Live from LinuxFest Norhtwest 2025 Day 1. Exclusive coverage, chats, interviews, and more. Catch day two in episode 612 of LINUX Unplugged.

Sponsored By:

• Join the Party! The Jupiter Membership Party: Join the party and get exclusive content.

Links:

• LinuxFest Northwest Homepage — 25 Years of Community Excellence.
• nixbook — Convert your old computer (even chromebook) to a user friendly, lightweight, durable, and auto updating operating system build on top of NixOS.
• COSMIC Alpha 7 — ISO excited for the latest COSMIC alpha release! We’ve been busy clearing up scores of bugs while soldering together the features that we absolutely must include before the Big Betahemoth descends upon the Earth. Let COSMIC Alpha 7 commence!
• The best-looking Linux desktop I've seen so far in 2025 — The creators of one of the coolest Linux distros just released a new version - and it puts the old one to shame.
• Linux Kernel Vulnerability Allows Attackers to Escalate Privileges via Out-of-Bounds Write — The vulnerability can be triggered by manipulating a specially crafted HFS+ filesystem, which, under certain conditions, can overwrite sensitive data in kernel space.
• Zorin OS 17.3 takes Brave step of changing default browser — Zorin OS 17.3 is the latest point release in the 17.x series, meaning it's still built on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. It's a free upgrade for anyone already running a previous 17.x release.
• LINUX Unplugged 612: 25 Years of LinuxFest Northwest — We're live from LinuxFest Northwest 2025. We're joined by guests from the audience, try our hand at Linux trivia and share our experiences from the best fest in the West.

Texas LinuxFest day two live from the floor. It's a busy one, and we have some great guests sit down and chat. Then we send out Brent to walk the show expo hall.

Links:

• Texas Linux Fest Schedule
• Terry Black's BBQ

Live from the floor of Texas LinuxFest. We capture the structured chaos 1 from Austin Texas.

Links:

• Texas Linux Festival 2024 — Texas Linux Fest is the first state-wide annual community-run conference for Linux and open source software users and enthusiasts from around the Lone Star State.

Our Nostr workshop. We’ll help you get your Nostr identity and answer any questions.

Plus, where we see this protocol going and features coming.

We're finding new use cases for it every week. It's based on simple and flexible event objects (passed around as plain JSON).

And, of course - it's open source.

One of the more compelling usecases emerging is decentralized realtime chat.

Because everything is passed around as plain JSON, the ability to build cross-app and platform apps is built in.

Create one identity and use it across all the apps and sites. Taking your identity with you is as simple as bringing your key.

Fountain.fm is building a new live experience, with an embeddable webchat built around Nostr. The chat can be pulled into any app or website. And it will be easy to build tooling around.

Links:

• Nostr Starter Pack
• Primal
• Alby
• Fountain

A bonus stream and our first official LIT Coder stream! Chris discusses CES 2024 day two and its focus on artificial intelligence.

Then, explore AI regulations with Carolyn Posner from the Consumer Technology Association.

Additionally, we delve into the potential approval of Bitcoin ETFs and the fading of diversity, equity, and inclusion policies in big businesses.

Note: Description and Chapters genreated by AI, Boost in and tell me how it did!

Chris hangs with the live stream while we wait for the Coder that never starts. We cover new transparent OLED TVs, the trend of canceling streaming services, a government spending deal, affordable televisions, Nvidia's Super Series, Apple's AI strategy, drug use in Silicon Valley, Bitcoin ETFs, the Y2K issue, and the importance of safety in updating chips and programs. Stay tuned for more.

Note: Description and Chapters have been AI-generated. How'd it do?

Brent sits down with Tim Canham, Senior Software Engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. We explore topics including the hardware and software powering NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter; JPL's switch from Solaris to Linux; the open source projects, tools, and philosophy at JPL, ...and more.

Special Guest: Tim Canham.

Sponsored By:

• Join the Party! The Jupiter Membership Party: Join the party and get exclusive content.

Links:

• LINUX Unplugged
• LINUX Unplugged - Tim Canham
• Timothy Canham - People Profile - NASA Mars
• NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) - Robotic Space Exploration
• Mars Helicopter - NASA Mars
• Mars Perseverance Rover | NASA
• Cassini | NASA
• Curiosity – NASA Mars Exploration
• Sun Microsystems - Wikipedia
• Oracle Solaris - Wikipedia
• Fry's Electronics - Wikipedia
• Matplotlib — Visualization with Python
• Elasticsearch — The Official Distributed Search & Analytics Engine
• BBC World Service - 13 Minutes to the Moon
• BBC World Service - 13 Minutes to the Moon, Ep.05 The fourth astronaut — The computer that got us to the moon. The size of a briefcase, there had never been anything like it. Apollo 11 was “the first time software ran on the moon”.
• Impostor syndrome - Wikipedia
• How NASA Designed a Helicopter That Could Fly Autonomously on Mars - IEEE Spectrum
• GitHub - F´ - A Flight Software and Embedded Systems Framework
• F´ - A Flight Software and Embedded Systems Framework
• Meet the Open-Source Software Powering NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter
• quickemu — Quickly create and run optimised Windows, macOS and Linux desktop virtual machines.
• MythTV, Open Source DVR
• Brent Gervais - @brentgervais on Twitter

Brent sits down with Dr Quentin Stafford-Fraser, computer scientist, serial-entrepreneur, inventor (perhaps) of the webcam, Augmented Reality Ph.D. who ran the very first web server at the University of Cambridge, among much more. We explore topics including computer science as an art-form, the origins of the Raspberry Pi and T9 predictive text, philosophies around innovation and invention, challenging the patent system, and more.

Special Guest: Quentin Stafford-Fraser.

Links:

• Quentin's Personal Website
• Quentin's Blog - Status-Q
• Telemarq
• SPARCstation - Wikipedia
• Raspberry Pi Foundation
• Raspberry Pi — Computing for everybody
• OpenStreetMap — a map of the world, created by people like you and free to use under an open license
• T9 (predictive text) - Wikipedia
• The GNU General Public License v3.0 - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation
• Moore's law - Wikipedia
• One Laptop per Child - Wikipedia
• Nicholas Negroponte: One Laptop per Child, two years on - TED Talk
• Social Warming: The Dangerous and Polarising Effects of Social Media by Charles Arthur
• Dr Quentin Stafford-Fraser - @quentinsf on Twitter
• Brent Gervais - @brentgervais on Twitter

Chris's thoughts on Linux's NVIDIA conundrum, Elon's takeover of Twitter, MailChimp's insider hack, and the Google Drones taking off in Texas.

Links:

• Matthew Miller's Thread on Twitter — "Here's the conundrum with @Nvidia drivers on Linux, in a thread. I have a Fedora perspective, obviously, but I think it's a shared problem. (🧵 rant which I'm not going to bother to count or number.) #linux #nvidia #opensource #freesoftware"
• Elon Musk Buys 9.2% Twitter Shares in Passive Stake — Elon Musk took a 9.2% stake in Twitter Inc. to become the platform’s biggest shareholder, a week after hinting he might shake up the social media industry.
• Hackers breach MailChimp's internal tools to target crypto customers — Sunday morning, Twitter was abuzz with reports from owners of Trezor hardware cryptocurrency wallets who received phishing notifications claiming that the company suffered a data breach.
• Fortnite raised $144 million for Ukraine relief — The game raised $36 million in its first day alone, and today, Epic revealed the final total of $144 million. The funds are being put towards several aid groups, including Direct Relief, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the United Nations Children’s Fund, and the World Food Programme.
• Alphabet's Wing will begin drone deliveries in Dallas-Fort Worth on April 7th — Alphabet's Wing division has announced that it's launching a drone delivery service in the Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) metroplex on April 7th. "With this service, the DFW area will be the largest metro in the world, and the first in the United States, with access to on-demand drone delivery," a company spokesperson said in an emailed statement. 

The Unplugged team holds a live event with a special guest, your questions, and we give away a lot of Bitcoin sats!

Sponsored By:

• Linode: See why we and Linux users around the world love Linode, and get a $100 credit

Links:

• Jupiter Broadcasting Meetup Page
• Jupiter Broadcasting Matrix Server Info
• Link to Our Matrix
• Guides to Learn to Matrix — Imagine a place... where you are welcomed to be yourself, where you have control on your data, and where you can talk more privately, while also allowing you to socialize with others.
• New Podcast Apps that Support Boosts
• Fountain Podcasts
• Castamatic
• BlueWallet - Bitcoin wallet and Lightning wallet for iOS and Android
• The Bitcoin Dad Pod
• nixos-challenge: NixOS Challenge
• LINUX Unplugged 451: The NixOS Challenge — We explore what makes NixOS so powerful, and why it might be the future of all Linux distributions.