions in this particular case. But no Firefox for me. I might try to solve that one just for fun, see what it is. But so far...
Yeah, I wonder if you could go to Firefox and get their extended release build for ARM if they have one that would be for FreeBSD and try running that and see if that would... It does seem like FreeBSD tends to kind of default to older package releases, maybe because these things tend to be better accounted for.
Yes, I would say my experience, at least up to this point, on the Pi 400 has been quite mixed. I'm learning some new things, and I'm also realizing a lot of stuff that I expect to just not even be an issue is turning out to be quite an issue, and I need to go solve those things. So, mixed. Very mixed for me.
So far.
Mm-hmm.
Maybe next week will be better.
I'm hoping.
You can try it on Intel hardware or AMD hardware next week?
Well, I figured it would probably be a good idea to try my framework, given they've been doing some work on modern laptops, trying to get that all running. So I thought maybe that would be a good place to go next week for me.
So I don't think any of us so far have tried FreeBSD with a multi-monter setup, have we? Have you, Brent?
No.
No, I haven't either. And I'm wondering, I'd like to know from the audience, It's boosting and tell us, are you using a multi-monitor setup or a single screen? Tell us a little bit about your setup because I kind of want to know what the audience's position on the monitor setup thing. And if this is something we should be testing or not, I mean, I'd like to know.
I remember in Linux, it was a little bit of a problem years ago and has become way better. I don't even think about it now.
I didn't even think about it until I was thinking, yeah, we're all trying these on single screens. But maybe that's what most of the audience would be running it on. So maybe that makes sense to test there.
But should they is the question.
Yeah. So you're... yeah that sounds perfect i wonder how our audience skews so boosting and tell us, so okay you're on a good path you're not totally secured yet from having to run windows especially if you have a bad time i don't know for extra fun you might try it on the Atari VCS.
You just want to see me suffer.
I do. Now, Wes, do I see a Windows desktop in your future? How is your BSD challenge going? I do. Very badly, actually.
No, I think...
Oh, yeah? What piqued your interest? Yeah. How it all works. I agree. I do agree. Yeah. Oh, that's where I thought you were going. I love it.
How did he sneak that in?
I knew it. I had a sense it was going to get worked in somewhere. I felt it coming.
Well, I was curious.
Right. I could imagine. That seems right up your alley. My my impression of the installer was it felt very utilitarian utilitarian what am i trying to say like utilitarian yes thank you like it felt like a professional tool like you know not really something that's even trying to aim at a brand new user, but a brand new user who's maybe following some documentation could definitely still work through it. But when I was using it, I was thinking I bet Wes likes this. Did you like it?
Yeah, I loved it, too. I thought, look at this. It's exposing some great options that are just common sense security precautions that you might want to set on a brand new system right there. And I think you probably also noticed ZFS is just front and center.
It only took me 500 episodes to convince you.
I like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I'll have a comment on that too, but before I get to my bit, I'm curious if either of you have tried ports yet and saw anything from the ports tree? Yeah, no, a Thomas knows, like, backy in or anything. Yeah, for sure. Right, right. Yeah, a core set of stuff is in the repo in the native package manager and then, you know, AUR equivalent with the ports. It's nice to have it just on the file system. You can just browse the file system and see your options.
I did run into issues that I want to mention for anyone trying this. I did try to just install some stuff and ran to some certificate errors, which ended up being just a time clock synchronization issue for me. It took me a really long time to figure out that was the deal. So I just enabled NTP and got my clock back up and running. Everything worked fine. But I wasted a ton of time on that. So that's your PSA in case you run into that. What? What? Did I take the hard method?
Yeah, because I did that. I turned that on.
Yeah, I did too. You guys didn't tell me anything about this.
I was like, sure, why wouldn't I? Why wouldn't I want? I expected my path to be easy mode. I thought I was taking the easy hack because I took an old B-Link and it's all Intel. It's like, you know, a laptop from years ago. And I thought, this is going to be a slam dunk. Intel CPU, old Intel video, Intel Nick. This thing's going to boot right up. Everything's going to work out of the box. I'm going to start checking off and earning points right away.
He gave me the pie for him.
So I sat down at the BSD bench with Brent, where he and I have everything set up there, and Brent's nicely... Have we talked about that? Yeah. You like the bench?
There is very much of a BSD bench. It's our battle station.
Guys. The BSD battle station bench with Brent is what it is. Yeah. And it's great because we have like Ethernet ready there with a switch and power so we can hook up different stuff and HDMI and the monitors. Just plug a machine and try it. And so the first thing I went to was easy mode B-Link. It was a long week. And I thought, okay, I just, I want to win. I want to win. And it did boot. It didn't really do much else than that out of the box. I was surprised really how much there was to do.
But, you know, so I bailed on the live environment pretty quickly. And I just went over to the installer image that boots, and I chose the installer option. And I really, like you, Wes, I really do like the installer. It's really just a nice utility to get the job done. And the options around ZFS integration were really slick. And the options around, like, do you want to start these particular things or secure these types of things? I just, I like that since it's coming in,
you know, I'm coming in fresh. It also felt. It felt classical while also still feeling like it's a maintained piece of software. Yeah. And, you know, I love a good in-curses interface, even if it's not technically in-curses.
I feel like you had some muscle memory on this one. I was over your shoulder watching you go through this install process, and you were zooming through it in a way that I...
It is very reminiscent to the installer back in the FreeBSD 789 era. I mean, it just does more stuff, and yeah. It was very much like, oh, yeah, I've seen this before. Let me send them a bunch of new infrastructure so I can spend the money. I like that aspect of it. So I was able to get FreeBSD 14.2 booting because I was going the Intel route.
So I didn't have any issues there. I think 600,000, but then maybe some of these extra boosts kind of tallied up.
After it was done installing, I kind of immediately was like, well, what do I do now? What is the first thing you do with a blank BSD system?
When you go to FreeBSD route, you just get a terminal. You get a TTY. There's nothing else going on. But we had another issue with missing metadata.
Well, let's go install Plasma.
So we're going to investigate that.
See if it might be an upstream LSP issue. If you want to jump through a split.
Just not the message.
Plasma 5 is still where we're at. It's still on X1.
So we got 327,170 sats.
But it doesn't include things like, you know, SDDM and other things like that that you kind of actually need to go into a full graphics.
Now, that was going to be a more reasonable 65K. So thankfully, pretty easy to look that stuff up.
So I do the old package install and install all that stuff.
Not sure if it's working means...
And like a total Linux user, I reboot the system, and I just expect it's going to boot into X. Right? Because if I've implicitly installed the meta package and SDDM or whatever, like, probably want that to the start.
Probably.
And a Linux package manager, you know, in the BSD parlance, you go from init 3 and you install your graphical desktop, and now you're on init run level 5, right? Like, and it just, that's what I expected BSD to do. It does not. It just boots right back to the TTY. Because then you still have to do quite a bit of manual configuration in, you know, a couple of places like rc.conf to actually start everything, like all the D bus stuff you need around there.
And there's quite a few manual commands I had to run to get all that stuff talking and get those services started. So you very quickly get familiar with the FreeBSD services command and how to start and stop and how to add things using the sysrc command or whatever it is to add things to rc.conf. And so you go through and you just kind of trial by error, figure out the bits that are missing. And this is where I noticed a trend around the LLMs that I wanted to follow up with you, Wes, is...
For getting things going, like a graphical desktop environment or jails, an LLM sucks. Because in the Linux world, you can just, you know, install this command. And when you install that command, there's a package script or whatever it is, and it invokes the service, and all those things are done for you.
And the LLM doesn't need to also tell you, by the way, you're going to need to install dbus, you're going to have to run these three dbus commands, you're going to have to add this dbus service to rc.com, then you're going to have to set that thing to start. And then, oh, by the way, you're probably going to want to start it right away. The LLM doesn't tell you any of that stuff. Where guides that are written by human beings do. But what the LLM is really good at is specific commands. Like,
I want to do XYZ. What's the command on FreeBSD for that? Like, getting real narrow specific stuff, having something like perplexity makes transitioning to FreeBSD so much easier than it would have been a couple of years ago. It's bonkers. It's just so much better. but it absolutely misses the context around like dependencies and all that stuff where how to guide still really nice.
I agree with that completely in my experience. How was your experience with troubleshooting using LLMs?
Pretty decent. You know, I mean, honestly pretty decent. I think it might be an easier target for LLMs because BSD just doesn't change at the rate Linux does. And so, you know, when these things got locked in a couple of years ago with their base knowledge, that it's essentially the same stuff. So it's still valid. Where with Linux, sometimes I'm getting stuff for Nix that isn't valid anymore.
Yeah, at least one of us should. I think that's a good idea. I think that's another system.
How do I integrate this into the rest of the game? Yeah, perhaps. Maybe I'll talk about this next week, but it was particularly glaringly obvious in trying to get Podman working. It was really where it became like, oh, this is only giving me a small slice of the picture. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, definitely. So the other thing I was kind of surprised about is, you know, after you go through the process of installing sound, again, you can have the sound devices show up, but you can't play sound.
I didn't expect this. I didn't expect to be able to see the volume levels, see all the sound devices, but I actually had to go into rc.conf and actually say play sound before sound would actually work on those devices. I was kind of surprised by that. I am really glad, though, that I took the FreeBSD route first so I could get the idea of what it's like to build up a modern Plasma desktop and get to a functional Plasma desktop.
Tomato comes in with 22,000.
I think next week one of the things I want to do is I want to try what that path is like now.
I'm excited for you lads to do a FreeBSD challenge.
But as a server.
FreeBSD assumes less is more. I run NetBSD on some of my servers, but I haven't given free a try at all.
Yeah, it makes sense.
I was also glad to hear Chris made the connection with Nix OS. I mean, as someone who's been using Linux and BSD since the 90s, the central point of configuration was a nice familiar feature of Nix. I wish I could have organized a local meetup for 600, but everything's coming first.
Yeah, like some distributions, most of them go way too far in that direction. OnePassword.com slash unplugged. That's all lowercase. It's the number one password.com slash unplugged. Okay, I have a question for you. Do your end users always, and I mean always without exception, work on company-owned devices and IT-approved apps?
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And it's also bundling 1Password. You know 1Password. We've all had those situations where we've seen the passwords under the keyboard. We're stuck to the monitor, or somebody uses the same password everywhere. You think, God, if they just had a great password manager that would solve all of this. Well, 1Password's award-winning password manager is trusted by millions of users, 150,000-plus businesses from IBM to Slack, and now they're doing more than just securing passwords.
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Well, given we're all in the studio together this last week, we have some excitement. We're quite excited about Planet Nix and do have some things in the works in the background.
Yeah, I've been cooking and I've been talking to the good folks over at Phlox to see if they can make it possible for us to get down to cover Planet Nix and things are lining up. And so I think we're going to be able to take our coverage up to a whole other level this year. And it's really because of Phlox. So I'm going to tell you more about that as we get closer, but we wanted to just get this event in front of you so you know what's going on. So we wanted to bring Zach on the show.
well zach mitchell is joining us on the show for the third time he's in a rare guest club really and zach is a software engineer who's building reproducible software at flox and he's here to talk about planet nix like we've mentioned kicks off march 6th through the 7th in pasadena california, Zach, welcome back.
Thank you for having me. I feel honored to be in such a prestigious club of return guests.
The third guest tier. Yeah, that's pretty great. And the reason why we like having you on is because we're always very excited about big Nix events. And we kind of have a fresh start with Planet Nix. Give me the layout. What's happening?
Yeah. So this is a Nix conference.
Hey, guys. Thanks for discussing my posts. Nix, death by a thousand cuts.
This is laid out for our spread out over two days.
Coming up more these days and we're going to have two tracks going. Including from multiple C-suite folks.
Both days, you're going to have a mix of talks and workshops.
Clearly, y'all have drank the Nix cool.
At the end of the first day.
We have lightning talks. This is why I use Nix everywhere.
But this article was very focused on desktops.
Nix is great on the server, but are you guys using Nix all day.
Every day on the desktop?
For my work, I regularly get pulled and compile open source projects from many languages. I think the story for server production I just kind of put up a whiteboard and I should highlight that fact. I get the sense that maybe Wes uses it daily and perhaps is your local flake guru who likes to dig deep on solutions.
And then we have kind of a voting process to see like what groups we break out into.
This is really better as a conversation and I'm working on a follow-up blog post.
So I won't rebut each point here.
But I will agree with you that comparing Nix to traditional Nix is really comparing happens to approaches. They are different beats and really provide different features.
You get a bunch of nerds you want to talk about one very specific thing.
See you in March. You can kind of congregate and have dedicated time to go talk about that. We'll have some tables set up.
How this is exactly going to work is still kind of being figured out. Like the details are still being finalized. But we'll have some space for kind of community projects to set up a table, talk to people who want to either get involved or learn about it, stuff like that. So we'll have a lot of space for the community to kind of self-organize or talk about whatever they want to talk about. in addition to all the talks and workshops and stuff that we have set up.
But yeah, so I'm really excited about that.
As a Nix user, I have the strong sense that there's a need for a community event like this. I feel like there's a lot of people excited about this idea. And being right alongside scale really worked well last year. And tell me a little bit about like there's like a combo there that you can do, right? Where you could be like a planet Nixer and go to scale combo pack.
Yeah i i believe if you buy a scale pass that gets you into planet nix automatically there's also i think an expo pass but i think that's a separate thing so i'd have to get back to you about specifically whether that's correct if.
Somebody's just doing planet nix do they need to get a independent planet nix pass.
I think that's actually just part of the scale pass scale so So you just get scale. Okay.
All right.
Yeah. And I'll follow up if that's not correct.
Okay. Well, we'll put links in the show notes if it's, if it's, if it's otherwise. I'm, I don't know. I'm, I'm not really even sure exactly what I'm looking forward to. I think it's like meeting people, you know, getting to know people that are doing things and changing things in the Knicks community. And I looked at some of the presentations, obviously attending some of those is going to be a big part, but will you have a sense of what you're looking forward to Wes?
Always should have been.
Yeah yeah yeah yes that was awesome, definitely definitely i feel like too we're going in knowing we have a little bit different sense of what to expect, I think, because last year was totally a whole new concept to us.
So we're going to come in with a bit of an idea of how to get going to compile up and trust projects.
Zach, I imagine that's just kind of true for Planet Nix in general. There must be some lessons learned that are getting applied to Planet Nix.
I think as a DevOps.
Sysadmin, developer desktop, that might be one area where it's kind of the hardest if you're not also like a Nix developer to meet the expectations that you have from a different she was sending signs from scale on the scale side. And so we didn't quite have signs set up. And so people didn't quite know where to check in. And there's also a little bit of a shortage of volunteers at the very beginning. So we were just kind of grabbing people and saying, okay, you're helping people check in now.
And I think one attendee brought their girlfriend with them. And I don't think she quite knew what this all was, but she ended up being one of the people setting up or like checking people in at the tables. Oh, that's great.
And without some of the- While awesome.
I would prefer if we have things a little bit more nailed down. That's one of the things that we've figured out this year. Yeah, the submission process for the program and stuff like that was basically the same. Then I think went pretty smoothly. We doubled the amount of talk and workshop slots. We're doing two tracks over two days this time.
Wow.
Whenever you make that commitment to have twice the...
It's a lot of organizing.
Yeah. So you commit to having twice as many slots to fill. And you kind of wonder like, okay, is there going to be enough interest to fill all these slots? And the answer was unequivocally yes. Good. So like that all, yeah, that all went very smoothly. I was really happy with that. I'm really happy with our talk lineup. We have a lot of talks and workshops. I'm really excited to see personally some of these talks.
And so as one of the organizers, I will like have to force myself to pass the baton to somebody so I can go watch talks and stuff like that. Otherwise, I'll just be in organizer mode the whole time.
Yeah, yeah.
I tend to oversubscribe myself, but it's always like kind of for something fun. So like, yeah, last time I was kind of running around like mad because like I said, the ground game was not quite as figured out as it will be this year.
There's always something. It does get better every year.
Yeah. I was hearing about this setup. And yeah, it seems like it's working.
And you're always trying something new too.
It's a nice setup.
Every time we do this, there's a chance to kind of do it better.
Well i think the only question i have is we were doing can i count on you to uh you know give us the hookup on the great after parties and places to go after that you know each day that's can i can i count on you for that zach you.
Can absolutely which works.
Especially well if you know you want a full yeah last year.
We had some disc requirements kind of like an off-site karaoke thing neat.
Oh my goodness really yeah.
That was that was.
Pretty fun if you have any ice spring skating with 5 000 I'm in.
I'm definitely in.
Congrats on success.
So speaking of ice sports and things that are popular in Canada.
I recently picked up Curling.
So I've been curling for the last year.
Uh-oh.
I hate throwing out stuff that works.
Well, we can be friends then.
My laptop is 10 years old and my mom is still happily using the one that I had before that.
All right, Zach, well, we'll let you go and see if you enjoy the rest of your Sunday, but thanks for coming on and giving us the updates. Good to chat with you again.
Yeah, I'm really excited to see you all out there.
I'll see you all of these days. If I could do all my sensitive stuff like banking on my computer, I wouldn't really have to worry so much if I just stuck with the bits of class.
You know, we are going to bring you the best Planet Nix coverage possible. Thank you again to Zach for joining us. Also, keep it on your radar. If you can't make it to Planet Nix, maybe you can make it to LinuxFest Northwest, April 25th through the 27th in the beautiful Bellingham, Washington. Once again, at the Bellingham Technical College, 25 years of LinuxFest Northwest. You know, your boys are going to be there. Whoop!
Heck yeah.
So we'd love to see you there. And you can get information at linuxfestnorthwest.org. Oh, and look at you, Wes Payne, on the website. Wes Payne on the website.
Really? What's your talk about?
If you want to just come say hi, come check it out. You know what? We always have something going on, and we'll have more plans coming up soon. But right now, we're going to get laser-focused on Planet Nix.
Well, we did receive some amazing boosts last week. Thank you to everyone who boosted episode 600. And we certainly are starting with a baller.
That's right. Our baller booster this week is a mania. Well, I'll send it to Brent here. I've got my initial Matt.
I gave you a slack.
Coming in with 600 thousand sats Oh my god, Yes Yes he wanted to send 600 for episode 600 thanks for all the shows and he says see you at Linux Fest Northwest amazing yes beers on us, beers on us thank you for the boost appreciate that Dev and really looking forward to seeing you at Linux Fest Northwest, and thank you for the 600 acknowledgement too does feel like a big milestone we're on the other side of it now and feeling good feeling really good appreciate that, It is a daily day.
In a similar vein, John Spriggs in our Matrix chat suggested grease pencils on ceramic walls.
There you go. Okay.
Right. neural p comes in with 6 000 sats happy 600 here's to more.
Thank you for the great boost aaron that's very reasonable that's true thank you we do i always love knowing what's going on in the home lab too it doesn't have to be nicks well.
40 000 shotoshis came in from rotted mood.
You're not going to make show Toshies a thing over there.
I'll just slip it in and see if it catches on.
All right.
Some thoughts on the Tuxies. Please keep them. I think they're great, and I look forward to them at the end of every single year. I think getting the community more involved to take some of the work off y'all's hands is a good idea, and I'm happy to help in any way I can.
Well, thank you, Rodman.
So we are still in discussion. I think it's going to be back in some form, although we don't have firm commitments on that, but we have everybody who's kind of interested.
Congrats on 600. Thanks for putting in all the seen and unseen effort to make this show every week.
Oh, you're right.
I've listened to at least 500 of these episodes.
Each week it feels like hanging out with the kids.
Be proud of what you've accomplished.
That's on 600 episodes and follows that up.
I feel the Broadcom acquisition of VMware has had a similar size change in many aspects of IT. One difference is that the change is economic conversations regarding.
Why do I love that so much?
Are they in the plane?
I wonder, right? Flyover Friend comes in with 22,222 sats. That's an Aflac. Congratulations on 600. Here's to 600 more. Concerning the book conversation in the pre-show, I'll add a big upvote for the Expeditionary Force series. And the reader for the audiobooks is top-notch. He's good. I'm having a little hard time falling asleep to him sometimes.
Oh, it's too exciting, isn't it?
And he's got a lot of, you know, he gives a presentation, as I like to say. He gives a presentation.
Can you mimic his presentation?
He's just got a range.
You know? There's a lot of energy.
Oh, you wait.
Yeah, okay.
Happy 600 from the Atlanta meetup.
Yeah, where you can just sort of tune out. Yeah. I guess so. Oh, hey, how about that? What do you suppose a 20,000 sat is?
Hello, Oakland!
We got anything for that? You want something? How about... Ah, yes.
Gretton comes in with 5,000 sats. Cheers from ATL BitLab.
Okay. Something goes wrong.
Yep.
Thank you, PJ. Oh, super happy to brief. Including Drew. Oh, heck yeah.
It's true. It's good.
I love this.
That's good. Thank you, Derivation. You know, Brent and I were doing an oil change, and I just bought a kit. Because I've always just bought this kit. But this time, I got fancier oil. So it was a different kit. And they didn't include all the oil. And so we're done. We're wrapping up, and we're like, we're still short, like at least two liters or something of oil. It was bad. We're like, well, now we have a non-functional car, and we don't have the oil.
And, of course, it's fancy boy oil, so I can't just, like, go to O'Reilly's. linux thankfully we had another car but you know it's like in a way I should just have a very prescribed process that I follow I shouldn't rely on these pre-made kits and I should order the pieces myself and yeah it the analogy works I tell you what, thanks derivation appreciate that.
Well the dude is abiding with 20,000 sets I was re-listening to yesterday's live feed and I don't believe anyone mentioned It really should be 1.6.
Because that doesn't include the manual, Nick Lang, because I didn't get to that. Even better.
Oh, everything everywhere all at once. Right. We didn't mention it, but I think people kind of knew, right? It felt like it was a riff.
By the way, I also voted for this one since it was clever, despite the fact that the other title was the one I proposed. I know that you joke about the site speed of 1Password all the time in the live feed, but did you know it's built with Hugo?
Oh, I did not know that.
The support site is, but I think the rest of the site as well.
Oh.
No wonder it's so fast.
It does pop right up. OnePassword.com slash unplugged. Just pops right up. Thank you, the dude abides. I learned a little bit in that boost. Appreciate that. Ham is...
Hamish McLean.
Hamish McLean. Clean? Clean. Comes in with 6,666 sats. Devil's donation from the London gang with love. Oh, that's amazing.
Nice.
Thank you, London gang. thank you well uh well i think that's good right maybe i don't know thank you very much, Hey, thank you. No, never.
Shapira Me came in with 2,000 sats in total. Chris, you said that it's ironic that now podcasts that are really relevant are being kidnapped by YouTube. But on the other hand, it does make sense that as some media formats become more relevant, these big platforms want to try to dominate it.
Right?
I guess that those like you become highly specialized in this format, a niche, and somehow suffer the most because of it. I think moving to V for V was the right move.
Well, first of all, I really appreciate your insight and how you really do seem to get it. And that's, I think, a very valid point. As these things got more relevant, of course big money would get in. And in fact, to that point, it's a well-known fact that YouTube just wrote checks to some podcasters to move over to YouTube as their primary distribution platform. just like Spotify did several years ago. They just write checks.
Yeah, it's just how they do it. And I do, I still want to keep an open ear to the audience that wants to advocate for video. Like I don't want to shut it down entirely, but I like our focus on audio because it means we can do multi-track audio. We can try to clean it up. We can do things that we just can't really do with video on a budget that's sustainable. But yeah, he follows up there.
Yeah, Shapirami continues here on the topic of shower thoughts and our crazy wacky methods of trying to record them. I have a glass door on the shower that separates it from the rest of the bathroom, so I decided to try a pen that writes on glass. Thank you for the tip. What a great idea.
How many people are solving this out there? I love it. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like this is a show swag opportunity because if we could come up with a product, I would buy it. You guys would probably buy it. It sounds like people in the audience would buy it. This would be a great unplugged product is the shower thoughts accessory. Yeah. The unplugged shower thought saver. That's really funny. That's really funny.
Somebody write that down. Cause I won't remember, but I think that's, I would, I would own one. The immunologist is here with, thank you for the boost. The immunologist is here with 6,000, 10 sats. Happy 600. Stay decentralized. I wanted to try free BSD on my Raspberry Pi four, but I realized it needs a USB keyboard for that. And I use Bluetooth for everything, even my sound. So no BSD for me this time. Wow. A hard line on the blue teeth.
Interesting. Yeah. We went, we just went real simple wired just cause you know, even ethernet just wanted everything to just work as easily as possible.
I'm not sure why we instinctively started there, but it seemed to work out well for us.
Yeah. I think the, I think if we were going blue teeth, it'd be a challenge. Well, howdy.
Nice.
Wow. Well done.
On BSD, right?
Yeah. I kind of feel like that's what we've been doing with people boosting and telling us. I'm getting some signal on this. All right. Well, thank you for setting Balbi up. I know you had a split fail. Yeah, just so. Yeah, yeah. We won't get the sats, but you'll keep the sats. But the other, we have several nodes in the process, so we will generally, most of them get it. It's very rare, but things change from time to time, and we just have to stay on top of it. They are like a Tamagotchi pet.
Oh, that's nice of you.
A lot of packs sent in 10,000 shotoshis.
Yeah.
Happy 600. Been a huge fan since around episode 200.
Right on.
And we'll happily keep tuning in for that next 600 and beyond.
Well, thank you, Lod. Nice to hear from you. Thanks for boosting in. True Grits is here with 17.010 sats. Is that a start trick?
Sure.
Hello. Apologies for missing the past window to make it into 600.
Should there be a component? And we could discuss it on the show. Oh, that's great.
That's always nice. But I finally pulled the trigger on getting my sats off the exchange.
Can you argue for some points?
You can thank the Cash App not supporting Graphene OS for that.
I think it represents. That should be a two-pointer.
And also happy belated birthday to Chris. Cheers to 600. Thank you, True Grits. It's great to hear from you.
Yeah.
There he is.
Oh, there might be both versions, depending on how much you did.
Word word yeah.
I think like.
That drives me crazy especially when you've been listening to an audio podcast right like and then they go to a youtube live stream and they spend so much time like addressing the live chat or what they're leaking at or you set up zfs or you know whatever you were an audio podcast or you got like a desktop going that was yeah you could run stuff if you don't get at least one of those whisper seems like you didn't actually try it we're still working on the actual refining process.
We might just do a little bit on it.
You got to run Windows for a week?
Yeah, right now, yeah, we're manually running them.
That's why it's a punishment.
We plan to write processes and scripts around that. So it's nothing magical at the moment. It's just hard work. And I don't think we've gotten anybody, not a single person said anything about the transcripts. But with Gene? Well, Gene did. Gene. But I mean, outside. Oh, okay, good, good, good, good. I was like, oh, man, we worked hard on that and people said they wanted it. And then nobody said anything. Maybe. Just works, right? Just works.
Well, exception boosted in a row of ducks.
Hey, look at those ducks.
Happy 601. Why? Because it's a prime number.
Nice. Thank you.
But it's got to be like a system-wide thing.
Hey, Oppie1984 is checking in with 4,000 sats. Related happy 600 boosts. Also, just say no to video. Nice, Oppie. Thank you. vote registered. Ha ha ha ha. Oh, man. So, Sire, if you want to take another pass at it, FreeBSD is just going to use framebuffer by default unless you go into your rc.conf and tell it which video driver to load, and you've got to install those drivers. Like, even with my Intel system, I had to go in there and tell it to use the Intel, manually, and tell the Intel.
I had to install stuff, and then tell it to use the Intel driver and load that. Otherwise, it just won't try. There's a mod and all that, But you find out how to, you get that working, and then you'll be cooking, right? I'm sorry to hear about the trouble. I'd love to hear other people's success or trials with FreeBSD. Next week is the episode to really report in and let us know how it's going. Thank you, everybody, who boosts in and supports episode 601.
This here little crazy podcast is made possible by our community, our members, and the folks who submit value back to the show, either through time, talent, or treasure. And we had 37 of you just stream those sats as you listen to the podcast, and we stacked 54,723 sats through the streamers. Thank you very much, SatStreamers. When you combine that with the boosters, the show stacked a very reasonable 892,649 sats.
And we're going to want to see a screenshot of the Windows Comic Sans desktop.
Thank you, everybody. we are planning a long bright future and, Being able to directly support the show means that your value comes into the show. We can manage that in the future to give ourselves runway, perhaps leverage this to really be able to go on trips or have episodes that don't require sponsorship at all. It's a bright, bright future. And it's made possible by our audience that makes the content sustainable. Like, it's just a beautiful cycle of life there. And we really appreciate it.
If you'd like to boost in, you can probably do it the easiest way by getting the Strike app to grab those sats and then the Fountain app to send a boost. Or if you don't want to try out a different podcast app, you can do it with Breeze, B-R-E-E-Z. And there's a couple of ways to get the sats into that, including Strike. There's a lot of great podcasting 2.0 apps, and you get lots of features in there.
Like our live stream, when we're live right now, in the app, it would tell you right at this moment that we're live. Additionally, you get the full transcript support, and sometimes you get the full dieterized transcript version in the podcasting 2.0 apps. It has cloud chapters, which are an improved version of chapters. When the show is released, you get released announcements within 90 seconds. And then, of course, it also supports things like Boost.
And there's an entire category of things coming to podcasting to do apps like audiobooks and more. And all of this is an open source spec. It's just trying to make podcasting competitive with platforms like YouTube and Spotify. But doing it in a decentralized way where the RSS feed is always the source of truth.
Not a proprietary platform.
Not a script hosting provider. Your XML file is the source of truth.
It wasn't even in the document. And anyone can read that.
That's what podcasting 2.0 is all about and I encourage you to go get a new app at podcastingapps.com and we appreciate the support so.
This is sort of it's an overture to.
Folks that you know you can use Durham like Durham plus Nix in various ways David and Nick Shells really nice because Durham I'm just like I love an Apple watch replacement got me a Garmin watch connected with my, Garmin watch really been loving the health stats really been liking the functionality You were using it this weekend while you were rock climbing to kind of keep track of how you're doing and recovering.
But there is this sort of uncomfortableness with it's tied into the Garmin Connect app. I don't know how I would move this to another device in the future or if I ever wanted to leave Garmin.
Well, I know you absolutely love having all that history as well. And I recently came across this little project, Garmin DB. It basically downloads and parses data from Garmin Connect or Garmin Watch. But it also does Fitbits and Microsoft Health CSV files.
Nice.
So it goes and grabs all of those and allows you to analyze that data in a SQLite database, basically, through Jupyter Notebook. So you can also visualize all of that data with this project. And it pulls down everything. And when I mean everything, it's like your heart rates, activities, your climbing, your stress, intensity, minutes, like all that stuff from the daily summaries page on Garmin, if you know that.
But it also does all your sleep and weight and basically pulls everything you possibly can get.
Yeah, and then the tools to analyze it and visualize it.
I imagine, Chris, it's not too much of a stretch to get this to implement this data into your Home Assistant instance.
I would not be surprised if somebody's already working on that, Brent.
Maybe we should look into it.
Yeah. Maybe I don't want to know, though. But, you know, it is nice that it supports other devices, too. I didn't realize that. I'm kind of excited, you know, with the potential of the Pebble stuff, maybe kind of getting rejuvenated with Google open sourcing and all of that. It'd be nice to plug that into this as well. So there could just be one more device you could export your health data from. So it's called Garmin DB, but it also, like Brent said, supports a lot of the Fitbits.
And whatever the MSHealth file format is, it supports that as well. And it looks really great. And GPL, too. GPL, too. So you got yourself a nice open source app, too. And that's, you know, I got to say, one of its killer features over the Apple Watch. There's probably ways to export Apple Watch health data. If anybody knows, I kind of would like to know. I wouldn't mind going to get any of my old health data. But this is just, this is the difference right here, right?
It's tools like this basically just sit on top of Python and SQL and CSV files. And it makes it possible.
Maybe put it in the feedback room.
But don't take anyone to start. Thanks for sharing.
We'll check on it there.
We're live at 9 a.m. No, 10 a.m. Pacific. Got to get that right. And, of course, you know, I'm going to screw it up. We're live at 10 a.m. Pacific, which, what is that, Wes, in the East Coast? Is that plus three?
Yeah.
Okay, so, yeah, we used to be three. So, now, yeah, it's 1 p.m. Eastern. Right. And we will also be live in your podcasting app. And you can plug jblive.fm, jblive.fm in wherever you're at. and listen to the show. We like it when you get in the Matrix, too, and help us title it.
Classic by Michael W. Lucas.
It gives a nice vibe. So that's all over there. And we'd love it if you'd join us live next week. Who knows?
I was thinking we'd use one of those new fancy AI tools to turn it into an audiobook.
I think so. And you could always pipe in and tell us how it's going, too, and that mumble room will be running as well. Now, links to what we talked about today are over at linuxunplugged.com slash 601. You'll also find our contact form, the RSS feed, details about the matrix and all that kind of stuff. I'm slipping into an accent. I don't know why you find the details. Also the rules for the free BSD challenge. Those are going to be in our show notes. Just look down in the links.
You'll see the rules for the free BSD challenge. And we'd love to hear how it's going for you. Don't forget. We also want to hear about your multi-monitor setup. Are you using multi-monitor single screen? Tell us your setup. We'd like to know if it's a popular thing in our audience or if it's something we don't have to worry about. Anyways, thanks so much for listening. We'll see you right back here next Tuesday, as in Sunday.