LINUX Unplugged

Three revelations from Red Hat Summit. Our on-the-ground report will separate fact from hype.

Sponsored By:

• Tailscale: Tailscale is a programmable networking software that is private and secure by default - get it free on up to 100 devices!
• Kolide: Kolide is a device trust solution for companies with Okta, and they ensure that if a device isn't trusted and secure, it can't log into your cloud apps.
• Core Contributor Membership: Save $3 a month on your membership, and get the Bootleg and ad-free version of the show. Code: MAY

Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

• 💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike
• 📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FM
• Introducing image mode for Red Hat Enterprise Linux — Image mode for Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a new deployment method that takes a container-native approach to deliver the OS as a bootc container image.
• Image mode for Red Hat Enterprise Linux Overview
• Image mode for Red Hat Enterprise Linux YouTube Example
• podman-desktop-extension-bootc — Support for bootable OS containers (bootc) and generating disk images.
• bootc Introduction — Transactional, in-place operating system updates using OCI/Docker container images. bootc is the key component in a broader mission of bootable containers.
• Show HN: Convert your Containerfile to a bootable OS
• What is InstructLab? — InstructLab is an open source project for enhancing large language models (LLMs) used in generative artificial intelligence (gen AI) applications.
• InstructLab — InstructLab is a model-agnostic open source AI project that facilitates contributions to Large Language Models (LLMs).
• instructlab CLI — Command-line interface. Use this to chat with the model or train the model (training consumes the taxonomy data).
• IBM's Granite code model family is going open source — We're releasing a series of decoder-only Granite code models for code generative tasks, trained with code written in 116 programming languages. The Granite code models family consists of models ranging in size from 3 to 34 billion parameters, in both a base model and instruction-following model variants.
• ibm-granite/granite-code-models — A Family of Open Foundation Models for Code Intelligence.
• Getting Started with Fedora/CentOS bootc — The Fedora/CentOS bootc project generates reference base images that are designed for use with the bootc project. Its goal is to provide a host system easily configurable via container tooling, usable as a container host, but also to allow non-containerized deployments with applications bound to the host context.
• CentOS/centos-bootc — Create and maintain base bootable container images from Fedora ELN and CentOS Stream packages.
• LAB Paper: Large-Scale Alignment for ChatBots
• Spring Membership Discount — $3 off forever.
• psitransfer — Simple open source self-hosted file sharing solution. It's an alternative to paid services like Dropbox, WeTransfer.
• bhh32's food-journal — Command line tool and web application to keep track of my food intake.
• Pick: URL to PNG — A URL to PNG generator over HTTP with a fairly simple API accessed via query params passed to the server.
• Bonus Pick: Telegraph — Telegraph is a simple Morse translator, start typing your message to see the resulting Morse code and vice versa.

A few of our go-to tools for one-liner web servers, sharing media directly from folders, and a much needed live Arch server update, and more!

Sponsored By:

• Tailscale: Tailscale is a programmable networking software that is private and secure by default - get it free on up to 100 devices!
• Kolide: Kolide is a device trust solution for companies with Okta, and they ensure that if a device isn't trusted and secure, it can't log into your cloud apps.
• Core Contributor Membership: Save $3 a month on your membership, and get the Bootleg and ad-free version of the show. Code: MAY

Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

• 💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike
• 📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FM
• Berlin with Brent — May Meetup, Sat, May 11, 2024, 6:30 PM CEST
• Linuxfest Northwest 2024 Videos
• Tiny File Manager — Web based File Manager in PHP, Manage your files efficiently and easily with Tiny File Manager and it is a simple, fast and small file manager with a single file.
• Tiny File Manager Password Options
• Tiny File Manager Project Demo
• noblepayne/tinyfilemanager-flake — nix run github:noblepayne/tinyfilemanager-flake
• Big list of http static server one-liners — python -m http.server 8000
• awesome-webservers: ⚙️ — Collection of one-liner static servers.
• static-web-server — A cross-platform, high-performance and asynchronous web server for static files-serving. ⚡
• The smallest Docker image to serve static websites
• Self-Hosted 122: Back to the Future — How Chris created live TV streaming from his local media collection, Alex breaks down the new Open Home Foundation and what it means for self-hosters. Brent's been trying out an open-source AirDrop replacement for all systems, and much more!
• LocalSend — An open-source cross-platform alternative to AirDrop.
• 🌷 Spring Membership Discount 🌱 — Promo code: MAY
• SouthEast LinuxFest — June 7-9, 2024 in Charlotte, NC.
• Boost LINUX Unplugged on Fountain’s Website
• Pick: audioserve — Simple personal server to serve audiofiles files from folders. Intended primarily for audio books, but anything with decent folder structure will do.
• Neofetch is Dead! Here are 7 Alternatives for Your Linux System

The first LinuxFest is back and better than ever. We share stories and friends from one of the best Linux gatherings of the year: LinuxFest Northwest.

Sponsored By:

• Tailscale: Tailscale is a programmable networking software that is private and secure by default - get it free on up to 100 devices!
• Kolide: Kolide is a device trust solution for companies with Okta, and they ensure that if a device isn't trusted and secure, it can't log into your cloud apps.

Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

• 💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike
• 📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FM
• LinuxFest Northwest 2024 — An annual open-source event co-produced by Bellingham Linux Users Group, the Information Technology department at BTC, Cascade STEAM, and Jupiter Broadcasting.
• Bellingham Technical College — At BTC, we're here to help you access the hands-on education that can give you an advantage in today's job market.
• Ubuntu 24.04 LTS Downloads Now Available — Ubuntu 24.04 is an exciting Long Term Support (LTS) update with this new Linux distribution release being powered by the Linux 6.8 kernel, making use of Netplan for networking on the desktop, features the modernized desktop OS installer, various performance optimizations, and a ton of new features.
• x32-proxy — UDP and Web Socket proxy server for Behringer and Midas digital mixer control.
• LinuxFest Northwest YouTube
• Peyton's GitHub
• Electromagnetic Field — A non-profit camping festival for those with an inquisitive mind or an interest in making things: hackers, artists, geeks, crafters, scientists, and engineers.
• completenoob's NixOS ZFS on Root Setup — Install NixOS with ZFS on root on a ThinkPad T470 with 24gb Ram and a 1TB nvme ssd.
• radio-browser.info — This is a community driven effort (like wikipedia) with the aim of collecting as many internet radio and TV stations as possible. Any help is appreciated!
• Pick: Playlifin — A tool to convert a Youtube Music playlist to a Jellyfin playlists.
• Pick: Playlifin Voyager — Playlifin Voyager is a tool to export and import playlists from and to your Jellyfin Server.

We're back from Austin, with interviews and stories to share. Plus, it's Gentoo week and we take our first look at Fedora 40.

Sponsored By:

• Tailscale: Tailscale is a programmable networking software that is private and secure by default - get it free on up to 100 devices!
• Kolide: Kolide is a device trust solution for companies with Okta, and they ensure that if a device isn't trusted and secure, it can't log into your cloud apps.

Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

• 💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike
• 📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FM
• Fedora 40 beta is fastest operating system I've tested — Apps opened in the blink of an eye. The Overview appeared instantly. Everything seemed to be built around the idea that the user works at the speed of madness and the OS is there to help make it happen.
• Fedora Linux 40 Docs
• Fedora Linux 40 Cleared For Release — Fedora 40 thus will see its official release happen next Tuesday, 23 April.
• F40 Change Proposal: Drop Delta RPMs — According to early feedback from Release Engineering, it looks like it will not be feasible to address the shortcomings of Delta RPMs as they are currently implemented, and since they often no longer result in a net reduction in download sizes for upgrades, this Change proposes both to disable the generation of DeltaRPMs during the compose process, and to disable the deltarpm support in dnf / dnf5 by default.
• Berlin with Brent May Meetup — May 11, 2024
• LinuxFest Northwest 2025 — April 26 - 28, 2024
• System76 and Jupiter Broadcasting Epic Parking Lot BBQ — Sat, Apr 27, 2024, 12:00 PM
• LFNW Talk: 5 Reasons to Love NixOS — NixOS seems to be everywhere these days and has the fanatic energy usually reserved for Arch users. But WHY is it so popular? In this talk, I'll go over 5 reasons I love NixOS and you might too.
• LFNW Talk: Deploying NixOS Anywhere — In this talk, we'll unlock the full potential of NixOS by exploring how its unique architecture enables installation just about anywhere—from bare metal and VMs to a VPS provider near you.
• LFNW Talk: LINUX Unplugged LIVE — We're recording a live edition of LINUX Unplugged in person. Our weekly Linux talk show with no script, no limits, surprise guests, and tons of opinions.

We asked, and you answered: Your top 5 Linux app essentials and post-install rituals. Plus, some news to better cope with "extreme file-system damage."

Sponsored By:

• Tailscale: Tailscale is a programmable networking software that is private and secure by default - get it free on up to 100 devices!
• Kolide: Kolide is a device trust solution for companies with Okta, and they ensure that if a device isn't trusted and secure, it can't log into your cloud apps.

Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

• Berlin with Brent: May Meetup — Brent is back in Berlin! Please join the Jupiter Broadcasting community for an evening together, and bring your friends!
• 💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike
• 📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FM
• Warp — Warp allows you to securely send files to each other via the internet or local network by exchanging a word-based code.
• Bcachefs Repair Code Reaching Complete & Robust Recovery — "This patchset was kindly tested by a user from India who accidentally wiped one drive out of a three drive filesystem with no replication on the family computer - it took a couple weeks but we got everything important back."
• Linux 6.9-rc3 Released With Many Bcachefs Patches — "[...] but hey, if you had a corrupted bcachefs filesystem you'd probably want this, and if you thought bcachefs was stable already, I have a bridge to sell you. Special deal only for you, real cheap."
• Fedora 42 Change Proposal Wants To Make KDE Plasma The Default Over GNOME
• F42 Change Proposal: Fedora Plasma Workstation — Switch the default desktop experience for Workstation to KDE Plasma. The GNOME desktop is moved to a separate spin / edition, retaining release-blocking status.
• Changes/FedoraPlasmaWorkstation - Fedora Project Wiki
• 412linux.io — N100 Media Serving Efficiency with Quick Sync
• Pick: FreeTube — FreeTube is an open source desktop YouTube player built with privacy in mind. Use YouTube without advertisements and prevent Google from tracking you with their cookies and JavaScript. Available for Windows, Mac & Linux thanks to Electron.
• FreeBSD Speedruns — The zero-to-desktop FreeBSD speedrun category records the time taken from the first boot of a FreeBSD image, through installation, to the display of a desktop environment or window manager.
• FreeBSD Zero to Desktop Speedrun Challenge — The operations and commands that needed to be done took me 1:33 and installation of base.txz/kernel.txz datasets took 0:28. Downloading and installing needed pkg(8) packages took 2:22 of time.

We're building a completely hidden Linux OS inside an existing system—with no trace left behind.

Sponsored By:

• Tailscale: Tailscale is a programmable networking software that is private and secure by default - get it free on up to 100 devices!
• Kolide: Kolide is a device trust solution for companies with Okta, and they ensure that if a device isn't trusted and secure, it can't log into your cloud apps.

Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

• 💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike — The global money app for fast, safe payments and bitcoin. Get sats easy.
• 📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FM — Grab the Fountain app and listen live, boost along, and more.
• Shufflecake — Plausible deniability for multiple hidden filesystems on Linux
• System76 and Jupiter Broadcasting Epic Parking Lot BBQ, Sat, Apr 27, 2024, 4:30 PM | Meetup
• Jupiter Extras: Nostr Workshop — Our Nostr workshop. We'll help you get your Nostr identity and answer any questions.

We're breaking down the attack: how it works, how it was hidden, and why time was running out for the attacker.

Sponsored By:

• Tailscale: Tailscale is a programmable networking software that is private and secure by default - get it free on up to 100 devices!
• Kolide: Kolide is a device trust solution for companies with Okta, and they ensure that if a device isn't trusted and secure, it can't log into your cloud apps.

Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

• 💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike
• 📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FM
• oss-security mailing list — Backdoor in upstream xz/liblzma leading to ssh server compromise.
• Fedora Announcement
• Debian Announcement
• Ubuntu Announcement
• Kali Linux Announcement
• Arch Linux Announcement
• Gentoo Announcement
• openSUSE Tumbleweeed Announcement
• NixOS Unstable Discussion
• Why does it take two weeks for NixOS to replace xz?
• Andres Freund on Mastodon — I was doing some micro-benchmarking at the time, needed to quiesce the system to reduce noise. Saw sshd processes were using a surprising amount of CPU, despite immediately failing because of wrong usernames etc....
• rwmj on Hacker News — Very annoying - the apparent author of the backdoor was in communication with me over several weeks trying to get xz 5.6.x added to Fedora 40 & 41 because of its "great new features"
• A Microcosm of the interactions in Open Source projects — Make no mistake. This is the way it works. It needs to change.
• Devuan GNU/Linux on X — Devuan is not affected by the latest vulnerability caused by systemd.
• systemd PR: Dynamically load compression libraries
• Matteo Croce on X — I'm the author of such PR. While I absolutely didn't know that libxz had a backdoor, I really think that libraries should be loaded on-demand when rarely used, hence my change :)
• Ryan C. Gordon on X — This is probably how the xz thing happened, right?
• Jan Wildeboer on the Fediverse — Again the FOSS world has proven to be vigilant and proactive in finding bugs and backdoors, IMHO.
• Unplugged Core Membership
• TXLF is coming up! — April 12 - 13 in Austin, Texas.
• LFNW coming up! — April 26 - 28
• Mobile Game Ads Are Boosting Podcast Follower Counts — Wondery, iHeart and Lemonada Media are all using a non-public product from MowPod - which gives extra lives and game credits to gamers if they follow shows on Apple Podcasts from game apps.
• MowPod's podcast promotion tools: tales from the bar
• fortydeux's NixOS Configs
• Prism Launcher — An Open Source Minecraft launcher with the ability to manage multiple instances, accounts and mods.
• World Backup Day — March 31st — One small accident or failure could destroy all the important stuff you care about.
• Updating Our Fiddly Bits | LINUX Unplugged 494

We test the Linux-first, all-AMD Sirius 16 laptop, discuss the new Hyprland release, and share a few stories from our recent trip.

Sponsored By:

• Tailscale: Tailscale is a programmable networking software that is private and secure by default - get it free on up to 100 devices!
• FlakeHub.com: FlakeHub.com is the all-in-one platform for secure, compliant, and transformative Nix development. Bring Nix to work the way you always wanted with FlakeHub.com. Register for the private beta and get a secure, compliance-friendly Nix and all the support you need.
• Koide: Kolide is a device trust solution for companies with Okta, and they ensure that if a device isn’t trusted and secure, it can’t log into your cloud apps.

Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

• 💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike
• 📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FM
• Introducing GNOME 46 — GNOME 46 is code-named “Kathmandu”, in recognition of the amazing work done by the organizers of GNOME.Asia 2023.
• S.O.D.A Machine (Shell On Demand Appliance) — A fusion of hardware, software, art, and hacking, all encapsulated in a project derived from recycled materials.
• LINUX Unplugged on Fountain
• Nostr Protocol Docs — Details on how the Nostr Protocol works and why.

We're on the ground live at NixCon and SCaLE. We catch up with old friends, and discover how Nix is devouring the Linux world one function at a time.

Sponsored By:

• Tailscale: Tailscale is a programmable networking software that is private and secure by default - get it free on up to 100 devices!
• FlakeHub.com: FlakeHub.com is the all-in-one platform for secure, compliant, and transformative Nix development. Bring Nix to work the way you always wanted with FlakeHub.com. Register for the private beta and get a secure, compliance-friendly Nix and all the support you need.
• Kolide: Kolide is a device trust solution for companies with Okta, and they ensure that if a device isn’t trusted and secure, it can’t log into your cloud apps.

Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

• nix-community/lanzaboote — Secure Boot for NixOS
• Eelco Dolstra’s PhD Thesis — The Purely Functional Software Deployment Model
• Docker and Nix (DockerCon 2023) [YouTube]
• Flox — Create development environments with all the dependencies you need and easily share them with colleagues. Work consistently across the entire software lifecycle.
• flox on GitHub — Developer environments you can take with you.
• Gsettings - Monitor All System Settings Change
• dconf Reference Manual
• foss-north — foss-north is a free / open source conference covering both software and hardware from the technical perspective. We provide a meeting place for the Nordic foss communities and will bring together great speakers with great audiences.
• An Open Letter from NixOS Users Against MIC Sponsorship — Several members of the community are uneasy with the current happenings around the North American Gathering aimed at NixOS Users and its community (also known as NixCon [sic] NA).
• pjones/plasma-manager — Manage KDE Plasma with Home Manager.
• Bastard Keyboards — Custom-designed split keyboards with feature-full firmware.
• Bastardkb on GitHub
• Pick: nix-starter-configs — Simple and documented config templates to help you get started with NixOS + home-manager + flakes.

We each bring surprise topics, a mix of hardware and software, as we prepare to hit the road for NixCon and SCaLE.

Sponsored By:

• Tailscale: Tailscale is a programmable networking software that is private and secure by default - get it free on up to 100 devices!
• FlakeHub.com: FlakeHub.com is the all-in-one platform for secure, compliant, and transformative Nix development. Bring Nix to work the way you always wanted with FlakeHub.com. Register for the private beta and get a secure, compliance-friendly Nix and all the support you need.
• Kolide: Kolide is a device trust solution for companies with Okta, and they ensure that if a device isn’t trusted and secure, it can’t log into your cloud apps.

Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

• 💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike