Chris: Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris.
Wes: My name is Wes.
Brent: And my name is Brent.
Chris: Hello, gentlemen. Well, coming
Chris: up on the show today, we have something new and something old for you.
Chris: Valve made some big Linux hardware news this week, so we're going to give you
Chris: our take and the big things I think everyone's kind of overlooking.
Chris: Then we have a souped up, refurbished one liter PC that might just work for
Chris: my home lab. We're going to put the ThinkCenter M920Q through the tests,
Chris: and then we'll round out the show with some great boos, some picks, and a lot more.
Chris: So before I go any further, let's say time-appropriate greetings to that virtual
Chris: log. Hello, Mumble Room!
Mumble: Hey, Chris, hey, Wes, and hello, Branch.
Chris: You're doing good. You're representing. It's a small on-air crew.
Chris: We've got some up in the quiet listening.
Chris: Everybody's out. Otherwise, I think having a nice Sunday. Of course,
Chris: our Mumble Room is live during the show. Details at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash mumble.
Chris: Also, be sure to check out defined.net slash unplugged and go meet our friends at Defined Networking.
Chris: They have Manage Nebula, which sits on top of the open source Nebula decentralized
Chris: VPN platform that we love.
Chris: Unlike traditional VPNs, Nebula's decentralized design keeps your network resilient.
Chris: If you have a home lab, which is a couple of machines or a global enterprise
Chris: from 2017 on, this thing had to hit the ground running because it interconnected
Chris: Slack's global infrastructure across multiple data centers around the world.
Chris: And they're moving everybody's data. So it has to work. It has to be confidential.
Chris: And something I have been negligent to mention, but I wanted to,
Chris: is at the beginning of summer, they released desktop clients for Nebula.
Chris: And there's a Linux client in there as well as iOS and Android.
Chris: Defined Networking has managed Nebula, which you can try out for free up to
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Chris: not something built on another platform that's going in a different direction.
Chris: And so go check out Nebula. Try it out for free, up to 100 devices with a managed
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Chris: Go to defined.net slash unplugged.
Chris: You deserve a better VPN experience. So go redefine it at defined.net slash unplugged.
Chris: We have a spot of housekeeping before we start the show. Ohio Linux Fest is
Chris: back December 6th, 2025.
Chris: Brent, are you going to just pop down? You know, just pop on down for a little...
Brent: It's only like 10 hours from where I am now, so maybe, maybe.
Wes: We've got over 10 days, so plenty of time for you.
Brent: Oh, thanks.
Chris: Yeah, now we know you can do it. It'll be in downtown Columbus at the Sonesta
Chris: Hotel. We'll have a link in the show notes. You do need to register.
Chris: Listener Jonathan will be there giving a talk. He's a sysadmin at Red Hat,
Chris: and he manages a fleet of laptops. That's neat.
Wes: Yeah, this talk should explain what to consider when managing Linux workstations
Wes: for remote or traveling employees, discuss some of the technology used,
Wes: and how things have changed.
Wes: Yeah, that's a non-trivial problem, and you'll love to see it being talked about
Wes: because I'm someone who wants to work for employers that provide Linux laptops.
Wes: So, you know, realistically, that comes with, like, compliance and other things
Wes: that needs to happen to make it work in the org. So, you know, spread that knowledge.
Chris: I did do the travel math. If I was willing to drive 11 hours a day,
Chris: it'd be 3.7 days of driving.
Chris: 3.7 days total of driving to get one way.
Brent: You could totally do it. We've done worse.
Chris: It's a bit of a trek.
Wes: I know this is one we've been wanting to make for years now.
Wes: Yeah. But it has eluded us.
Brent: Tell you what, fly in somewhere, I'll pick you up, and then that'll shorten your drive.
Chris: I like this idea.
Wes: And we still sort of get like an artificial road trip. out of it.
Brent: You get to ride in the van.
Chris: Perhaps in our absence uh
Chris: some of you could go and either boost us a little report emails report or even
Chris: better show up in the mumble room and tell us how ohio linux fest went again
Chris: it's on december 6th we'll have links to the web page and you do need to register
Chris: so all that information will be in the show notes at linuxunplugged.com slash 641,
Chris: Well, Valve made some big news this week. They announced a whole lineup of hardware.
Chris: We have a new Steam frame, an updated Steam controller, and the Steam machine
Chris: is back in a new and revamped way.
Chris: And they're all running Steam OS.
Chris: The implications feel pretty big here.
Brent: The fact that they're all running Steam OS, I think, is the thing that jumps
Brent: out at me first. This is what we were hoping for in our, was it our predictions?
Brent: Did someone predict this? but that feels like quite a good thing for the linux ecosystem.
Wes: Kind of a doubling down from them right like um we
Wes: had this first go around if this if this was the
Wes: usual like uh random government agency switches to linux then like they would
Wes: have already cycled back a few times uh by now but like instead we're getting
Wes: steam machine take two but they've spent like the last decade building out a
Wes: whole bunch of cool technology underneath to to make it work out hopefully a
Wes: lot better this time yeah.
Chris: If it was a movie trailer or something the subtitle would be it would be steam
Chris: machine 2 and the subtitle would be lessons learned right because that's that's the sense i got and i.
Wes: Or i.
Chris: Tried to devour all the interviews and that was the sense i got is they incorporated
Chris: everything they've learned from proton and linux development and steam deck
Chris: and they realized oh we would do the steam machine way differently now,
Chris: So Gabe quotes, Gabe said, quote, we've been super happy with the success of
Chris: the Steam Deck and PC gamers have continued asking for even more ways to play
Chris: all the great titles of their Steam libraries.
Chris: I will admit I have wanted them to do more with VR. So here's just to go over it.
Chris: The 2026 lineup, which they say early 2026, is a updated Steam controller.
Chris: Quite a nice update to it, actually, with magnetic sticks and new trackpads
Chris: and all that. And they're including, which you're going to hear more about this,
Chris: a low-latency wireless dongle, which is also built in to the Steam machine.
Wes: Yeah, doesn't it seem nice? I don't know. I mean, I've only seen a couple of
Wes: clips, but just the UX around it, the fit and finish, it seemed like a great idea.
Chris: Brent, I get a sense you're the most excited about the new Steam machine,
Chris: which is a six-inch cube aimed for the living room. It's got a Zen 4 processor in it.
Chris: I guess that's six times, they say, more powerful than the Steam Deck.
Brent: Wow.
Chris: So it's a little box, a little Steam machine.
Brent: Considering what some listeners have done with the Steam Deck and their portability
Brent: and traveling, I think, yes, this is the kind of machine you and I love,
Brent: Chris. A little tiny thing you could just plunk anywhere that gets all the work
Brent: done. And, oh, wait, I said work.
Brent: This is a gaming machine. Wait a second.
Chris: Well, you know, I mean, it probably does make a nice little desktop machine, too.
Wes: I mean, you do love seeing them. Even Steam, you know, saying that as part of their adverts.
Chris: Yes.
Wes: I will note, just as, you know, it's getting called the GameCube,
Wes: and as a GameCube fan, the only thing I'm really missing from it is,
Wes: where's the nice little handle?
Chris: That does need a handle. You're right.
Wes: Maybe there'll be 3D, you know, 3D printed aftermarket stuff you can get.
Chris: People will build them for sure. For sure. And this, again, made for the living room.
Chris: So probably people that were Steam Deck or are Steam Deck customers and always
Chris: leave it hooked up to the TV, which I guess is 20%. I think that was the number they quoted.
Wes: Yeah, I'm wondering about that because it does it does feel like console targeted.
Wes: I wonder how you feel about the value to money. You mentioned like a 6x factor
Wes: or something. But I've seen some people a little unhappy, feeling like maybe
Wes: we don't really know the full price details or anything, but just feeling like
Wes: maybe this isn't going to be long term competitive.
Chris: Yeah, that's a good question. That is a good question. I'm a little. Yeah, I agree.
Chris: I'm a little underwhelmed. I feel like I could build a more powerful system,
Chris: but we don't know what the price. Yeah.
Wes: Maybe if to your point, they're targeting more casual folks that you just want
Wes: something that'll work well enough. You're not necessarily nitpicking over triple A frame rates.
Chris: What I understand is their goal was you could play the majority of the Steam
Chris: library at a 4K resolution on a TV with not everything turned up,
Chris: but like decent settings.
Wes: Yeah, okay.
Chris: And then they're going to release essentially an API that game developers can use.
Chris: So when it loads on one of these Steam devices, they know which type of Steam
Chris: device they're on and they can preset the game video settings to be optimized for that machine.
Wes: Oh, okay.
Chris: Yeah. So that's one of the ways they're going to eek a little extra out of what
Chris: might otherwise be slightly underwhelming specs.
Chris: But the thing I think that I'm the most excited about, I'm curious to hear how you guys feel.
Chris: And this is the part I think I might have predicted, as I think I predicted
Chris: before we saw the next Steam Deck, we'd see them do something in VR.
Chris: And now we have. It's called the Steam Frame, a lightweight standalone streaming
Chris: VR headset powered by a Snapdragon 8 ARM processor.
Chris: It has eye tracking and something that Valve has called foveated streaming.
Chris: So this thing is really designed to be able to stream games to it.
Chris: You can also play games locally, but it's designed around the intention of streaming
Chris: any game from Steam on your desktop.
Chris: And the foveated streaming is something that happens after the game has been
Chris: rendered on the remote PC.
Chris: So the remote PC's GPU works hard. So you can have a nice fancy sucker in there.
Chris: And it renders the game frames.
Chris: And then just before the software sends it off to the frame that you have on
Chris: your face, it spends all the time in the video and all that rendering only the
Chris: part that you're looking at because the frame is tracking your eyes.
Chris: And so if you were to somehow be able to zoom out and look at the entire picture
Chris: only the exact spot you're looking at has all of the resources and everything
Chris: else is lower res lower rendered and so it's only doing its most,
Chris: computational workload exactly where you are focused you can't tell because
Chris: you're not looking anywhere else so.
Wes: Does that mean it's streaming your eye tracking data back to the um the host rendering platform.
Chris: That's what i have to reckon yeah it must
Chris: be that kind of data going back and
Chris: forth very cool and very
Chris: impressive the other thing about the frame is that
Chris: it is really going to be quite customizable the entire machine is just in the
Chris: front piece like the little tiny visor piece that pops off and there is just
Chris: going to be a world of accessories to make this thing comfortable and i think
Chris: the part that people have have mentioned but have maybe glossed over is this is a full,
Chris: it is ARM, but it is a full Steam machine.
Chris: So that means you can sideload software on this thing.
Chris: And it also means that you can run Linux desktop mode on the Steam frame, on the VR headset.
Brent: This is exactly what you've been asking for.
Wes: Yeah, right? How much time have you spent recreating this? Strap a computer to my face.
Brent: He says.
Chris: Wouldn't it be sort of ironic if Valve was the one to bring this to the mainstream?
Chris: Because, you know, there's devices out there that do this. And so I haven't
Chris: heard a lot of people talk about this, but it did come up in an engineering chat.
Chris: And I will link to the full video in the show notes, but here's the bit relevant
Chris: to the Linux desktop on the frame.
Clips: For the microSD card, it's not just for SteamOS games, but any type of media
Clips: content also works on that?
Clips: Are you thinking of it works as extra storage? Media content,
Clips: it's certainly your computer.
Clips: So you as a computer owner can do anything you want with that data storage.
Clips: We tend to think about this as a gaming device first and foremost.
Clips: So while we don't restrict or limit any media options, that is very much not
Clips: our focus out of the gate.
Clips: We'll see what people do with it. Yeah, I mean, I would imagine that a microSD
Clips: card formatted for SteamOS to read it, if you go to desktop mode,
Clips: you'd be able to open files in there and look at it from the file browser. Yeah.
Clips: Does a headset render in a standard resolution? Is that configurable?
Clips: Well, the headset is locked to 2160 by 2160. SteamOS, I guess.
Clips: SteamVR. Yeah, SteamVR and SteamOS, it's all dynamic. All dynamic, okay.
Clips: Yeah, so even when you launch desktop mode, it's less of a mode and more you
Clips: hit a button and you have a desktop window and it could be a big one or a smaller one. Right, okay.
Chris: That could be really neat. It could suck.
Chris: But if you could bring a little high-powered armed face computer and get a Linux
Chris: desktop, a stable plasma Linux desktop, that's pretty exciting.
Chris: That can also game, can also stream stuff from your other computers.
Chris: That, to me, PJ, are you feeling what I'm putting down? Doesn't that feel like
Chris: a compelling product from Valve?
Chris: And you know how Valve leaves these things open. So, like emulators,
Chris: you could sideload on an SD card.
Chris: This sounds like your device.
Mumble: The things I'm feeling are indescribable. Like, this thing has me so fired up.
Mumble: Oh, man. The work they've done, and I kind of called this out a while back when
Mumble: we started seeing the rumors.
Mumble: Oh, Valve is working on ARM stuff and x86 translation.
Mumble: And i'm like oh this is headset this is definitely headset
Mumble: they're not going to do x86 for a headset and sure enough
Mumble: we got a headset and that and that right
Mumble: there the fact that it's running steam ls it's running linux it's not
Mumble: just this isn't great for gaming they are making the
Mumble: apple walled garden for gaming using open source and
Mumble: that is so exciting nobody else is doing this
Mumble: nobody else is making a full range of
Mumble: hardware and software that works together for a
Mumble: use case in this case gaming that all
Mumble: works together really really well and and being powered by linux and open source
Mumble: is incredible and having that compatibility layer having it on arm able to run
Mumble: x86 software we'll see i don't have very high hopes for that because you never
Mumble: know but i do have high hopes that,
Mumble: the system's going to work well for what it's intended to do and i think it's going to.
Mumble: Over achieve the way the steam deck like the
Mumble: steam deck isn't the steam deck isn't the most powerful hardware
Mumble: obviously we know that but it still punches way above
Mumble: its its weight class in terms of raw performance and raw power and i i think
Mumble: we're going to get the same thing here that foveated streaming it comes with
Mumble: a dedicated dongle as well as something people need to understand everyone's
Mumble: wi-fi sucks everybody's wi-fi sucks they solve that by giving you a little router
Mumble: i've given you a dongle yep.
Chris: Yeah that is a good that was a great move.
Mumble: And putting everything on six gigahertz that matters having three different
Mumble: radios all doing different things on the on the frame itself as well man this
Mumble: is exciting i i i've been wanting to get into,
Mumble: into vr for a while i've got a computer for it now
Mumble: you know uh even the index has been on my site but they never never went on
Mumble: sale right so for me it's exciting i'm worried about the wireless factor but
Mumble: i think they've got that covered with the dedicated streaming hardware the standalone
Mumble: stuff 8 16 gigs of ram like it's a powerful computer on your face,
Mumble: rumors to sideload apks for android it's it's armed so you know way droid stuff
Mumble: like that a lot of the vr games or apks are on android meta quest style but
Mumble: open source i'm you're gonna be able to fired up.
Chris: Yeah i i also feel pretty excited about it of course i'm reserving some judgment based on the price.
Chris: We know we're going to have two versions. It'll be a 256 gigabyte and a one
Chris: terabyte versions of the frame.
Chris: The dev program is starting very soon.
Chris: Kits will start going out mid-November. So probably in the next couple of weeks,
Chris: you're going to start seeing these kits go out.
Mumble: They claim the price will be
Mumble: lower than the index. So if it's under a grand, man, I'm sold. I'm sold.
Mumble: Like it's still, the quest is still way cheaper, but you know,
Mumble: pay for what you get, I guess.
Chris: This is one of the big questions. But Valve...
Chris: I don't know about the price, but I want to go back to something you said earlier,
Chris: and that was how the deck seems to punch above its weight.
Chris: We are watching Valve now having figured out the game, right?
Chris: Just like we saw with the deck with Proton, we're watching them invest in the
Chris: technology stack way out ahead of time.
Chris: Getting the infrastructure ready at the open source level way ahead of time.
Chris: And then when it's ready, bring it into their product and making something seemingly
Chris: impossible possible before it was good Windows gaming on Linux and now it's ARM.
Chris: On or x86 games on arm and this is where fex comes in f-e-x and we've talked
Chris: about it very briefly on the show it's a translation layer of sorts right west
Chris: it's kind of like an api translation layer.
Wes: Yep fex allows you to run x86 applications on arm 64 linux devices similar to
Wes: what you might do with like qemu user or box 64 um and then not only can you
Wes: do it just in general but it's also meant to be used alongside things like Wine and Proton.
Wes: So you can have a chance to play x86 Windows games on ARM Linux.
Wes: And then it even has tricks to make that work, like it supports forwarding API
Wes: calls to host system libraries like OpenGL or Vulkan.
Wes: So instead of doing sort of like the dumbest layer of just emulate everything,
Wes: you can sort of figure out like, oh, I could just directly translate this call
Wes: without having to go through the layers of emulation.
Wes: That you can make this work at all, let alone be performant enough to play games enjoyably incredible.
Chris: Yes yeah really um it's
Chris: something i've been meaning to try around on my uh my macbook
Chris: pro i played around with it for like 10 minutes the part
Chris: you just touched on there at the end that it understands if a
Chris: game is making an open gl or a vulcan call it
Chris: doesn't need to emulate that it can just pass that
Chris: through natively or if it's if it's a direct
Chris: x call that it can translate to a vulcan call it can do
Chris: that too but if the game if it's a windows game that's already using open gl
Chris: or vulcan it can pass it right through to the native subsystem which is which
Chris: is a similar trick apple uses with rosetta 2 on the arm macbooks you do have
Chris: to have arm 8 hardware but this is where valve has.
Chris: This long-term thinking, building out these open-source projects,
Chris: Now they have total control over the OS, the software environment that makes
Chris: it possible, and the hardware.
Chris: Like Jeff was kind of saying, it's almost the Apple ecosystem of gaming hardware
Chris: in the sense that they can optimize everything in that entire stack.
Chris: And even after it ships, they can continue to optimize it like we've seen with
Chris: the deck. The deck got better after it came out. It got faster after it came out.
Chris: Games ran better. More games after it came out.
Chris: And that was just them issuing software updates. since they have that whole
Chris: stack and they have fex to emulate
Chris: x86 programs on arm in a way that isn't
Chris: miserable and of
Chris: course we'll see but this to me is one of the absolute missing pieces because
Chris: when i run linux arm which i do pretty frequently everything's a web app for
Chris: me so few things are x86 and if this could be expanded to run other programs
Chris: down the future sort of like you can with Wine and Proton.
Chris: Oh boy. Because you can use it alongside with Wine and Proton,
Chris: of course. You have to be able to. It's just very exciting.
Chris: And to see them kind of put all this in there together, I think the ultimate
Chris: result down the road will be,
Chris: it may become too prohibitive for these game vendors to use this horrible anti-cheat software.
Chris: Because if 20% of your player base is on Steam hardware at some point in the
Chris: future, then you're going to have to do something that lets them play your game
Chris: on their hardware because that's a big customer base at that point.
Chris: And this is sort of happening in a broader context of the gaming ecosystem where
Chris: Xbox is kind of pulling back.
Chris: The consoles are sort of tired. This is a really nice value proposition.
Chris: And if on top of this, we can build out more and more users running these games
Chris: on Linux, on Steam hardware, these game manufacturers, they're going to have
Chris: to respond, right? They're going to have to.
Chris: Because anti-cheat to me seems like the biggest problem still for these devices, right?
Mumble: I just totally agree that developers need to get on board.
Mumble: There's a lot of news like, oh, Steam. Valve is a monopoly and Steam's a monopoly
Mumble: in the gaming sphere. It's like, well, there's no competition,
Mumble: you know, step it up, step up your game and, and, and actually compete in that
Mumble: aspect. And the anti-cheat stuff is a big part of it.
Mumble: You know, Valve kind of lets the developers do what they want to do in a lot of ways.
Mumble: And they just lay it out. It's like, Hey, do you want to be on our platform?
Mumble: Do you want to play your games on this great selling hardware?
Mumble: Then it's got to run on Linux. You got to get rid of that anti-cheat.
Mumble: And I'm really, really hoping that game developers step it up and,
Mumble: and go that way as well. Especially now that we have even more hardware to, to play those games on.
Chris: I'm trying to think of, I'm trying to think of who the ideal customer is for this, Brent.
Chris: Who do you think the ideal customer is for the, for the steam machine?
Chris: Not so much for the frame, but for the steam machine, that kind of console thing.
Brent: Well i think it's me and you to be honest like i maybe i hesitate to buy consoles because,
Brent: i'm not that much of a gamer i used to be there's
Brent: a nostalgia there but i just i don't know every time
Brent: i've tried to you know set up a system it's uh hoops
Brent: to jump through but having a little mini pc that i could use in place of the
Brent: mini pc i bought last year for instance but also have it just like be work all
Brent: the time 100 of the time for some gaming when i do want to jump in that could
Brent: totally convert my sort of,
Brent: the way that I've been a gamer, but I'm no longer a gamer.
Brent: So this may convert a lot of people into gaming, which for Valve,
Brent: I would imagine is a good thing.
Brent: You know, they're, they're reaching out on the edges of their current customer
Brent: base and potentially converting new people to gaming, especially gaming on their platforms.
Brent: Uh, it I'm tempted for the first time in decades, I have to say.
Chris: It's, it's ideal for people like you and me that either live on laptops or B links.
Chris: So it's nice to have a but also i was thinking of
Chris: we hear more and more people that are leaving windows with windows
Chris: 11 frustrations and the end of windows 10 support and
Chris: this just seems like another license to leave windows now you can
Chris: go get your framework you can go get your macbook or
Chris: whatever it is if that's the way you're going and you can still get access to your
Chris: library of pc games and now you can just let valve
Chris: handle it um or somebody else right nothing nothing prohibits somebody else
Chris: from coming along but to me that feels pretty powerful and i think just as the
Chris: steam deck has moved the needle a little bit more for linux gaming i think so
Chris: will the frame and the steam machine and hopefully the long-term result is these anti-cheats go away.
Brent: I do have a question for you chris.
Chris: Okay uh.
Brent: If on day of release you know let's say you decided to buy something but you
Brent: had to choose between the frame and the steam machine which one would you go for.
Chris: Oh, 100% the frame.
Brent: Uh-huh. I was hoping you'd say that.
Chris: Oh, 100%.
Brent: Say more, please.
Chris: Well, you know, I've always dreamed of a decent VR headset that would let me
Chris: get work done in the RV with essentially either a ginormous screen.
Chris: And so what, of course, I've just ended up doing is I tried the Quest for a
Chris: while. But the issue there is you have to run this client software and all that. And it can break.
Chris: And so I just got an ultra-wide screen. But it's a ridiculously oversized monitor for the space.
Chris: So what would be great is to have my laptop at home or something.
Chris: And then when I need the big space, I put the frame on.
Chris: And if the frame is a computer itself, that's pretty awesome.
Chris: That's pretty powerful. I don't really want to stream my desktop. I mean, I might.
Chris: Maybe I will like that. But I love the idea of a persistent workspace in the frame.
Chris: My local user data is there. And I can just pull it up in a window in a space,
Chris: maybe have multiple windows even one day.
Chris: That to me would be probably more useful than a gaming computer.
Chris: But I know I'm a weird one. That's just odd.
Chris: I'd like to actually punt that to the audience.
Chris: And I'd like to ask you out there, what's your reaction to the Valve news?
Chris: And are you in the market for one of these in 2026?
Chris: And what do you think the pricing is going to be for the frame and the Steam machine?
Chris: Boost in and let us know your reaction, if you're going to get one,
Chris: and what you think the pricing will be.
Chris: Or what your price level is.
Wes: Maybe. Where do you need it to be if you're going to pick one up?
Chris: My, yeah, my question is, how comfortable would you, and be realistic,
Chris: you know, because it's never as cheap as we really want.
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Chris: That is the number one, then password.com slash unplugged, all lowercase.
Chris: 1password.com slash unplugged.
Brent: Now, with all that talk of hardware, of course, we're constantly working on
Brent: our own hardware in our home lab setups.
Brent: I know for a good part of the summer and even into this fall,
Brent: we were setting up the home assistant in my van. And that has turned out wonderfully.
Brent: Jeff, thanks for the hardware again. I don't know why you gave it away.
Brent: It's great. That said, Chris, we haven't really done any upgrades to your setup,
Brent: but you in the last few episodes have kind of hinted that you need a new box.
Brent: And it so turns out we have amazing listeners and listener Alex sent a previously
Brent: loved Lenovo ThinkCenter M920Q, which is a little tiny one liter PC.
Brent: We have to try it out and put it to the task. And well, wasn't there a note in that box too?
Chris: Ah, there was. Alex included a note in the box. I always really appreciate that.
Brent: Wait, that sounds like you have the map. I think that's the wrong.
Chris: Similar. It's not quite as big, doesn't have all the dynamic tiles that Wes has added.
Chris: But Alex writes, hey, Chris, Wes, and Brent, glad I could help out the show.
Chris: Inside the box, you're going to find a Lenovo ThinkCenter M920Q.
Chris: It's running 32 gigs of RAM, a 1 terabyte NVMe, a 250 gig SSD that might still
Chris: have Windows hanging around on it, and the power brick's in there, too.
Chris: I decided to add some fun extras for my tinkering. There's a PCIe riser card
Chris: that exposes the PCIe 3.08X slot.
Chris: So you can drop proper PCIe cards in. I used it with a gigabit Ethernet card
Chris: when I was experimenting with the system as a PFSense box.
Chris: And then later tried a secondary NVMe drive. Both worked well.
Chris: I even tested the NVMe adapter in place of the Wi-Fi card. It was functional-ish.
Chris: He says, while digging through the parts bin, I found an unopened SkyConnect
Chris: Zigbee adapter from when it was first launched.
Chris: Chris, I remember your Zigbee adventures. Maybe this one plays nice.
Chris: I've since moved to PoE gear, so it's all yours.
Chris: And because I can't stand shipping a box with empty space, I tossed in a few
Chris: Cafu smart plugs that work great with the HP home.
Chris: I've gone mostly in-wall for my setup, so these need a better home.
Chris: Oh, and these tiny skeletons I've included, those are left over from our annual
Chris: Halloween gifts that I 3D printed.
Chris: They just felt like they belonged in there. You probably don't see my name pop
Chris: up in the booth, but I've been a monthly member for a long time.
Chris: Always in the background, tuning in every week.
Chris: Monday mornings start with Linux Unplugged for me.
Chris: Anyways, hope you enjoy the hardware or at least some laughs out of the gear.
Chris: And hey, the ATL is absolutely ripe for a live show.
Chris: Hey, the ATL is absolutely ripe for a live show. I appreciate everything you guys do. Thanks, Alex.
Brent: Thank you, Alex.
Wes: This is awesome.
Chris: These smart plugs are great that he included. I'm going to set a couple aside
Chris: for you, Wes, so you can play with these two.
Chris: And they, I think, I don't know if they came preloaded with,
Chris: yeah, yeah, they come preloaded with ESP Home.
Chris: And it's an ESP8266 in here. And because of that, it has full energy monitoring, which I love.
Wes: That is awesome.
Chris: The workflow is,
Chris: Dead simple with these. I'll put a link to them in the show notes.
Chris: You plug them in. They create a little AP.
Chris: You join that. The first thing that comes up is it has a CAPTCHA,
Chris: but the CAPTCHA is just select your Wi-Fi, your real Wi-Fi network.
Chris: And so you do that, and then it reboots, and it's on your Wi-Fi.
Chris: And then about two seconds later, Home Assistant auto detects it.
Wes: Excellent.
Chris: Pulls it in, and I'm off to the races with energy monitoring,
Chris: all the stuff. It's just so great. So K-A-U-F.
Wes: Oh, wow. Yeah, okay. That sounds awesome.
Chris: Yeah, and they're Wi-Fi based, but they're not like a proprietary, right? It's ESP home.
Wes: I like that somehow, you know, I think Listener Alex is like the secondhand stuff.
Wes: It's better than plenty of firsthand stuff.
Chris: Yeah, that's very true.
Brent: I need a parts bin like that.
Chris: Yeah. Thank you, Alex. Very, very appreciative. And, you know,
Chris: even knowing how small these boxes are, I was still surprised when I took it out of the box.
Chris: And it you know it's slightly larger than my hand is really the size of the
Chris: thing it's it's remarkable it's.
Brent: One liter chris it's in the name.
Chris: I know i know i know but still actually holding it uh was shocked plenty of
Chris: ports on here it's got your display ports your hdmi's it's got some usb uh and
Chris: of course it's got an ethernet jack a little wi-fi antenna sticking out the back,
Chris: And then it has a real DC power plug, which I'm very excited about for the future.
Chris: And yeah, there's a little rattle. So I wasn't sure if it maybe got a little damaged in shipping.
Chris: And once I held it in my little hands, I was like, oh, this is very exciting.
Chris: This is actually a great idea. Thank you, everybody who sent these ideas in.
Chris: So I hooked it up as fast as I could. And I just booted like the latest Ubuntu
Chris: ISO on here using Ventoy.
Brent: Wait, wait, wait. You didn't check out the rattling first?
Chris: Well, that's how I checked it out.
Brent: Well done, sir. Well done.
Chris: It works. Okay, then the rattle's not a problem.
Wes: And no vent toy issues that worked as expected? Okay, great.
Chris: Thankfully, Ventoy works great on there. And it has, on the front, very handy.
Chris: Not only does it have a USB-A, but it has a USB-C as well.
Chris: And so when you, you know, on that Ventoy dongle I have, it's like a little
Chris: SSD in there. So it's very fast over USB-C.
Chris: You could just use the system that way. So I booted up in Ubuntu and went through
Chris: just the, you know, the live session.
Chris: And everything got detected. The Ethernet picked up an IP address just fine.
Chris: The disks were in there. And all of that.
Chris: I was able to browse the web. So I went ahead and just repartitioned it since
Chris: Gparted comes on the live session. And I love Gparted.
Chris: Went through and cleared out the main MVME.
Chris: Didn't bother with the windows. I figured I'd just mess with that disk later.
Chris: And cleared it all out. And then,
Chris: you know, rebooted and started the installation process for a server.
Chris: And what we ended up with is pretty nice, of course.
Chris: This little think center is a decent little box in here. It's got a i5-8500T
Chris: and it's got six threads and like the note mentioned,
Chris: 32 gigs of RAM in this, which is going to be great because ultimately I'm trying
Chris: to consolidate a Home Assistant Yellow and maybe a couple of Pis or one Pi and an Odroid.
Chris: Down into one machine. So it's going to be a lot on this machine.
Chris: And I think I'm going to be running Home Assistant potentially,
Chris: although I'm not 100% locked in, inside a VM.
Chris: So I set up a Nix OS base on this thing and got KVM installed and had Wes start poking around.
Chris: We thought about a couple of different ways to virtualize Home Assistant OS.
Chris: Kind of ultimately went KVM libvert. Do you want to talk about that a little bit?
Wes: Yeah. I mean, there's a ton of options, right? You're almost spoiled for options.
Wes: I've been keen to try SystemD VM spawn more, although that's very new,
Wes: and it didn't seem like the USB pass-through stuff was really as sophisticated
Wes: as we might want, specifically for trying to virtualize something like Home Assistant.
Wes: LexD or the ForkNow Incis is another good option. That does have robust pass-through options.
Wes: But you'd kind of gotten a base config going. Out of the box,
Wes: in NixOS, it's really quite easy to get, well, KVM going.
Wes: We could just use QMU, But if you want a little more affordances,
Wes: a little more options for like tools to work with stuff that isn't just your
Wes: own custom QEMU script, well, Libvert's a pretty standard option.
Wes: It does mean, you know, you kind of got to go and interact with its world,
Wes: right? Like it has XML files that it wants to make.
Wes: And you got to like make your VM storage pools and tell it about how you want the networking to work.
Wes: But the plus side is it's, I mean, it's got all kinds of affordances to do that
Wes: in a whole bunch of like enterprise complicated ways that are way more than we actually need.
Wes: And so it meant really, like we were able to use Nix OS to create the basic
Wes: bridge setup we wanted, which in particular, you wanted to have Home Assistant
Wes: VM appear as if it was just like another box on your local network,
Wes: so it could really easily talk to all of your devices, right?
Chris: Yeah, because auto-discovery is a huge part of the Home Assistant setup.
Chris: A lot of the new Home Assistant devices that they make, just auto-broadcast.
Chris: So that was something that was definitely needed. And we had some reports of
Chris: people that had tried virtualizing it on, I think, Proxmox, and they had some
Chris: issues with the USB pass-through not always working.
Chris: Thankfully, Alex included that SkyConnect dongle, so we had something to test
Chris: right there. I'll also note, it seems like the Home Assistant blessed path is KVM LibVirt.
Chris: If you're going to virtualize Home Assistant OS, all their documentation kind
Chris: of pushes you down that path.
Wes: It did feel well supported. It would maybe be another way to put it,
Wes: right? Like, yeah, the docs make it super simple.
Wes: They have like QKO images ready to go, which is pretty great.
Wes: So in that sense, it was a very smooth process really to get it going and then
Wes: be able to connect to it and see it.
Wes: And we're able to use the NixOS side for, I mean, later you might like bake
Wes: this stuff in with add-ons or whatnot, but, you know, we were able to bootstrap
Wes: tail scale access and set up some basic sort of port forwarding and stuff.
Wes: So we could get in and talk to the VM either by the LAN or via tail scale.
Wes: It all pretty much worked. I mean, I don't think we, it hasn't really been tried
Wes: in anger yet. It's really a demo setup, but I don't know. What do you think?
Wes: Do you have enough confidence to like try it in production?
Chris: I was pleased to see that I could do a firmware update of the Sky Connect through
Chris: the virtualized Home Assistant instance. That seemed like a good sign there.
Chris: So that's definitely, that's got me feeling more confident. I want to hook up
Chris: a few more USB devices and like you say, actually try it with a few things.
Chris: Um to me i think i also have to like somehow simulate gpu load and i need to
Chris: simulate my load without maybe spending hours moving all of my applications
Chris: over because i really want to see this thing under kind of sustained baseload
Chris: what its power draw is especially if you're going to load up the host.
Wes: Too and you've got your vm going is that going to maintain responsiveness to
Wes: all the home automation you're doing and then yeah.
Chris: Right you.
Wes: Haven't even i think dabbled yet fully with exactly what even the baseline power dry is.
Chris: And that would be my concern is that the home automation stuff or the responsiveness
Chris: suffers when maybe like you know we're we're doing a big jellyfin job or something
Chris: uh before we move too far off of home assistant os you guys know i love home
Chris: assistant and i really respect the work they do over there but my god if you
Chris: want an experience and frustration,
Chris: I challenge you listening to this episode, go download the home assistant image for KVM Libvert.
Chris: Go through, go to their webpage. Don't, don't Google it, but go to their home
Chris: assistant webpage like a regular user would and try to download the image.
Chris: And boost in your results. Tell me if you actually, if you got it.
Chris: I'll zap you back if you actually manage to find it through their website.
Chris: That's rough. So that to me was
Chris: like, I'm not even sure if I'm getting the right thing and all of that.
Chris: I actually downloaded the wrong image the first time and then went back and
Chris: like, oh, nope, this is where I get the QCAV file.
Chris: Okay, they have something already set up. I need to grab that.
Chris: It was a lot. It was a lot of reading to still even end up with the wrong file.
Chris: And that's a little disappointing because the experience, if you just buy their
Chris: hardware where it comes loaded with Home Assistant is the exact opposite.
Chris: It's just so smooth. It's so easy. I was surprised by that.
Chris: But so ultimately, I need to figure out a way to test Jellyfin and ersatz and the whole RAR stack.
Chris: Of course, things like NextCloud need to be able to run on there.
Chris: Audiobookshelf, Music Assistant. I mean, I just have a litany.
Chris: I mean, you can go over the back catalog of the show. I have probably something
Chris: like 30 applications running on this.
Brent: But you just have your Nix config you can move over, right?
Chris: They're all mostly Docker, you know, because this is from years ago,
Chris: which feels a little, when you have like 30 Docker applications,
Chris: that feels kind of just like sprawl.
Chris: I know where most of the application data is, but probably not about 20% of it would be my guess.
Wes: Right, probably a few of them have it just in a folder right there.
Wes: A few of them are using Docker volume. Some of them are using bind mounts to
Wes: a regular spot on your file system.
Chris: Yes, exactly.
Wes: And then a couple other random stuff, who knows?
Chris: And then to really make it all work, I'd have to move the storage over, and I'm not
Chris: ready to commit yet because i'm not sure if all this under actual load
Chris: works so i'm trying to think of a way to simulate gpu load simulate disk
Chris: activity and moderate cpu load that
Chris: i would feel confident that that's a decent estimation maybe some download you
Chris: know what i mean like i need to think of that and then check the power drop
Chris: and then determine if it's a same or less than all my other hardware combined
Chris: that's where i'm kind of at with it now but i'm very impressed with these one
Chris: liter pcs if you weren't concerned about the power at all it's so obvious i'm,
Chris: Let's just say I was, I never felt like it was slow. I never,
Chris: I never had, you know, I do sometimes feel like that with the O-Droid and definitely with the yellow.
Wes: Yeah. You and I were both like simultaneously kind of banging away,
Wes: working on stuff, doing NixOS builds without even telling each other.
Wes: And yeah, it was doing just fine.
Brent: I would imagine this thing has a fan in it, which your other computers don't.
Brent: So I'm curious about audible levels.
Brent: Cause you're going to have this tucked away in the, in the RV somewhere.
Brent: Are you worried about that in any way?
Chris: You know, I never heard it spin up. It would be in the booth,
Chris: so I don't think it would be too big of a problem.
Chris: If it did spin up, I don't think it would be too bad. So I'm ultimately dedicating
Chris: right now the 256 gigabyte SSD that came in there, the separate disk that came in there.
Chris: I'm dedicating that to the KVM VM storage pool, and I've decided to format it in BcacheFS.
Chris: And if I put this thing in production, I intend to keep it as BcacheFS.
Chris: And i feel good about it i went through i reviewed
Chris: like some ideal mount options for a bcash
Chris: fs file system nothing too surprising in there uh i did turn compress on because
Chris: you know these are vm images some of them are have you know large sparse sections
Chris: i turned on no access time and things like that to just try to improve overall
Chris: performance but uh i didn't tell you ahead of time that i was going to do that west no.
Wes: You did not um i actually first noticed because there was kind of a weird i
Wes: think you'd run into some problems as you were trying mount options so there was.
Chris: Like an.
Wes: Artifact from some of your um vibe coding that left.
Chris: Like a.
Wes: System d script that was doing the mount so one of the first things.
Chris: I did was.
Wes: Clean that up and i made it like a regular file system yeah.
Chris: Well here's i want what i wanted was i was researching the mount options and
Chris: this is just a great thing because you can go out and do it for me um but the one i decided to yolo,
Chris: Because it was like, this is something you could try, and I decided to try to
Chris: brute force it, is Bcache FS not only does it have compress,
Chris: which is dope, and everybody should use for their NASs and SSDs and stuff,
Chris: but it has background compress,
Chris: which I think is obvious what that does, right?
Chris: It's when the system isn't as busy, when there's some spare cycles,
Chris: then it attends to the compressing.
Chris: Well, that sounds exactly like
Chris: what I want, right? Who wants this crazy compress at write and read? No.
Chris: Do it in the background. So I went ahead and said, yeah, let's throw that in
Chris: there, which then I rebooted the system and got the emergency console.
Chris: It almost came all the way up. And then I got the emergency console. Oh, OK.
Chris: OK. All right. So I go in, and the solution that the machine came up with,
Chris: because I wanted to keep the background compressed, because that's a dope option,
Chris: is I had the machine try to mount the file system at a different point so it
Chris: wouldn't take the system out if it doesn't work. And I used SystemD to do that.
Wes: Yeah, okay.
Chris: But it was still kicking errors when it tried to mount the file system,
Chris: so ultimately I wasn't getting a reliable mount. It just wasn't taking the system out.
Chris: So I had to capitulate, and I took the background compressed out for now.
Chris: But it still has compression on it.
Wes: Well, I'm just excited because now you're kind of like keyed in.
Wes: You'll be following the Bcache updates that I keep sending you.
Chris: Ray.
Wes: And you can try more of the features as they keep landing.
Chris: Although, so...
Chris: We're working on this thing, Wes and I. And, you know, I got it pretty far,
Chris: but I had to step away for like three or four hours on Saturday for kids stuff.
Chris: And I come back and Wes is like, by the way, I switched it over to the Zen kernel.
Chris: I'm like, oh, good, good.
Wes: I figured you'd want that.
Chris: It crossed my mind. It had crossed my mind. But then I'm like,
Chris: no, that's too crazy for a server.
Chris: I'm not going to do that for my server. I want. We're like, this thing's going
Chris: to be a VM host. I need to be an adult.
Chris: Maybe I should even use the LTS kernel. I'm thinking to myself,
Chris: especially if I got BcacheFS.
Chris: And then I come back and Wes is like, yeah, I zenned it up. Totally latest version.
Chris: Click right on the edge. I'm like, all right, we're going with it. Let's do it.
Wes: Yeah, that's right. 617 7-zen1.
Chris: Why not? It might help with the overall Jellyfin performance.
Chris: We do have NF tables on there for a few things like Wes was talking about.
Chris: ButterFS on the root, so my root file system for the host is not Bcache. That's just for the VMs.
Chris: The root is still Butter, but I do have automatic scrubbing and weekly trims
Chris: for the SSD and MVME, both on BcacheFS and ButterFS.
Chris: Like Wes said, we went with KVM and LibVert, and we bridged the VM to the local
Chris: network, and just sort of were able to declare all of that in the NixOS config.
Chris: I would love feedback from the audience on this.
Chris: Bear in mind, I'm coming from a Home Assistant Yellow. It has like two gigs
Chris: of RAM and, you know, like a Raspberry Pi 4 processor. But I'm thinking...
Chris: Four gigs of ram is probably enough but that's a bit i'd like feedback on and two virtual cpus.
Wes: Yeah i think those values came from the uh their install guide they had some
Wes: like default sort of like oh run this um vert install command to kind of get
Wes: started and so we've started there but yeah i wonder like it sounds like jeff
Wes: might be using this maybe other audience members have tried it out and if they i may.
Chris: Have now i'm thinking about i think i actually upped it to eight gigs in the
Chris: actual config i might have upped it to eight gigs.
Wes: Excellent i.
Chris: Think i went eight gigabytes of two CPUs dedicated.
Chris: And I'd like feedback from the audience if that seems to be sufficient for Home
Chris: Assistant OS where I'm going to have a handful of, well, you know,
Chris: a dozen add-ons probably and stuff like that and probably 300 devices talking to it.
Brent: You might be able to flash ESPs now. Congratulations.
Chris: That's what I'm hoping is I'll have enough memory for ESP Home.
Wes: Oh, we got to test that.
Chris: I know. It's a tight line to walk here because Home Assistant's just one of
Chris: the many, many things this box would end up doing.
Chris: And so if this was only doing Home Assistant, I just let it eat up a lot of the RAM.
Chris: But I do need to actually, so I don't know if I'm throwing things away with
Chris: eight gigs or four gigs like Home Assistant recommends is the sweet spot.
Chris: The problem is at one point they recommended two and here I am,
Chris: I'm bumping up against that all the time.
Brent: A little bird in our chat says maybe this machine can actually take 64 gigs
Brent: despite being advertised as 32.
Brent: So that might solve your issue here.
Chris: Great, Scott. And then I am going to use the SkyConnect, I believe, for my Zigbee.
Chris: And I think I'm going to use the ZWA 2, whatever that fancy Home Assistant Z-Wave
Chris: adapter is for the Z-Wave stuff.
Chris: Although that makes a lot more work. It's a lot easier if I just move the existing adapters.
Chris: I may just have to bite that bullet. I'm not sure.
Wes: Yeah, so far it seemed like the USB pass-through worked just fine.
Wes: We definitely saw it inside Home Assistant, saw it and all that.
Wes: We haven't tried it in terms of actually talking over the radio or anything, but hey.
Chris: Nope. For more flash, though. For more flash.
Wes: Oh, yeah, right. So that's a good sign.
Chris: That was good. I haven't got a good sense of the power readings.
Chris: That's what I'm going to be spending my time on between now and the next episode,
Chris: just kind of getting a sense of what the power usage is.
Chris: The thing that i have to really just underscore for me that's such a big deal
Chris: is that it does natively have a dc plug on the back so down the road i could
Chris: just take the ac adapter out of the picture entirely and for me that's a pretty
Chris: big deal it could be a nice little savings because,
Chris: inverting that the way the inverter works is the actual the less amount that
Chris: it's inverting the worse the efficiency is so when something like that's only
Chris: drawing 20 30 watts uh i lose like 40% in the inversion.
Chris: It's actually really rough. Whereas if I just go straight to DC,
Chris: I don't, it's all, there's no efficiency loss there.
Chris: So that's something I'll be thinking about, but I'm very, very impressed with
Chris: the one liter PC, especially this little Lenovo and just took Linux like a champ.
Chris: Absolutely no problem getting Linux on there. Total compatibility,
Chris: all the devices work and the performance seems to be really good.
Chris: So this is, I'd say, best case scenario for me. And I'm extremely grateful for
Chris: Alex for sending this in.
Chris: We're going to keep building on it And probably not next week,
Chris: but in the future, a little bit down the road, I'll have an update once I've
Chris: really tried it and put it through its paces.
Wes: Stay tuned for Chris, Chris's One Leader Power Pulse.
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Brent: Welcome to the Boost segment. We first have Marcel here, Buller Booster, with 22,444 sets.
Brent: Marcel boosted our episode 640, The deuce configolo desktop gigolo.
Brent: Thank you for that. He says, I
Brent: tried to boost a config confessions related message, but it was too long.
Brent: I sent it in via the contact page instead, but I still wanted to send in some value.
Chris: Thank you, Marcel. I have that tag for the post show because it's kind of in depth.
Chris: So I don't know if we're going to get into it in the show, but I have it saved
Chris: for us. I went and grabbed his email. Thank you, Marcel.
Chris: Didrell's here with 3,661 sats.
Chris: Well i messed up something fountain so sorry about my username uh but after
Chris: a six five on my config i wanted to say thank you also this is a zip code boost
Chris: but it has to be multiplied,
Chris: by 15 whoa oh boy yeah get your calculator out and then grab the map does the map even have.
Wes: A calculator module i don't know.
Chris: If i kept that i think the map has python so.
Brent: You could just use that.
Chris: You're right yeah it definitely has a python interpreter well how could it three
Chris: six six one three six six one times fifteen.
Wes: Does the post office, can I leave the equation on there and they'll figure out
Wes: what zip code I'm talking about? No.
Chris: Do they have an LLM that'll do that for you?
Wes: Yeah, as they're scanning, you know, and doing the fingerprint, you know.
Wes: Okay, we get 54915. And that is a zip code assigned to Appleton, Wisconsin.
Chris: Hey, hello, Wisconsin.
Wes: Yeah, it covers areas in a few different counties, including Winnebago.
Chris: Although apples are our thing, so get out of our thing. Appleton.
Wes: Don't make us fight about apples.
Chris: Don't, yeah, you don't want Washington fighting about apples.
Chris: Woo! Thank you, Didrell. Nice to hear from you, and thank you for that boost.
Wes: BTC is my 401k boost in with 4,590 sets.
Wes: Elevation boost, boosting from my mountain home in Southern California. Oh, fun.
Chris: Do you get snow up there at 4,509 to fight? in California?
Chris: I'm genuinely curious. In Southern California, do you get snow at that elevation?
Chris: I don't know how the earth works.
Chris: That's beautiful. That's beautiful.
Wes: Hello up there. Thank you for the boost.
Chris: What is it about the idea of living up in elevation sounds so appealing to me?
Chris: I don't know what that is.
Wes: Because it's been a while since you've moved a couch.
Chris: I've lived at sea level for too long.
Brent: Jeff, guy on the floor Do you know if they get snow up there?
Mumble: Yeah, they do Depends on where he's at But yeah, you got Big Bear You got all
Mumble: those mountainous areas over there I got snow at about 3,700 feet In Asperia,
Mumble: California, back in the day.
Brent: And that's Jeff with the weather.
Chris: PJ with the weather, thank you PJ Well.
Brent: Badu High Sent in a boost 2001 sets.
Brent: Hey, I was user 75 from last episode, and yes, you guys got that postal code
Brent: right, and yes, the weather was pretty nice that day.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: Nice. I like it. We got it right. Also, a little clarification there.
Brent: Yeah. He says, uh, to Brent's question there on the postal codes,
Brent: Brazilian postal codes do have this long but simple format with a dash that
Brent: can identify an address right down to the street.
Brent: That is why I didn't send my actual postal code. It's way too precise.
Chris: Good thinking.
Brent: And he finishes up here. Looks like I missed my chance for the addition of config
Brent: confessions, but it was my fault. I did submit it pretty late.
Brent: I guess I'll wait for next year's config confessions.
Chris: Missed it by that much. Sorry about that. Thank you for the boost,
Chris: though. Anonymous comes in with a row of decks.
Chris: 2,222 sats. It was awesome seeing y'all at Texas Linux Fest.
Chris: I wanted to join in the config confessions. this is my first ever git repo and
Chris: i just recently moved to using flakes about two months ago things are a bit
Chris: messy i'm also currently working on adding my other hosts and i'll add the host
Chris: readme to change it when i do all right we'll tag that for the post show as well for the members,
Chris: thank you anonymous or perhaps tie fighter and good job getting your first git
Chris: repo going as brent will tell you that's important yeah.
Wes: And working with flakes.
Chris: That's true yeah well done well effing done jasko.
Wes: Comes in with five thousand sets,
Wes: with all the fun around the config confessions i think it would be cool if love
Wes: hosted a sort of hackathon maybe announce a theme or a couple categories a few
Wes: weeks before the show and have you guys roast our projects maybe in place of
Wes: the tuxies it certainly has that same community engagement aspect anyway.
Wes: Hey, now you know, this is an interesting idea.
Chris: Especially if we did like a home lab thing where like if people had a home lab
Chris: project they've been wanting to get done, we could do like a two week sprint.
Chris: And then at the end they send us their setups and we give them a review and
Chris: tell them how they did. You know, so it's their excuse to finally buckle down
Chris: and just get something done. I want to, because I do that.
Wes: Artificial deadline, a thing to me.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: Yeah, push for. Yeah.
Chris: If that's something people would like, you know, I don't know,
Chris: we need a name for it. We need a good name.
Chris: And if we get a good name, if somebody sends a good name, that's a sign we should do it, I think.
Chris: Thank you, Jasko. It's a pretty good idea. I like that. I like that.
Brent: Well, our dear Gene Bean is here with a row of ducks. Hey, y'all.
Brent: PinchFlight is awesome. I know you mentioned it many times, but it's so much
Brent: nicer than I even realized.
Brent: As a bonus, integrated the containerized version of Jellyfin that comes from
Brent: Nick's packages. And that was pretty straightforward.
Brent: And he links to, Gene B links to his GitHub repo.
Chris: Well done, Gene B, and glad you got a chance to try it out.
Wes: It's pretty great. Gene's links right to the actual pull request and diff that
Wes: kind of shows, like, updating the secrets for it and adding a NixOS file that
Wes: sets up OCI containerization to declaratively run the container.
Brent: Nice.
Chris: I think where it really clicks with Pinch Flat is when you pull it up in Jellyfin
Chris: or Plex, and it looks equivalent to all your other media, but it's the stuff on YouTube.
Chris: And now you don't have to go down the YouTube rabbit hole and get sucked into a whole bunch of stuff.
Chris: You just go in there, you're playing it locally through your media center where
Chris: you watch all your other content and it just integrates with the rest of the
Chris: stuff you watch. I think it's great. Thank you, Gene.
Chris: Good to hear from you. Woodland Geeks is here with 4,321 sats.
Chris: Hey, finally got to boost. Hey-oh, good for you. The Utah app at the end of last show was on point.
Chris: I have been looking for something like this. I got it working yesterday,
Chris: and I had a couple of setup glitches, but the creator was Johnny on the spot
Chris: with the game issues. Oh, that's always so great.
Wes: That's rad.
Chris: And an area where free software can sometimes really shine.
Chris: You don't want to put expectations on the developer, but you're just never going
Chris: to get that from, you know, Microsoft or something.
Chris: That's great. Love to hear that. Thank you, Woodland.
Wes: Hodor comes in with 18,500 sats.
Wes: Hi there, long-time listener, first-time caller.
Chris: All right!
Wes: I wanted to highlight a Linux conference close to my heart, Ohio Linux Fest,
Wes: happening Saturday, December 6th.
Wes: I've attended for over a decade, but attendance has dropped the last few years.
Wes: I'm hoping to boost awareness here in the colony.
Wes: It's affordable, fun, and I've certainly made new connections there.
Wes: And maybe with some support, it'll return to the two- or three-day event it
Wes: once was. check it out at holfconference.org.
Chris: And you know what it was because of your boost Hodor when I saw this or Hodor
Chris: when this came in earlier I was like putting that in the housekeeping,
Chris: so it's something we always like to do but sometimes it's just not on our radar,
Chris: and I appreciate you giving it the awareness we're going to give it a plug here
Chris: and we'll have a link in the show notes for people in the area to go check it out and.
Wes: Maybe you know for folks that do report back let us know how it went because we wish we could be there.
Brent: Well we got a row of ducks from southern fried sassafras,
Brent: i loved config trek into the desktop
Brent: i mean deuce configulo desktop gigolo well i
Brent: know i didn't include it in the boost just to make one of you say it again i'd
Brent: never do something like that in all seriousness plus one for a part three of
Brent: the config confession series at some point now to jump back to the past and
Brent: catch up on that backlog i wonder who will end up winning the race to texas.
Chris: Don't spoil it don't spoil it you'll never believe what happened next the.
Brent: Tracker did have a bug in it just saying.
Chris: Oh oh this is new this is a very late reported.
Wes: Bug let me just say.
Chris: Now the bug field kicks in wh 2020 50 comes in with 4 444 sats that's a big old mcduck,
Chris: Quick PSA for Unraid users, remember to back up your flash drive,
Chris: not just your data pools. I just upgraded to 7.2, and on reboot, my flash drive died.
Chris: Oh, man. After way too long refusing to admit it was dead, I finally grabbed
Chris: a new one, only to find my backup was a year old.
Chris: Fortunately, Unraid is awesome, and all my VMs and containers still loaded up and ran.
Chris: However, any container I set up after the backup didn't have a template,
Chris: so it would not have to run.
Chris: Luckily, all I had to do was remove the template and reinstall it from the community
Chris: app, and then it picked right back up with all my data still intact.
Chris: This is also a time traveler boost. I'm going through the back catalog.
Chris: So greetings from episode 25.
Brent: That's a typo, right?
Chris: It's fun to listen to all the old stuff with the benefit of hindsight. Yeah, it is.
Chris: Oh, boy, man. Yeah. I love that on Unraid, all that stuff is separate from your
Chris: data. So you can just allocate all your disks.
Chris: Those flash disks, those flash drives, I just don't trust them.
Chris: Not long term. but they're thankfully very easy to duplicate make an image of
Chris: etc right so there's that thank you for the report appreciate it very much WH
Chris: good to hear from you and hope to hear from you in the future.
Wes: Oh and this last one was me we could probably just skip that I should have I.
Chris: Should have trim that oh I was wondering who that was yeah.
Wes: Sorry about that.
Chris: Okay all right all right yeah all right okay then that brings us to And that
Chris: is all of the 2,000 and above boosts for this episode.
Chris: And a shout out to our SAT streamers. 19 of you streamed and you collectively
Chris: stacked 25,467 SATs to support this here show.
Chris: When you combine that with all our boosters, we almost, almost broke 100K SATs.
Chris: 99,094 SATs. And when you do the math, that gets split equally between myself, Wes Brent.
Chris: A bit goes to Editor Drew. That goes to the podcast app in the index.
Chris: That's a pretty low haul.
Chris: Although, slightly picked up by a live boost by PJ.
Chris: Although it didn't fire the sound like I wanted. I was hoping for a live boost sound.
Chris: But credit goes to PJ with one, two, three, four, five sats.
Chris: Oh, no, it's True Grits. PJ was just saying he wanted to hear the pew sound with 14,000 sats.
Chris: True Grits had the Spaceballs boost. Surprise, surprise. I'm still making my
Chris: way up to current episodes. Lesson for everybody. Do not ever get behind. There you go.
Brent: Great advice.
Chris: And Jeff just says, I want to hear the pew sound. So here you go.
Chris: There you go, Jeff. Thank you, everybody. Not a fantastic episode,
Chris: but you know what? We really do appreciate the direct support. This is a wild system.
Chris: It's using a free software stack. It's using a peer-to-peer monetary system.
Chris: But the booths are on sale right now. So if you've been thinking about it,
Chris: now it could be a great time to dip in. Best price of the year right now to boost us.
Chris: And you also have that membership. If you just want to set it and forget it,
Chris: linuxunplugged.com slash membership. Thank you to everybody who does support the show.
Chris: This is something that's been going on now for 12 years.
Chris: It's a bit of an odd phenomenon, if you think about it in the media space and
Chris: to have something going for 12 years that's totally aligned to its audience.
Chris: I think it's something special and it's something we should keep going and we
Chris: appreciate everybody who does make it sustainable and does make it possible.
Chris: Here's your taco. We appreciate you very much.
Chris: One little bit before we run is one pick this week. One pick, but it's a good one.
Chris: We've mentioned this a long time on the show. It's called Easy Effects.
Chris: It's had other names, but it's a limiter, compressor, equalizer,
Chris: helps with volume in general for your desktop applications or maybe a video
Chris: or a podcast you're listening to that doesn't have very good levels or the host
Chris: levels are all over the place.
Chris: You can turn Easy Effects on, and it's like having a sound technician for your desktop audio.
Chris: And just recently, and the reason why we're giving it a mention is not only
Chris: is just a great application that you should have, but with the recent release,
Chris: the whole application was ported from GTK4 to a combination of Qt,
Chris: QML, and the Kirigami frameworks.
Chris: So it's got a brand new fresh release. It's on Flathub as well.
Chris: And it's one of our favorites.
Wes: It's so good. It's just, it's so good. It's only gotten better.
Wes: It's easier to use now. It's more automatic. Like, this is a huge update,
Wes: so clearly they're, like, able to keep shipping and iterating.
Wes: And, yeah, like, the ThinkPad I use for show stuff, it has abysmal speakers.
Wes: EasyFX is basically the only way that I can really manage to use them at all.
Chris: I will say, no shame, but a lot of the free software events that I watch that
Chris: are streamed, they always have, like, really low audio.
Chris: Or a buzz and you can just
Chris: you got firefox up or whatever you're watching the video stream you
Chris: open up easy effects you turn it on and you can start moving dials and
Chris: you can take something that's barely audible right up to something you can
Chris: actually manage it's just fantastic it works with pipe wire it's got lots of
Chris: little knobs honestly it's the kind of app that mac users brag about all the
Chris: time and it's something we have right here for linux it should get more attention
Chris: it's got a nice little visualizer too so you get the uh just spectrum easy effects
Chris: 8.0 you can get it from GitHub or you can get it from Flathub. It's a great project.
Chris: And I had no idea they were porting it to Qt, but...
Wes: No, me either. But, you know, as a Plasma user, I'm here for it.
Chris: Suits us just fine. Suits us just fine. Links to that and everything else are
Chris: over at linuxunplugged.com slash 641.
Chris: Now, if you missed something or you want to jump around, Wes,
Chris: you've got a power tip for people. Something they can really take advantage of.
Wes: The magic of cloud chapters! Yeah, let's write a JSON file They'll magically
Wes: deliver it from us to you that tells your podcast player where to go in the file.
Wes: And if you need even more specificity, we've got transcripts in SRT and VTT
Wes: format. So pick your favorite.
Chris: Yeah, depending on your player, you may even get the speaker names.
Chris: And for those of you that are on podcasting 1.0 apps, we will bake the chapters
Chris: in for the applications that support it.
Chris: And some of them, like Apple Podcasts, now are adding transcript support as
Chris: well. So some of the 1.0 apps are starting to, and I have to say,
Chris: those are from the podcasting 2.0 standard, which is really great to see.
Chris: So the stuff that we've been producing for years now on all of our shows is
Chris: just immediately available to all Apple podcast users because Apple is implementing
Chris: the podcasting 2.0 standard.
Chris: I don't love that app, but it's really cool to see that happen.
Wes: Power of open source and open standards.
Chris: Yeah, it's neat to see it happen in the podcast space. And if you get one of
Chris: those 2.0 apps that have all the stuff, you can get them over at newpodcastapps.com.
Chris: Then you can tune in live and you can listen to us on Tuesday on a Sunday.
Clips: See you next week. Same bat time, same bat station.
Chris: Yeah, that's right. You can also join our lug. That's another way to listen
Chris: and get in on the conversation. We get together every single Sunday at 10 a.m.
Chris: Pacific. you can find it in your local time at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar.
Chris: Thank you to our members. You get the bootleg with everything and more.
Chris: And of course, thank you for joining us. We wouldn't do this show if you weren't
Chris: listening, so we appreciate you too.
Chris: And let us know your adventures with the one-liter PCs and your thoughts on
Chris: the Valve hardware announcements. We'd love to read those next week.
Chris: Thank you so much for joining us on this week's episode of Your Unplugged Program.
Chris: We'll see you next Tuesday, as in Sunday.