666: Berkeley Suffering Distribution

Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris.

My name is Wes.

And my name is Brent.

Hello, gentlemen. Coming up on the show today, it's been a full week of Berkeley suffering distribution. And today, it's our BSD challenge results as the challenge comes to a close. We'll find out who survived the install, who made it to the desktop, and who had to learn the hard way that one tiny, innocent mistake could send the whole BSD box straight into the void.

Hello.

Hi, you guys. Thank you, guys. And shout out to you up there in quiet listening, too. It is fun. Big. You know, it feels like, I don't know.

It's a milestone for the show, I think.

Also, good morning to our friends over at Define Networking. Go meet Manage Nebula from Define Networking, Define.net slash unplugged. It's a decentralized VPN built on the open source Nebula platform that we love. And Nebula was engineered for scale and performance from day one. Very low CPU usage, minimal network overhead, and the kind of reliability that you actually control yourself.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah. So the deadline is June 1st, 2026, and then there will be one final deadline, July 1st. But put June 1st in your head.

Yeah, get in early.

We're going to try to make it. We don't really, of course, have this figured out yet, but November 6th through the 7th is when it's going, Texas Linux Fest.

So stay tuned for more details and maybe go check out that CFP. I will say, as someone who presented last year, it was a great experience. great to work with the organizers very easy conference very friendly.

Good solid community high signal great.

Great place to give a tuck.

Not a very big event but that's what i like about it.

But a lot of people who are who are hungry nerdy linux folks who um want to learn more.

Yeah also we did want to make you aware of dirty frag a new copy fail like vulnerability which we'll have details linked in the show notes but it's another one of these if you can get local access to the box, you can escalate privileges.

And another page, cash abuse. So, you know.

And there is a proof of concept in the wild, and the responsible disclosure schedule got breached, and so it's out before the patches are. There are some mitigations. We'll have those linked for some of the more commonly shared ones right now. And we also have more in-depth details in this week's bootleg edition of the Unplugged program. But before we get out of housekeeping, I have a personal question I want to ask the audience. So please boost in or email.

Me too.

For my home network. Oh, Wes, I can't wait to get your input on it. It's in like the... I mean, it's past the design phase. It's bolted to the wall and secured inside a sealed box. This thing is production grade, and I'll tell you more about it. But the piece I'd like to get more insights on is how people are doing routing in their home network, especially if they have failover networks, not mandatory. And if you're using Linux, I'd like to know about that setup.

Can BSD routers apply or no?

We'll get into that, Wes. We'll get into that.

This is true.

Especially in Linux land, a lot does change. What about in BSD? Have things improved to make switching more viable in one year? I don't know about that. So just a very quick overview. The BSD challenge has four levels to it. The daily driver, the power user, and the bonus round.

From BSD to Bootsy.

That's hard work. It's a lot of on the grounds. It's, it's, that's a, That's the hardest thing we could think of, and it's work that needs to be done. So whoever comes, it's basically a second job.

There's a lot of corporate details that need to get filtered for the open source folks.

Yeah, so whoever fails, whoever gets the lowest score, has to become the official Red Hat Summit correspondent of the week. And we'll see where that lands. So before we get into how we did, let's talk about what we did, what we used for our BSD challenge setups. Brantley, tell me about the hardware. Don't give us too much details yet on the results and your score. Just give us a sense of the hardware you used or virtual machines or whatever, whatever the stack was for the BSD challenge.

Well, I had high hopes. I had hardware sitting, waiting in the wings, and that's where it ended up staying. So that's a little maybe foreshadowing. I don't mean to foreshadow too much, but I had certainly got some success in a virtual machine. And I used a, let's say, rather insane VPS to help me with that challenge.

All right. Okay. That's a good tease. Okay. Now, Wes, I want to know what your hardware setup was or software setup, whatever the stack was it used for your BSD challenge.

Yeah. It was a combo of virtual machines, of course. And then also the old trusty show T480 ThinkPad.

Oh, yeah.

With an all Intel stack, which is a pretty kind of a cheat code for some of these things, honestly. And then I also put for server mode, I got it running on an old NUC I have laying around that TBD needs to be Nixified, but needed to get paved anyway. So this seemed like a good opportunity.

All right. So I had, of course, a couple of VMs where I experimented with a few ideas. And that was just, you know, QMU, KVM and remote viewer on my desktop.

Which works pretty well, I got to say.

It does. The hardware I decided to go with, I talked about it last week, we revived a Dell Precision 7000 series kind of custom... r&d machine and it's a big box two xeon processors in there i slapped a new ssd well new you were ready.

To get some bsd work done.

Yeah man big old screen it has two different video cards in it which is a bit of a challenge but not impossible and i just needed one of them to work right and then i also thanks to uh yeah thanks to olympia mike had me a spare nix book which is like a dell something or other, you know, nice mid-tier Dell laptop from years ago. And had that to test on as well. So I will acknowledge that I think the flaw perhaps in some of my approach was it was too biased to laptops. I'll get into that later.

It would be maybe worth trying to do something like this where, like, you know, in the older days of Linux, like, we might not have thought it super fair if you didn't do the steps where you're like, well, were you being, it's like, it's fine to test a random thing. But like, is that what you would do if you were really trying to plan around doing this long term?

Although the Dell next book I used, a little spoiler there, but really had full hardware compatibility. So that was nice. Before we get to our results, we had a few people email in. We also have some that boosted in. We'll get to those as well. And Jeff wrote, and he tried out NetBSD. He's a longtime free BSD home labber, but he's never tried out NetBSD. He got through levels one through three and the stretch goals. He got an NPF firewall going and QMU Linux VM running on his BSD bots.

Nice.

He set up ZFS snapshots. But he hit a wall at level four because Podman jails would not work on that BSD.

Ah. Yeah.

Fair.

Fair.

He also has open BSD on an Orange Pi 5, which he uses as a tail scale endpoint.

Yeah.

And he sent us a nice detailed write-up. He did have some audio quirks and some Wi-Fi performance issues. And he goes by TuxMM in our community. Thank you, TuxMM. So FreeBSD15 with XFCE as his desktop on that one. XFCE was pretty popular there. Oh, no, I'm sorry, that wasn't Tux. That was Jeff. TuxMM was using FreeBSD15 with XFCE. Jeff was using NetBSD. Sorry.

Yeah, TuxMM was a cardiology nurse practitioner, Linux user since 2019.

Hey, nicely done.

Installed FreeBSD15 on an external NVMe, got Ethernet and Wi-Fi working. Firefox with online radio and YouTube VLC, OBS Studio, LibreOffice.

Why?

Mega Command sync to backup NGINX SSH from a MacBook Air mounted USB and wrote a bash script. System updated via package. FreeBSD 15 uses package for base too. Yeah, which is a cool new thing in the BSD world.

So I'm looking up Mega Command. A command line interactive and scriptable application provides a non-UI access to mega services. Ah, the mega storage. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very nice. FreeBSD 15.

That's an impressive setup.

Well done on the points, too.

Mm-hmm.

Eddie tried out GhostBSD. Bare Metal install would not boot for him, so he moved over to a VM. He got about 20 points, he said. GhostBSD for him made levels one through two, getting the desktop rolling pretty easy. But level three, he hit a struggle there. He called BSD like visiting the early days of Linux and closes with long live Linux.

Amen, Eddie. Amen.

Hey, it's good to be reminded of why we do what we do.

You see here, Joe had a suggestion for you. He says, I think Brent should give Ghost BSD a try. Nick's BSD doesn't work. He mentioned ZFS snapshots to another BSD host. And he says, Alan might have a tip for you there.

Ooh. I did look at my, well, things were going very bad for me at one point. So I did look at, I promised that I would look at the community's suggestions for what my backup plan should be. and on matrix uh we got the most votes for dragonfly bsd so i went and read all sorts of things about dragonfly bsd and i decided i should just try harder on nick's bsd so i did.

Now mr mayhem sent in a thorough report brantley did you see this.

Oh yeah so mayhem like uh jumped the gun and did a full week before the challenge and said hey i got the max points but i was just looking at uh the nice blog post that they wrote up and it it's worth visiting we'll have it linked in the show notes um there's an update for week two and there's a nice photo here of mayhem with mini mayhem uh their son doing all sorts of the challenges that i didn't find success with, so they did some of the stretch goals and got a bunch of stuff going there's

A good looking desktop.

Yes. Yes.

Good looking desktop.

And it looks like they spent many hours with this thing but he has a little bonus point here. Weirdest place. They got, here it says, there were bonus points for installing it in a weird place. So I put it in my car. This is a proof of concept so far. And there's a photograph of a proof of concept, let's say. But I actually intend on making this a long-term reality with a smaller screen reflecting off of my windshield with a smaller screen.

I love that. That's what I was hoping somebody would find. That's great.

There's a lot more in this blog post, and I would say dive in. It's a fun read.

I want to call out one thing.

And Brent will be quoting from it instead of his own experience.

Oh, yes.

He tried to give Pinchflat a go, which I'm a big fan of, how I watch YouTube offline on Jellyfin. And he says it should have been easy to port. It's written in Elixir. You know, it's VM power programming language. But he could not get it running. he could not get it to build, so he switched over to something called Cinch Flat.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, it's a simple scriptish wrapper around YouTube DLP, or maybe, no, that's Pinch Flat. Anyways, I wanna look in, I think I've seen the name. Oh, good, he did link to it. So, let's link to Cinch Flat in the.

Oh, I hadn't thought about Pinch Flat, but yeah, we know early.

So, BSD first Pinch Flat alternative, look at that. Look at that, oh, that's so great. You know, the stuff you get through the, thank you for that. That's a lot of effort that went into that blog post too.

Yeah.

It was really nice. Put that in the old show notes there. There's also, we'll put some links to some resources. I did mention kind of being laptop biased. Well, there is a resource for laptop users that want to try out FreeBSD. And it's the FreeBSD Foundation's Laptop Support and Usability Project. that aims to deliver packages for FreeBSD that improves functionality for that kind of out-of-the-box experience you might want on a broad range of different laptops.

Do you think this is what helped you, Chris?

Definitely came in clutch for me. Definitely made all the difference. And after this, I had no problems, and I just stacked all the points. Thank you to our members. If you're not a member yet, use the promo code 666, and you can take 6% off every month's subscription. The lifetime of the subscription applies to new purchases, reactivations, and upgrades. We just want to say thank you to those of you that are considering becoming a member.

You want to keep us going? We all are underwriting this.

Yeah, you are. LinuxUnplugged.com slash membership or jupiter.party. You can use promo code 666 for either membership. And we do greatly appreciate it.

Well, I guess my BSD week was an interesting one. If you remember, last week I was in the studio and feeling pretty good about this challenge. So I gave myself a few extra crazy handicaps. I don't know why I did that. But I decided to try out Nix BSD. We talked about it last week a bit, but it's basically trying to meld the declarative concept of Nix and Nix OS with BSD. And it turns out that's actually a really fun idea. It is also quite an experimental one.

All right.

But tell us your trouble.

Son.

I dove right in. My trouble started when Wes on that episode said, oh, you might have to build a thing or two. And that's Wes's low-key way of suggesting that it may take several hours. Yeah. Turns out many hours.

Okay.

So I got my very first two points like only a couple of days ago.

Congratulations, buddy.

Thank you. I would say NixBSD is fascinating. It is really fun to do it in a way that you're not supposed to. It also means I deeply handicapped myself in ways I didn't realize, still got further down the list. but I did get connection to the internet. So got it running in a VM, got a connection to the internet. I did install a package because, well, ping wasn't installed.

So to, Oh, wow. Really? Wow.

Yeah.

Okay.

Luckily it was pretty easy because I have an X config. So I was able to just enable ping in the next config, which was like literally a super simple thing.

Right.

Well, NixBSD doesn't really have PKG because everything's done with Nix. So that's impossible and would just have broken everything. However, I did build the VM by pinning the most recent pin that was available in the NixBSD project. So, would you give me some points for, like, updating the system before deploying it? Question? Half a point?

Hmm. Half a point?

Half a point. Then we got to do...

Okay, well, you can give me a full point. I'm fine with that.

I just feel like we give you a pity point.

I think that's fine.

I'm okay with that. Is producer Jeff all right with that?

Yeah, we're checking with PJ. PJ, you want to override one pity point for Brent for his half-assed system update there?

Okay all right um so moving through uh getting services running at boot um, i don't know i'm not going to give myself that point you can do it in the next config i didn't really get it done or i didn't yeah so um but moving on jails i got to create jails really easily, because that's a one-liner in the Nix config.

Yeah.

Nice. So in some ways, using Nix BSD.

Declared of jails via Nix config.

Yeah.

I want that.

Yeah.

Yeah. One thing about the Nix config was it made some things really easy and made other things really impossible. So it was a blessed Nix blessing, I would say.

So it's kind of like Nix OS.

Do we have a total here? Yeah.

Yeah. So in total, given, you know, tying one hand behind my back the entire time, I've got about 14 points plus a pity point.

So we'll give you 15 points. Okay. I'm going to need you to keep track of mine

Let me get a pen here.

I couldn't bring myself to tally up my points. So I hated this. And I don't mean to go ahead, but I got to go ahead here. I have to talk about this because I got to get through this. I have to be over with this. I cannot wait any longer.

Yep, let's do it.

Like yourself, I spent most of the week getting to level two.

Okay.

Because it doesn't matter what boot medium or hard drive configuration I used, I could not get a BSD to boot on that Dell Precision laptop. Couldn't do it. And then when I tried to do it in a VM, I hit a bug with the current version of Ghost BSD. It prevents X11 and like Plasma and all this other stuff from working or Mate or XFCE. So I couldn't do it in a VM.

Yeah, because they're using Mate on Xlibre, I think, in the most recent release.

Sure, it's fine. I got nothing else to do, right? So then I got to go dig up other hardware. So I find this old Nick's book from Olympia, Mike. Well, let me back up. So first I think, this is the worst part, actually. This was the part, I can't believe I almost skipped this. I start to realize, what if Brent's right?

Oh.

What if Brent's right?

A dangerous thing to think.

I know.

Go on.

We're all surprised at this one.

What if I put bang in my head against a Ventoy issue all day?

Oh.

Because I'm using Ventoy to...

Oh.

And I'm getting this weird air that GhostBSD is waiting on the boot medium.

That does seem, and it is the boot medium.

Right? It is the boot medium. So I'm thinking to myself, after like a day of this, I'm like, cause I'm trying different ISOs, I'm trying older versions, I'm trying the community edition.

Which I'll get to.

Which was a highlight. I'm trying, cause I really wanted to make GhostBSD work again. Cause that's what I visited before. And I just kind of wanted to check the Delta. So I go dig up an old traditional thumb drive. You know, a classic real thumb drive.

It's probably one of mine that I've left there. Probably.

32 gigger, you know?

Nope, not mine.

I flash it with the Ghost BSD.

Just like a straight flash.

No nonsense. Old school, like it used to do. And with the old DD. And I go over, and it starts to boot. And I'm like, oh, God, it's something different's happening. And it locks up in a completely different place. Completely different. So progress? I'm like, is there something wrong with this machine? It is a weird machine. So I'm like, maybe it's because it's a blank CD. So, or I mean a blank disk. So I'll just install Windows, right? Because I'm sure that's a common scenario in the real world.

Whoa no way.

Yeah and i go okay it kind of makes sense ghost bsd is based on free bsd all right.

Yeah it's just interesting because i've had other issues but not booting free bsd.

I know and like i can boot everything else from windows to the ubuntu's on this thing so i don't So I pivot and I go get the Knicks book and GhostBSD boots up just fine on the Knicks book. And what I decided to do was try out their Gerwish desktop environment.

Their what now?

Yeah.

Say again.

Gershwin. It's a GNU step like environment.

Whoa.

Kind of taken from the days before Apple acquired Next and Apple was working on kind of this new UI design that was called Copeland and all these things that never made it to the light of day. And it comes with a terminal, a text editor, some basic system preferences, file manager, and it's crazy light. The entire desktop environment's under 50 megabytes of storage.

Yeah, wow. This says it can be built in like a few minutes?

Lightning fast. It's very early. But you don't have to use GhostBSD to use it either. Although it's from the GhostBSD community, they also make a general free BSD live ISO available, a Debian-based live ISO available, and an Arch ISO. And I tried out the Arch one as well, and it's a little bit more up to date than what comes with GhostBSD right now. It's a very MVP desktop environment, but if you have any nostalgia for that

Next week, we're getting Vibe Gershwin.

Can it run on linux.

I like that idea well it runs on arch right so runs on the old debian it's really it was really nice it was like going back in time um so here's what i did so let's let's go through the points and i i'll tell you what i got working what i didn't get working and where things went sideways all right so i think i got through all of level one that was no problem because i read a man page about beehive and all that so that was fine and i had to do

All right.

Got some audio working. Browser was working. All of that was fine. I did stop and start multiple services, but I'll tell you, here's where things started to go sideways. I made multiple changes to rc.conf and nothing went sideways. It was fine. Maybe I got a little complacent after making multiple changes, but I decided, screw jails. Oh, fancy namespaces. Ooh, Capsum. Oh, okay. I wanted Beehive. I wanted to try out Beehive.

Yep.

I reboot, and what I get is just an endless boot script loop, just scrolling text forever, nonstop. System never recovers. It just scrolls and scrolls and scrolls and scrolls. If I hold down the control and I just smash C over and over and over and over again, I get a completely failed system. And so that one, like, I'm assuming it's, like, either a bad, it's either a bad, like, stanzas, it's a bad syntax, it's something. And it just reminds me just how fragile this is.

I wonder how much of this is BSD versus Nix, and how much would you compare, say, if you were trying to just run a stock Debian server versus a stock-free BSD?

I don't think it changes it much because there's still 20 years of technological innovations that would be in Debian that are not present in BSD. Like what? Well, take the Beehive, for example. It's a great product in its own. but they're too late and it's too little. And all they're doing is backfilling functionality that all the other operating systems around them built up. And now they're backfilling. Okay, well, they have it now. Great.

And I think then you're just arguing from a default then.

Well, I'm arguing for what is, who's the audience? Who's the customer?

Well, I mean, I think you have to consider how much you want to consider the learning a blocker versus just the outcome. Because I would argue you can make a very nice free BSD server that from the outside you would not have any idea.

But then you have something that only a small niche of the market can support.

That's true, but that's exactly what Linux was.

But like I said, we've had 30 years where now there is a free alternative that doesn't have that downside. Like 20, 30 years ago when they were both at the starting line, that made sense. That argument made sense now. But now we have something that's free. We have something that's widely supported. We have something that has a deep expertise base on.

There are things that that matters for, but that's not everything.

Okay, but what is that?

I mean, it's a similar thing like, why would you run NixOS, right? You can't get RHEL support for NixOS. We're locking ourselves out of this entire support base.

That is at least Linux. And I would argue there is still a wider base there. But what I'm trying to say is if you're looking at the two bases and you're going to build like infrastructure for your company, a virtualization infrastructure, or you're going to build something that runs in containers or something that runs on the cloud.

I think you're right at a certain scale, but I think there's a certain amount of room and value to the diversity, especially in a week where we're getting constant vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel. because the thing about BSD is I think it's simpler and more elegant than Linux. If you're going to compare, I would think it feels more like a closury or like a well-crafted ecosystem and Linux is kind of the node.

Linux is JavaScript to that. I would agree, or I would say BSD feels more intentionally engineered.

Yes. And so I think if you value that and if you have full scope over what you want to operate and you don't need the esoteric features of Linux, those can be a liability. and the simplicity and the security of the FreeBSD system, say, where you can do jails and capsicum and things like that. It's not that Linux can't do it, but Linux has to kludge together multiple systems in a much more complicated way.

Couldn't a cynical take be that you're arguing just that, well, it's security through obscurity, basically?

No not it's not about obscurity it's it's there's less going on so it's easier to get correct.

Okay i dig that and i i think because what this whole thing i'm trying to be like who's the customer who's the market who's the audience who's the user yeah i'm, An embedded firewall device, maybe?

Yeah, I think folks may be building appliances, right? We've seen a lot of use cases for that kind of stuff. I think you see it, folks use it to run some of like the core DNS infrastructure of the internet. You have situations where you have like a clear goal and you could solve it in a variety of valid ways.

Okay.

Now where I think the Nix OS side for me, this makes it more complicated. But if I'm comparing it to something like running a traditional Ubuntu or RHEL server or something like that, that's where I see that there's a lot of elegance. So think about encryption and disk maintenance. We kind of have to stack all of these pieces together. They don't really know about each other. You have the Lux side, you have the device mapper part of the kernel.

Let me tell you about my iPhone. I mean, it's like, okay, that's great, but you're describing an iPhone, you're describing a Mac, you're describing the Apple approach, and I like the x86 ecosystem, I like the Linux and Open ecosystem. And I do prefer putting together my own solution that better address it.

Well, it's not that you can't put it together. It's actually, in a way, it's more composable. It's like composability because it's intentionally designed in that way.

But you're so limited in your options.

Yeah, and that's true. So I think the market fit is maybe then where those core things that it does in a rock style, like they thought about that case. And it's kind of like, right, we had ePoll on Linux. They had KQ, which was like better thought out. Now, IO, Euring, there's been changes, but they just, they got a better API implemented.

So i could that would explain really then why the desktop experience is just so god-awful rough yeah um and i i maybe drew's gonna have to censor this if you're listening on the bootleg version you might want to skip ahead a minute here in a second i'm going to play this clip because i was recording this using nomad bsd which is one of the BSDs I tried, and I really like it. I think it's actually one of the better ones. It's a live BSD session that has persistent storage.

Even the nicest distributions miss the smallest usability thing. Like, I have to choose a keyboard layout, and it starts with user-defined and then Arabic. How many of these users in these countries are even downloading this? And the entire interface is in English right now. So why not just English, right? So then you get to English. Well, my goodness, how many versions of – okay, all right, there's U.S.

There's a dozen different English versions.

Okay, well, how many versions of U.S. English keyboards are there?

Thirty.

Well, oh, oh. Oh, no, not that one. Okay, no, I'm not Dvorak. Macintosh? No, I don't think I'm. Am I Norman? Am I symbolic? I must be international. So I'm not Euro or Workman or whatever. Oh, no, I don't think I'm Russian US. Okay.

None of them are right.

I guess I go with that one?

No, no.

Like, why am I doing this? And then look at this. More keyboard stuff. Why is there so much keyboard stuff? The entire interface is in U.S. English. It doesn't make sense. It's just, it's this little stuff that's just, and it's everywhere.

I was having a rough time, boys. I was having a rough time. I don't feel so bad anyway. Yeah, so it's just, and it's like, even when you get to the good stuff, and what you're saying, it must be the actual use cases are mostly headless. They're mostly in hardware or in file storage or in DNS or something.

Specific intentional devices. Yeah, the one that always stuck out with me was I think a couple of years ago, Netflix decided to share that they were using BSD for their infrastructure. Right, right. That was interesting. Okay, someone's using it for something real. And I know a lot of people are. They're just not necessarily as public with it. But that one always sticks out to me.

That is always the use case we've heard for the last 10 years.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Oh, you're right. So I'm guessing Wes must have had a great time. So BSD love and Wes over here.

We've got to tally up your points here.

Chris. Oh, you're right. Sorry, I forgot.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't want to let you go that easily.

I forgot about the F-ing points.

Okay, let's try to do this in a quick, fast way. So level one, I think you got everything. So seven points.

Yep, seven points.

It took you all week to boot it, but like me, you got somewhere else, so that's good. Daily Driver, you got graphics going in a browser, I'm assuming. Yeah.

And sound.

Wow. Okay. Sound going. And did you mount like a USB or some kind of external?

I did not. I mean, well, I couldn't verify. It may have mounted, but that was also when the system went into a horrible boot loop and I never got it back up.

Well, it specifically said you had to prove and you can't prove. So I'm taking that one away from you. Did you create your own user?

Oh, of course.

Okay. Well, I don't know.

Now, what did you name the user?

Magnolia called his jail poop. He said it was very late at night.

Jailbreaker would be a good one for a BSD box.

Okay, you might have moved into the power category then.

Yeah, because I did a full OS update.

Nice.

Full OS update.

Nice. And I had to install multiple packages. By the way, EE, not a bad little editor by default. Not a bad little editor. And I also had to stop and start numerous services, including SSH.

But were you able to SSH into your system?

Yes. I got SSH.

All right.

And I never, ever used any AI assistants in this. Never used any AI.

Nicely done.

Nicely done.

Nicely done. It was like, once I had SSH up, I was like, I could.

You could.

Did you write a shell script and execute it?

Okay. So I edited a shell script, but I did not create the shell script. And I think it was already executable. So I'm going to say no.

The wording says write a short.

Yeah, I'll say no.

Okay. No point for you on that one.

Yeah.

All right. Bonus round. You ready for this one?

Mm-hmm.

Did you create and start a BSD jail or equivalent? No. No, but that you're, you know, beehive might've.

Yeah, I know, I know. I tried to get beehive going.

But it didn't work. So, so you basically get zero in this entire category.

For all we know, it worked. For all we know.

Okay, well, tell us next week if you can prove it. But for now, I won't give you any of those points.

All right, so...

He got the pity points, but he don't give pity points.

No, no, no, no.

Here's the point where you can ask for some kind of bonus point somewhere. Did you run this anywhere crazy? I mean, I'm going to give you a point because you tried a lot of different BSDs. and some i've never heard of it's fine what is my total what's okay you got seven points plus uh five six seven another seven that's 14 plus another uh two horses eight do this plus uh zero so uh you know yeah you don't have to say how do you feel about uh oh 22 points oh.

I feel pretty good about that although i think wes is gonna beat me although i think pj is gonna beat all of us but all right,

Yeah.

Can you beat 22 points?

Well, I guess let's find out.

So how did your experimentation go? Did you get it up and running as a daily driver with a desktop environment web browser?

I did. Yes, indeed. Yeah, I got... Well, first I played a tiny bit around with Dragonfly and a VM, but it didn't seem like it had been updated super recently. I just wanted to play more with Hammer, too, because it's kind of an interesting file system.

Yeah. And that's one of the neat things about it is it has Hammer.

And they've done a lot of work on their, like, SMP stuff.

I wanted to give Hello Systems a try.

Right.

But it doesn't look like they've updated since 2024.

Yeah.

So, ultimately, I went back to FreeBSD, and I tried a couple of things. Started out with Awesome, and then switched over to Sway.

I think that was probably a good move. Pretty straightforward to get going.

Yep. I was going to try Plasma, but I just didn't quite get there.

I imagine you created a user account.

Oh, yeah. I got to have a WES user.

Did you mount an external disk?

Yeah. Yeah. plugged in a USB drive you keeping track that worked totally fine I'm attempting to I did get audio working I think that's all 14.

Points I have a question before you continue.

Yeah at.

What point in the week was this, Like currently where you are here, getting the audio going?

The Wednesday?

Yeah, I think you had it going early on because I got.

Awesome going last.

Week in the first week.

You and I didn't even have anything booted by this point, Chris.

Yeah, I was able to piggyback on sort of the setup I had because I saved all the comp files when I destroyed the VM that I made the first time and then kind of let that help that bootstrap the one I installed.

That's not fair.

All right, so he's got all of level one, including the bonus point.

I did also get Duaz going. I don't need a point for that, but I like Duaz. I think it's kind of nice.

All right, let's see how you did as a power user, Wes. Did you update your packages?

I did, yes.

Okay, did you perform a update installed packages with the native tool and perform a full OS update? Did you do a full OS update?

I don't know if I did. I might not have.

Whoa.

That's kind of a weird one, because if you're updating the packages.

Yeah, I didn't intentionally try to, but I did update, and I did install a bunch of stuff.

Okay.

And I did get ports going.

Okay, all right. I think that's probably, that's probably good.

And then, yeah, SSH was not a problem. But services, you know.

RC comp stuff.

You could just stop there.

Wes. you could keep going.

And then i did make a shell script and then i but i was trying out my hand because they use seashell by default and so i was trying my hand at writing a seashell script which i'm not very good at so i did run i was able to you know print some stuff out and you know write it to a file and like that nice so i'm not a not as good at bash which i'm also not that great at but.

All right so i think that's, all the points.

For level three no well what about the services getting a service to start at boot that was yeah i.

Got nginx going.

Yeah okay all right well did you lose parts anywhere did you go to.

Jail west did you start a jail.

Yes i did get some i got an nginx going into jail as well because i figured that seemed that seemed like a good thing to run did you.

Try to access the service from a host.

Uh yeah i was able to expose that to my local home network.

That's okay that's.

Like a i.

Did not get a vm going but i did get zfs boot environments working which was cool.

Well you're definitely definitely in the beast beastie whisper category with me but i think it beat me i feel like you you kind of blew it out there.

Well um it was easier to track how many points west missed which was only two so i think he did pretty good that that looks like i don't know depending if you think the math on our bsd challenge was correct or not something like 28 or 29 yeah.

I'm gonna say 29 i think that's what i tracked was 29.

For west so that's pretty couple questions for you west yeah did you run anywhere interesting or what surprised you the most.

Hmm no i just tried it on the i got the nuck going with free bsd i didn't end up that's where i ran engine x i didn't really end up doing more on it i was thinking it could be fun to play with so i might leave it around with free bsd for a little bit oh no we'll see it'll be next we've lost him.

Lost him he's gone we need a.

New host.

Everybody if you're willing.

It's interesting to see i also wanted to try the linux compatibility but i didn't quite get there either um so it's interesting to see let's sort of see the frequency and the cadence of how they port over that stuff and like what those environments look like and how updated they are or not and their work to port like i wasn't lucky because like the i the i915 stuff works for this laptop and that is well supported in free bsd but not all are then you kind of have to learn you know oh where do

That was where i was at the last time we gave it a go and this time we gave it a go it feels even less relevant than it did more than a year ago we tried it but that's just my personal opinion just.

Because you felt like maybe nothing changed or you didn't notice anything changing in this limited use.

It was a collection of things like that yeah yeah yeah.

It does seem like there has been some more effort i just think they're early Like we've seen over the past year or so more foundation work towards the desktop and like some some things like that.

So did any of you like manually connect to Wi-Fi?

Yeah, that was the first time I got Wi-Fi working.

It's fine. It's basically like the process was 15.

Like the WPA supplicant type stuff, right?

It was fine, but it was a whole effing, just bring this interface up, this is in this interface. It's like, okay, I remember doing this 15 years ago, and it's fine, but it just seems like there could have at some point in time been tooling created to make, you know. It's like, acknowledge that Wi-Fi is actually a thing, but they don't. They just assume if you need Wi-Fi, then, I don't know, it's just, that's all of BSD.

Well, and that's where you were kind of talking about, right? Like, maybe it would, if it was like a desktop sort of workstation thing that had Ethernet, and there's just...

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or if you're going with something built for the desktop, like your Ghost BSD, or something like that. They do a much better job with that sort of stuff, but...

You are right that it kind of, it does, especially on the desktop side, feel like going back in time on Linux World.

Well done, 29 points is, that's going to be pretty darn hard to beat there, PJ. do you think you do you think you scored more than 29 in the old BSD challenge, oh really I count okay I'll take BJ's score if you want to I was I was also counting while I listened I.

Was lazy mathin.

Oh okay BJ's.

Coming in with.

Fire yeah I get better let's.

Go yeah, i give you the full point i love the bsd native part yeah.

Yeah that's fine because.

It didn't say you had to you know mount something that wasn't native so you.

Get you get the whole thing, Nice.

Good choice.

You got a web browser going, you did system updates, all that good stuff. Net installer, yep.

Nice.

Oh, cool. I wanted to. That was all I wanted to do. I did not.

Tell us more.

Oh, that's fantastic.

So StarCraft, Jeff and I had a side deal. Whoever could get StarCraft working first. And definitely Jeff beat me, like, by days and days. I'm not even, geez.

Well done, Jeff.

So extra point, I say, for him, because I failed.

27 Brent giving away points.

He just hands them out.

No.

What?

Wow.

All right, now you're just showing.

He is just showing off. This is awesome.

I nuked my install, and he's sitting there editing video? Jeez. Oh, wow. Okay. I don't know. That's the kind of suffering I remember.

Your own challenge over there.

Great. Next is going to be the VNC challenge. Remote desktop challenge. Good back. Yeah. All right. Okay. You got SSH going. Good. Good. Uh, you got jail going? Did you go to jail?

Oh, nice.

All right. That's the bonus points. So 26 is what you're going with. How did we get to 29 for a while?

I have no idea.

I don't actually know. Uh, yeah, the math is rough on this one.

Oh, 27. Okay. All right. All right. Now 27.

Yeah, he should get some bonus. Some line bonus.

All right. You want to give them a bonus for, I think, I think a bonus for the desktop environment choice and a bonus for the gaming.

Yeah.

Hardware acceleration too.

Yeah. Bump them up to 30.

I think that puts them at 30. Oh my God, PJ. Well done, sir. Well done. 30.

So will you keep it around?

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Nice. Uh-huh.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Right.

Yeah. yeah i think you know after being hard on it i will add uh if you kind of do have a soft spot for the way the systems used to work and it and it works well for you you you could really get somewhere nice with like a gerwish desktop or an xfce desktop and free bsd and you could probably just settle in for a long while and you'd really have a very functional system as long as you didn't need large scale compatibility with new and exciting applications or hardware yeah or hardware yeah.

Ooh nice is that 31.

Well done sir.

Oh yeah well did you be able to run anything in there Linux program wise just basic stuff or, uh-huh, did you did you.

Run it on some interesting hardware or anywhere interesting, But no problems as far as hardware goes. Jeez.

Now, if you want to write in or boost in and advocate for why maybe you could beat 30 points.

Or why Brent should get extra bonus points.

Yeah, boy, oh boy.

We did have someone who I don't know if we had in our earlier feedback summary who sent us like a detailed PDF.

Oh, that was so great. I meant to call that.

Yeah, user LKF, I think Lars.

Thank you.

This document, it's like, I don't know, 10 pages and very well typeset LaTeX document.

Beautiful report.

Detailing all of the stuff they did. They have their own score. They might have.

Yeah, that was genuinely, there were some really nice write-ups that came in. We had to pop through them quick for obviously time purposes, but man.

We were really impressed.

So, you know, Brentley, I just want to say, get excited, get ready. It is time, my friend, because this week is Red Hat Summit. Have fun out there, Brent. At Red Hat Summit 2026. Looking forward to it. As the loser of the BSD Challenge, you will be our correspondent.

The least winner.

Yeah. And, you know, being that you went last year, you're already kind of up to speed on what the game is, so it should be no problem at all.

Well, thanks, guys. I feel honored.

Congratulations.

Thank you.

Hey, if you'd like to support the show, you can send us a boost. Fountain.fm makes it really easy. There's also AlbiHub, which you can connect to lots of different projects and podcasting apps. And please do boost it and tell us about your router setup. I'm building a new home router, brand new little baby.

Well, we have quite the baller boost here that I am hesitating to read now that I read the first line or two. But it is for a row of McDucks. 22,222 sets.

Hey, is that a row of McDucks? Is that what it is? Or is it an Aflac? Which one would you like?

I like the Aflac every time.

Let's do it. There you go. Let's do an Aflac for once. But also, why not? That's what I say. He does, too.

So our baller booster here is uh pj and he says uh bsd me calling it right now i beat brent at least 25.5 points at the time of writing this excluding bonus points install the linux comp hat stuff but i couldn't run a game due to libgl issues but i was able to cheroot into an ubuntu jammy instance and get nano going i.

Mean that's worth it right there.

Very fancy nano.

I did not Actually, I was just stuck with EE. Did you try it?

No, I didn't, actually.

Editor, it's not bad.

Yeah, I just was- He writes other details about how he beat me in various ways.

He also got some zonotic going.

Yeah, that's true. Super tux cart. So, good job, PJ. You win this round.

At least he sent a little sugar along for that salt in the bowl.

Yeah, that's right.

I appreciate the boost. Turd Ferguson comes in with 22,222 SATs. The history of 1-800-ITS-UNIX is a fun one.

What?

BSDI put ITS-UNIX on a toll-free number. AT&T took it personally. BSD got lawsuited into limbo and gave Linux time to take off. 1-800-ITS-UNIX.

Huh.

And, yeah. Really?

No.

I guess so. I do remember there being a massive lawsuit that AT&T launched. Yeah, so, okay. Here's what Google says. 1-800-ITS-UNIX was a marketing phone number used by Berkeley System Software Design, BSD-I-NC, in the early 90s to sell their BSD-386 operating system. It was at the center of a major legal battle between AT&T Unix Systems Laboratories over the trademark infringement, forcing the company to stop using the number.

That's like back when lawsuits were fun.

Yeah, I don't know. It doesn't sound too fun. It doesn't sound too fun.

Yeah, I mean, I suppose we've had our own fun of eternal lawsuits on the Linux side, haven't we?

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Well, our dear Odyssey Westrebusin with 5,000 sats. Just to say, live meep.

Hello, Odyssey. Thank you.

Thank you.

Appreciate that.

We've got a Moonanite here with, oh, cleverly, 6,666 sats for episode 666. Maybe instead of calling mysterious binaries magic boxes or, quote, blobs, We can call them, quote, danger zones.

Hmm.

I like that idea.

Yeah. Yeah. It comes with some bundled danger zones.

It's actually perfect. It might be too exciting sounding, though.

Yeah. It's a little edgy. I want that. I want the danger zone.

Yeah, right. I love any danger zones. This is yours, Seth.

Right. Autobrains here with a Spaceballs boost. One, two, three, four, five sats. Well, we agree with this. I love our community. We have so many diverse perspectives from around the world. That's our super strength. I'd love it if we could find a way to keep growing, get more women in STEM on board, get more young people and old people and every age in between people, all sorts of background. Let's get them all in this awesome e-tent.

Well, I love that idea.

Yeah, the community can always play a role in that.

Agree completely. Yeah. Wes and I did convert a rather aged gentleman who was very interested in learning about Linux back at LinuxFest Northwest.

So that was a great conversation it.

Really was and also i have to say this week just watching all the bsd challenge conversation happening in our matrix room was very fun very.

Entertaining i probably.

Should have did less of that and more on my challenge but here we are.

Yeah the brent vicarious challenge well uh wh 2025 comes in with 5 000 sets here is a plus one to ai segments i'd like to see some comparisons on all the new stuff coming out like say open claw versus hermes and etc this is also a time traveler boost going all the way back to 2015 kind of funny to hear chris remark that he finds the raspberry pi interesting but had no idea he would use one along with bopey saying by episode 600 we'd have

Yeah interesting yeah the.

Show's in the back catalog shows a bit of a time.

Capsule that way it is indeed. Thank you, WH. Appreciate you.

We've got Bearded Zero here with 6,999 cents. They say last episode should have been titled Control-C, Control-F. Thanks for all the AI talk and everything else on the show.

Well, Control-F would be find, right?

Usually, right?

Well, copy, fail.

You know what I say? Oh, I see. I say never paste. Just fill that copy, that paste, that pinboard up. Fill it up, fill it up, whatever. Fill it up, never paste.

I have a observation about how copy pasting is failing for me recently. I don't know if you guys have experienced this. I've been using open code quite a bit in my workflows and it just like copies anything you highlight. And so I turned that on in all my terminals cause like I'm not an animal, but now if I use any other program, it's just broken. I can't copy paste for the love of it.

Wes knows.

Yep.

Wes knows that I'd be sitting here at the station here in the studio and I'm sitting there trying to cop and I highlight stuff and it's not copying. I'm like, what is going on? There's gotta be a section.

Right? We gotta find some kind of.

I mean, I mean, be a gentleman and turn on copy with highlight. For goodness sake. Plug for the kitty terminal. Adversary 17 is here with 8,192 sayads. Adversaries like the beginning of last week's member bootleg feed, and he says, one day, one day, I'll make it to LinuxFest Northwest. We sure hope so.

We do.

That would be great.

Ronnie comes in with 6,666. Thanks for all the work. Number of the beast is here.

Hey, for us, it's a good look.

And I don't know if this was intentional or not, but they also happened to be at six seconds into the podcast.

Whoa, come on. do you think they knew we knew that yes.

No but bonus points.

Magnolia mayhem came in with 5 000 sats maximum points and he sent us the link to his write-up long story short i got it running in my car and achieved everything but a virtual machine.

Crushing it as usual, biggest mac has boosted in with a devil boost 666 satoshi's, Oh, hey, it's Brian from Boise. For this challenge, I used a Rescue HP Elite Desk and went with FreeBSD 14.4. I did most of the work over SSH, set up XFCE for my GUI, even got the sound working in Firefox.

Nice.

I grabbed a couple screenshots and a screen record with XFCE for screen shooter. Then I got Bastille set up and decided to try to get Pinchflat working. Took some manual edits to the Elixir source code to get the SQL playing nice, but it's running incredibly well now.

Whoa, they got it.

Awesome.

Interesting that they got it. And another Pinchflat user out there. Pinchflat users unite.

They continue here.

Hey, they met Erlang virtual machine crushing it.

Yeah, I guess so.

Pinchflat is now serving the Linux Unplugged channel via mini DLNA. The best part? It's arrived to reboot.

Yeah, really.

After everything was stable, I jumped to 15.0 at 1 a.m. this morning. Everything, jails and all, came back up. I didn't expect to build a snappy YouTube box for the house when I started. but here we are not.

Included in.

My story i created a small zfs status shell script and i did mount a usb drive with all that i think i can say i got around 30 points for this challenge.

Yeah i.

Think so as free bsd likes to say oh it's cut off i'm so sorry it just says does this loo well yes it does loo you did very.

I think it loo's well i think it loo's very well i think that's easily you 30 points big well very impressive huh well well well some people really crushed it i'm very impressed i'm glad it's sticking for some of you too and i hope you enjoy it very much there's some of the audience and users right there thank you everybody who supported the show with a boost we had 17 of you stream them sats collectively you sat streamers you stacked

How did that happen?

How does that happen? Let's do the AI-related one first, and then the rest will all click into place. So, of course, one of the problems when using AI services like OpenAI or Anthropic is you might be worried about your sensitive data going to these cloud-based services. In fact, I know some people avoid cloud AI in general just because they don't want to send their data to it.

Yeah, exactly. Because, you know, in a lot of situations, right, maybe the LLM needs to know that there is like an API key there or something like that. If it's really crucial for like a templating thing or a placeholder, you know, you should already have solved that. But if you didn't, and there is a mistake, you still don't want that key ending up in, you know, being cached, used for training, all that stuff.

Interesting. So you put this between you and the upstream cloud provider. You configure your local client to talk to this and it proxies the request up to say OpenAI or Anthropic. and during that time it's looking for personal identifiable information like email address social security number credit cards etc exactly, API keys there's also it offers a Chrome extension so if you're using ChatGPT Cloud or Gemini in the web it can also kick in for that as well.

There's also a desktop app for the Mac I think comes with a systemd service you can run it in Docker if you want it's got pretty nice logging it's all local they use a Distilbert transformer model using the Onyx front time to sort of do that local ML for the classification side. So, yeah, one way to, you know, try and ameliorate some of the downsides and risks of using some of these services.

Yeah, and like you said, there are several of these. This one's mostly Python and Go, and it's licensed under the Apache 2.0 license.

Yeah, give it a try. Maybe you have a use and let us know how it goes.

Next up, Portbook, which is a local Rust web dashboard. that auto-discovers and labels your HTTP services running on local host ports. It does live updates, project root detection, live error, and dead classification. So why spend the time setting up the dashboard when you can have the dashboard, auto-discover everything running on your machine, label, setify, classify, blah, blah, blah. Do it all for you.

And, you know, maybe you've got a couple of dev environments running, you've got a few services, you don't quite remember what's running on that thing. And, you know, sure, SS or Nesda can do some of that.

It would have been useful this morning when we were trying to hunt down our rogue DHCP server.

Yes, it would. So get yourself PortBook.

Yeah. PortBook. And it is MIT license.

This feels like one of those tools I didn't realize I needed.

Yeah.

Now I do.

Yeah. It's only like a five megabyte single binary.

It does look like it might be pretty new. I think it wasn't created too long ago. So early days. But give it a try. Maybe you can help shape it.

Also, great support for JSON output. All that kind of stuff as well. So if you just want something that reports on the back end, doesn't stand up

Yeah, and they've got some cool sort of example deployments in some of their guides, like a Technidium DNS server in a jail, Jellyfin in a jail, Rocky Linux jail, if you want to use that Linux compatibility mode, and then you get sort of this cool management layer on top.

Yeah, and it is a nice UI with resources, you know, overviews, dashboards.

Yeah, modern, svelte JavaScript stuff.

Nice, easy, EI, EI, geez, I'm getting sleepy, UI to create virtual machines, and what I think is really great about it is that it's sitting on top of FreeBSD, right? It's not like its own weird, although I think they do offer an ISO, but like it just runs on top.

Right on top. Yeah.

You know, Chris, I probably would have got a couple extra points had you linked us Sylvie earlier in the week, so no thanks.

You think it's Sylvie? I like Sleeve because it's like it's a sleeve for your VM.

You need to write to him.

Sylvie has been nice to me, so.

Okay, all right. And it is BSD2 licensed.

Appropriate.

Yeah, as you might expect. As you might expect. We'll have links to all of that

Yeah, that's right. How about cloud chapters and how about VTT diarized transcripts? Is that good enough for you?

I mean, from that, you can do quite a bit. Those are all in our feed as well as a video version, all in there as part of the podcasting 2.0 namespace. Multiple clients support that. But even if your client doesn't, if you know how to pull up an RSS feed in your browser, you can find the URLs to stuff. You know, it's right there. And of course, we are also live on Sundays. Make it a Linux Tuesday on a Sunday.