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: Well, hello, gentlemen. Coming up on the show today, it is indeed the grand
Chris: conclusion of our free BSD challenge that we kicked off in episode 600.
Chris: You've been reporting in, we've been bench testing, and we'll find out how we did.
Chris: We'll score our BSD challenge and see if one of us ends up running Windows.
Chris: Then we're going to round out the show with some great boosts,
Chris: some killer picks, and a lot more. So before we get into all of that,
Chris: let's say time-appropriate greetings to that virtual lug. Hello, Mumble Room.
Mumble: Hello. Hi. Hello. Hello, hello, hello. Hi.
Chris: Amazing. It's nice to have people in there. Of course, you can always join our
Chris: Mumble Room. We do it live on the Sunday. We start around 10 a.m. Pacific.
Chris: And Mumble details are at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash mumble.
Chris: And a big good morning to our friends at TailScale. Go to tailscale.com slash unplugged.
Chris: this is the easiest way to connect your devices and
Chris: services to each other wherever they are over a
Chris: flat mesh network protected by yeah it's
Chris: modern networking and it connects your devices your applications your mobile
Chris: devices directly to each other it's great for individuals and it's so killer
Chris: for companies as well secure remote access and it's really really fast it's
Chris: intuitive and it's programmable so you no longer need to have any inbound ports
Chris: But if you're a corporation,
Chris: you no longer need to have any of this crazy legacy,
Chris: just massively complicated VPN stuff.
Chris: It's easy to deploy. It's easy to integrate with your authentication infrastructure.
Chris: It's zero trust every organization or user can use.
Chris: And the free plan, when you go to tailscale.com slash unplugged,
Chris: gets you one Hyundai devices and three user accounts forever.
Chris: No credit card required.
Chris: That's the plan I'm on. Been using since like, you know, three or four years
Chris: ago or whatever it's been.
Chris: And still using today for my personal. and then started deploying it for Jupyter
Chris: Broadcasting too and it's just changed our infrastructure game and our flexibility,
Chris: of where we can deploy, what systems need to be where.
Chris: It's been a huge cost saver for us and there's thousands of other companies
Chris: and individuals beyond just that that are using it as well.
Chris: So try it out for yourself or for a business.
Chris: See why we love it, why we all use it. Talescale.com slash unplugged.
Chris: I am very pleased to say that we have locked in our plans for Planet Nix.
Wes: Oh, this is exciting.
Chris: Oh. This is huge for us, obviously, just because of the Nix journey we've been
Chris: on. But this is the first Planet Nix.
Chris: We really wanted to be there for the first one. I'd like to be there for every
Chris: single one of them, just like I have been for LinuxFest Northwest,
Chris: because you really understand the culture and journey of an event when you can do that.
Chris: And I have tremendous gratitude that I want to convey to Phlox.
Chris: They're making our coverage possible.
Chris: Last year, we successfully crowdfunded our trip, and we are immensely grateful.
Chris: But this year, I was able to find the right partner, the right fit,
Chris: and that's with Phlox. So we're really excited to work with them.
Chris: They're going to be helping us get down there and make the coverage possible.
Chris: If you're not familiar with them, they make it super easy to create development
Chris: environments with all the dependencies you need and then easily share them with
Chris: a colleague, you can go to flox.dev.
Chris: That's F-L-O-X.dev to check them out.
Chris: Super excited about all this. We'll have more details soon. We'd love to see
Chris: you there March 6th through the 7th in Pasadena.
Chris: Join us for the first Planet Nix ever. The very first one.
Chris: Whether you're a cadet or a Commodore, a hacker or a learner,
Chris: come on down. Check out all the fuss.
Chris: very, very, very excited about Planet Nix and of course, Scale as well.
Chris: And then LinuxFest Northwest just around the corner. And then one little bit
Chris: more of housekeeping for you all, just something to be aware of.
Chris: I have a new show that I'd like you to check out.
Chris: It's relaxed, it's fun, and we have an open mumble room like we do here for
Chris: this show. We start at 11.30 a.m. Pacific. That's 2.30 p.m.
Chris: Eastern, 7.30 p.m. UTC.
Chris: And I specifically want to invite our members to join us in the mumble room.
Chris: This will be a one-to-one way to communicate with me and some of the team that
Chris: shows up, hoping to have our friends from the network on, like Wes,
Chris: and Brent was on episode one.
Wes: Indeed. That was a great episode.
Chris: And those that remember Angela, she's on there with me as well.
Chris: In fact, this next week's episode,
Chris: episode 10, is going to be kind of a reintroduction to Angela, my ex-wife.
Chris: If you'd like to know about that, and some of the family story there,
Chris: then check out the episode, episode 10, which will be weeklylaunch.rocks,
Chris: and you'll find it over there.
Chris: Nine is already out where Brent joins us and we're going to have fun with it.
Chris: I wanted you to be aware of it.
Wes: I'd like to just give a moment of shout out to our tireless website crew here.
Wes: You know, this launch of the relaunch of the launch happened very quickly and
Wes: CG Bass Player and Chance M were instrumental in getting it across the finish line.
Chris: Knocked it out for us to make sure we could publish right on time.
Chris: Yeah, that was great. So you can find it at jupiterbroadcasting.com or you can
Chris: find the show site at weeklylaunch.rocks I think you'll enjoy it and it's going
Chris: to be a nice easy listen as well and that gentlemen is the housekeeping for this week,
Chris: All right, boys, it is the end of the FreeBSD Challenge.
Chris: And let's do a little around-the-horn check-in and start with Mr.
Chris: Brentley and see how his final week of the challenge went and eventually tally up his score.
Brent: Well, Chris, you and I started our week together in studio, which is always fun.
Brent: But I decided to say bye-bye to the pie that I mentioned last week with FreeBSD
Brent: on it and to give Modern Hardware a go.
Brent: So I decided to do the BSD-ing on my framework this week. That meant I had to
Brent: start from scratch, but I could try a whole bunch of new things and see how the hardware did.
Brent: And I decided, well, to go ghostly. So ghost BSD is where I decided to jump in.
Brent: I figured for sure someone else would do Nick's BSD, so I was going to leave that to you boys.
Brent: And I think it went pretty well at first. Chris, you were there.
Brent: You saw it just kind of booed up and Wi-Fi worked, which I was curious about.
Brent: And the video, everything video-wise worked really well. And it just seemed to like get going.
Brent: And it was snappy too, considering that it's Mate in there with a bunch of super
Brent: nice defaults in Ghost BSD that I really appreciated.
Brent: One of them especially was having the fish shell by default. That was super nice.
Chris: Yeah, we were sitting there at the BSD bench as we were busting through all of this.
Brent: Battle Station Bench.
Chris: The BSD Battle Station Bench as we were busting through all of this.
Chris: And my first impression when we both tried GhostBSD on physical hardware was
Chris: this is instantly more like a traditional Linux user experience.
Chris: You know, it boots really quick. It does a fun little trick.
Chris: I kind of wish I had an option, but it does a fun little trick where it dumps
Chris: everything into what they call basically a swap RAM disk.
Chris: And that takes a minute. So you need more than 4.1 gigs of RAM free because
Chris: it takes about 4 gigs just to do this memory thing.
Chris: So my first VM didn't like that very much, but on physical hardware, it was no problem.
Chris: So it takes a second and it copies everything to a RAM disk and then it proceeds
Chris: to boot the environment from that RAM disk.
Chris: And if you're on standardized hardware,
Chris: Unlike FreeBSD, which just drops you to a command prompt and it's like,
Chris: all right, boss, what do you want to do now?
Chris: This boots into an entire graphical environment with a curated experience.
Chris: It's pretty nice and is much more like a traditional Linux experience,
Chris: right, Brent? Like if you had tried Ubuntu Mate, this is what you would have experienced.
Brent: Yeah, I'm not sure I would have been able to tell the difference,
Brent: to be honest. And I think that's a good thing.
Brent: It's nice to see, I guess we're calling this a FreeBSD distribution.
Brent: just have some nice sane defaults or someone who
Brent: wants to get to the desktop pretty quickly this was a good
Brent: experience now that said i did
Brent: run into issues as i kept working through our challenge list we did give certain
Brent: points in episode 600 to certain activities so i worked all this week well and
Brent: just before this show to try to get as many points as possible you know i gotta
Brent: beat you guys something as.
Chris: We are setting up to record the show this guy is working on his homework last minute i'm literally.
Brent: Calling.
Chris: Attendance and he's sitting here filling out his homework trying to get the
Chris: highest score possible up to the very last moment.
Brent: Okay i.
Wes: Can um sympathize.
Brent: I mean there was no rule about that.
Chris: All right okay.
Brent: So uh as part of my homework i did catch one well there's a few things.
Brent: Let's walk through the points here. Install BSD and get it online. Check.
Brent: All of that worked for me. So that's worth two points.
Brent: Thank you very much. The next one here, record audio from a working desktop.
Brent: So I did get a working desktop and I did about five minutes before the show,
Brent: send you a little audio file. You'll let me know what you think of it.
Chris: Yeah. Speaking of last minute homework here, I believe it's a little quiet,
Chris: but it's Brent on Ghost BSD.
Chris: all right i mean it kind of sounds like garbage but.
Brent: It does sound like garbage i.
Wes: Couldn't use it if you needed to record on it for the show if reality yeah.
Brent: You probably.
Wes: Couldn't use it to take a work call.
Brent: No i know this was from a headset
Brent: mic that i've used in many many many calls of course i did not plug my podcasting
Brent: microphone into it just because i figured that would be a more realistic scenario
Brent: for most people and it sounds rough i think maybe there's some stuff that i
Brent: could do to make it sound better but i feel like 0.5.
Chris: Point is fair oh.
Brent: Hey hey now.
Chris: And in previous.
Wes: Defense you know for many years linux audio has also sounded like that so.
Chris: Well here's the thing and i'll just be honest with you guys right up front before
Chris: we get to my section uh i never got audio working i intended to circle back
Chris: to it as they say and get it working, but I've hooked up this little USB speaker
Chris: that I've used for other things,
Chris: and it has a little microphone on it, and it's just, I thought,
Chris: a generic audio device, and,
Chris: And I hook it up, and it never gets detected by FreeBSD or GhostBSD.
Chris: I never got working audio out of this device.
Chris: And I'm sure if I would have, you know, gone through the closet,
Chris: I probably could have found a USB audio device. It would have worked fine.
Chris: I just assumed this one would, and it did not. So I never actually got working
Chris: audio. So I get no point for this.
Chris: So, I mean, 0.5 isn't that bad.
Wes: Yeah, I'm in the same boat, so
Wes: I think Brent and several audience members really smoked us on that point.
Chris: Yeah, yeah.
Brent: Heck, yeah. Take that. Chris, and to confirm, I did take that audio device you
Brent: were trying, and I did try it on Linux and it worked perfectly fine.
Brent: So not the device, definitely the software.
Chris: Yeah, there's probably just not a driver. I just assumed it was some super generic
Chris: USB audio codec, but now you try it on FreeBSD and you find out, no, actually,
Chris: somebody, some brave soul is maintaining some esoteric driver for this stupid
Chris: speaker or whatever it's using, whatever chipset it's using in the Linux kernel.
Brent: I did continue using this on my framework, which went pretty well,
Brent: Although just today, I shut the lid to put it on suspend because I figured,
Brent: well, it's five minutes before the show. I should put this thing to sleep.
Brent: And it started overheating, I would call it.
Brent: Fans are blasting with the lid down. And I thought, geez, that's not good.
Brent: Sure enough, I peeled open the screen and it just had crashed, basically.
Brent: It was on a prompt, command prompt, and nothing I can do, nowhere I can go.
Brent: So, uh, seems like sleeping at least on the framework 11th gen is not so nice
Brent: with ghost BST. So that's a little PSA.
Chris: Can I ask you something?
Brent: Yeah, please.
Chris: Uh, did your crash screen have a cool rust QR code?
Brent: It did not. It did have some information, but I could not leave.
Brent: I could not go to other TTYs to try to, uh, save this thing.
Brent: It was just blasting heat.
Chris: Blasting fans.
Brent: Oh, yeah. And I just had to hard, hard reboot it.
Brent: And just to make sure it wasn't me, I rebooted fresh and I put it to sleep and same deal.
Brent: So that's a little disappointing.
Chris: And does it, so it seemed like, I always love it when something crashes,
Chris: especially at the system level, and then it just pegs the CPU. That's the best.
Chris: That's so, like, I've literally had situations where I've come into a room and
Chris: it's just like ridiculously hot.
Chris: You're like, what is going on in here? And oh, this machine's been crashed for 24 hours.
Brent: Pegged out sorry you didn't even get any bitcoin for it.
Chris: Yeah so i guess maybe no no sleep no suspend for you on the framework for now.
Brent: Yeah which kind of is a deal breaker i would say for most people um there might
Brent: be a workaround some way to fix this i didn't have a chance to do any research
Brent: because it happened a couple minutes before the show but to be noted because
Brent: that uh yeah it didn't feel too good,
Brent: I also, of course, ran into issues.
Brent: So Wi-Fi worked at the studio, worked perfectly fine. I came home. That was not the case.
Brent: And it took me a really long time to try to figure out. I had to even open up
Brent: WPA Supplicant, that old file that you haven't touched in 10 years,
Brent: and just to try to figure out what was going on.
Brent: And my theory, the closest theory
Brent: I can have, is that WPA2 isn't quite supported out of the box, it seems.
Brent: My network here is WPA2 only. And that didn't seem to work either,
Brent: so a little, I don't know, disappointed with that.
Chris: Really?
Brent: Yeah, really. The GhostBSD wiki has
Brent: a nice FAQ where they mention how to troubleshoot Wi-Fi if you need it.
Brent: But it doesn't mention anything about that. So, again, I was maybe.
Chris: As far as I know, there should be support for WPA2 and FreeBSD,
Chris: and GhostBSD is based on FreeBSD.
Wes: Yeah, I was able to get it working with...
Chris: WPA2, yeah.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: I think the studio uses WPA2.
Brent: That's what I could find as well, but it's the only thing I could see.
Brent: So, opening up WPA Supplicant, it was saving my password, the correct password
Brent: for the network, but just marking it as WPA.
Brent: So, it needs more work. Okay. But that's another little hiccup I ran into.
Brent: And my experience is with BSD, you quickly have to basically dive into config
Brent: files to try to troubleshoot some of these things. So a good way to learn.
Wes: Is this guy, is he new to Linux? What?
Chris: Yeah, I don't mind. I mean, really, the config files are pretty reasonable.
Chris: You know, they're pretty sensible. And they're generally a handful that you
Chris: really have to care about.
Wes: Yeah, you do kind of have to end up learning, like, what are the core things?
Wes: Okay, I want to modify this part of the system. That's over in this .conf,
Wes: and this bit's over here.
Chris: And there's a few things that are stored in slash boot that would be stored
Chris: in slash Etsy for Linux, and you have to kind of remap your brain around that,
Chris: but it's not too bad. How did you manage the command line stuff in general, Brent?
Brent: Yeah, I thought it felt kind of just right at home.
Brent: It felt like trying a new distribution where, okay, a couple of tools are renamed
Brent: and they're a different tool, but they kind of function in a similar way.
Brent: So installing packages and those kind of things, But really, it felt very familiar.
Brent: So I thought it was completely fine.
Brent: Totally fine. I would be very much okay with it.
Brent: Not your opinion?
Chris: No, I'm just glad to hear you didn't have a problem with it.
Chris: I, you know, I don't know.
Chris: You guys saw, I was like, I just want to use sudo. All the suggestions,
Chris: all the guides online have a use sudo, and then you're not actually supposed
Chris: to use sudo. You're supposed to use do as or whatever.
Wes: Well, I mean, supposed to is a strong word, right? Like, you could do it.
Wes: Well, it's not installed.
Chris: It's not installed.
Brent: Well.
Chris: Oh.
Brent: It was installed by default on Ghost.
Chris: On Ghost. On Ghost, yeah.
Brent: That was a nice idea as well.
Wes: And that's true on some Linux setups, too. Not most of these days,
Wes: but historically that has been.
Chris: Back in the day, you're right.
Wes: You got root, you could set up pseudo if you wanted.
Chris: You would have to set it up yourself, that's true.
Wes: So it's just sort of that style.
Chris: It is.
Wes: Which fits, right?
Chris: Yeah, yeah. Okay, Brett, let's...
Wes: Also, just point in favor in my mind, I think do-as is a lovely little utility.
Chris: Oh, yeah?
Wes: Well, just, I mean, the conf is so much simpler than, you know,
Wes: the pseudo-conf, I mean, maybe you want this with do-as too,
Wes: but the pseudo-conf, they had to come up with this whole VI pseudo thing because
Wes: the pseudo-conf is so easy to mess up that you can lock yourself out of the system.
Chris: Yeah, and half the file is them warning you not to edit it directly.
Wes: Right, yeah. So just the simplicity, it's not as full-featured.
Wes: You probably wouldn't want to use it in every situation, but you just want to
Wes: have a normal user who can run things as root.
Wes: Super easy. I mean, this is kind of why we're on Linux now, catching up in a
Wes: way with the systemd run improvements in terms of CLI UX.
Wes: So anyway, that's my little micro-soapbox on 2S.
Brent: Well, you know, Wes, because you had a micro micro soapbox last week and told me, Brent, it's do as.
Brent: And I was like, okay, okay. All right. This week I'm going to do that.
Brent: And I got on ghost and it wasn't even installed.
Brent: So I couldn't even use it. So I tried, I promise.
Chris: All right. Let's get to the points. What else did you do to stack points?
Chris: Cause I know you were doing your homework late.
Brent: Yes. The last point here for two points is get one server or service running accessible via the LAN.
Chris: Yeah.
Chris: How did you do?
Brent: Well, it depends what you consider a service.
Brent: So a few points here, I kind of tried to combine. So I figured,
Brent: geez, I could just try SyncThing. That's a service.
Brent: And I could try hosting it maybe in a jail.
Brent: Maybe then I can get some extra points for running something inside a jail.
Brent: That ended up as quite a nice rabbit hole. And I will say I failed at the jails part.
Brent: the same thing as well known to not work with
Brent: networking in jails uh so maybe a
Brent: bad choice on my end i did dive into jails and they sounded very interesting
Brent: i didn't get far enough to get it working in a way that i was happy with so
Brent: i would say more adventuring there so when it comes to the five points get an
Brent: app running inside pond manor jails that is a total zero for me Okay.
Chris: All right. That's fine. That's kind of extra.
Wes: Yeah. You got the audio file.
Brent: So that said, I bailed on jails and just installed sync thing with,
Brent: you know, normally and got it up and running and used it through tail scale.
Brent: And I found tail scale was very easy to install in BSD. It was just such a treat.
Brent: And that was your experience too, right, Chris?
Chris: Yeah. So I think out of all of the things I set up on BSD,
Chris: tail scale was the simplest because nothing works by default but tail scale
Chris: had the least amount of shenanigans i had to go through to get it working and
Chris: the combined with the fact that it's packaged upstream so it's really easy to
Chris: get installed the free the free bsd package manager is very serviceable yeah.
Wes: It's just in the port street so you can just.
Chris: No you don't even it's not even you know oh is it packaged i know.
Wes: It is a port too but.
Chris: Yeah yeah yeah but it's a it's in the you can just use package install and it's
Chris: fantastic super easy and you know you just change a couple things and it's up
Chris: and running and you tail scale up it.
Chris: Really impressed. See, every time I, that's the only time I've ever got it working
Chris: on BSD and all of the things which I'll talk about in a minute that I did get
Chris: working, that was the easiest for me. So I agree with you, Brent.
Brent: Getting Tailscale working, I realized I needed access to my password manager,
Brent: which I was like, oh, it's on my hard drive, like local hard drive.
Brent: I had installed GhostBSD to an external hard drive, so I just had to access
Brent: my internal hard drive on the framework.
Brent: No big deal, except I did find out that it was actually a big deal because it's
Brent: Lux encrypted and Lux encryption is not supported by default on the BSDs.
Brent: there is a project i found liblux sd e
Brent: uh which is considered a status experimental
Brent: for lux support and i played with that for far too long and could not get it
Brent: working so another little red flag there i would say if you've got lux encrypted
Brent: disks that is not the standard way to do it on bsd and i could not access mine
Brent: even though i tried and tried and tried and tried In reality.
Chris: If you were a regular BSD user, you'd probably have, you know, this on ZFS.
Chris: You'd be using some, yeah, you wouldn't, you wouldn't be using Lux.
Chris: But during this migration, if you were to move over, it's important to realize
Chris: this is going to be a roadblock.
Brent: So that was a good learning experience.
Wes: Did you, did you consider ZFS native encryption?
Brent: Well, I mean, that's what I used to install GhostBSD. But this was basically
Brent: me testing on my hardware, not wanting to wipe my current hard drive,
Brent: because I would like to use that later.
Wes: You wanted to be able to access already Lux encrypted data.
Brent: Yeah, I mean, what I discovered by trying this week was that a lot of things
Brent: I took for granted by trying Linux distributions were not necessarily true on BSD.
Brent: And that was kind of the whole point of this experiment was,
Brent: what do they do differently?
Chris: Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. You just glanced off, I think,
Chris: one of the key insights of the challenge.
Chris: I think as Linux users, we start to take for granted how much stuff actually
Chris: does work between distributions, commands, things like Lux encryption,
Chris: the file systems in general.
Chris: You can really move between your Ubuntu's and your Fedora's and your Arches
Chris: and your Nix's, and it's really quite manageable.
Wes: Especially if you've been around long enough to know the slight variations you
Wes: need for each flavor or whatever.
Chris: Yeah. But this is truly a different world.
Chris: And some of the things that you relied on that you could just bring over don't work.
Chris: I ran into this too. And there's alternatives, and often they're very clever
Chris: alternatives, but you need to migrate to that.
Chris: It's a different world, and not everything works the same.
Chris: And in that way alone, it's an interesting technical challenge from just distro hopping.
Chris: And I think you were just kind of glancing on that, Brent, but I really think
Chris: that's something to underscore.
Brent: Yeah, and in that way, I don't think a two-week challenge is actually enough
Brent: because there's some tools that map one-to-one.
Brent: But really, if you need to change your entire file system to reach the same
Brent: level of functionality that you previously did, well, maybe that takes a little bit more time.
Brent: And so, yeah, I would agree. A lot of tools I took for granted had a whole new
Brent: way to configure them, a whole new way to use them, sometimes arguably better,
Brent: depending what you value.
Brent: But it just meant I couldn't move very easily from one system to the other.
Brent: So a lot of learning opportunities.
Wes: I do think you're definitely right that, you know, FreeBSD is deep enough that
Wes: you could you could spend it.
Wes: I mean, as long as you like figuring out new and cool ways to use it.
Chris: I kind of went into this thinking, you know, what if I keep one of these systems?
Chris: running ghost or free bsd and uh
Chris: you know what if i just used it ongoing to try different stuff and so i you
Chris: know i'll talk about that when we get to my section but that was kind of my
Chris: mindset when i went into it um we should let's look at your total points though
Chris: brent because you're you're sounding like you're doing pretty good here you
Chris: got yeah i think running you got audio you got okay all right did you total it up.
Brent: Well there are a couple more points here i'll just work through really quickly
Brent: so get tailscale working on bsd system check install and configure a firewall.
Brent: I wasn't very intrigued by that. So I didn't even give it a try,
Brent: even though that probably would have been easy points. So zero for me on that one.
Chris: Didn't you technically have to get PF up and running with a basic rule?
Chris: Oh no. Cause you didn't do jails. Sorry. Nevermind. Nevermind.
Brent: Nope. So I'm going to give myself a fail on that particular point.
Brent: Um, next here, try out two BSDs.
Brent: So that could be net BSD, ghost BSD, free BSD. I certainly did that. So five points there.
Brent: Next BSD, give that a try. That might be next week. So haven't done that yet. Zero points.
Brent: And the last one here, get a non-BSD native video game running.
Chris: Right.
Brent: I will say I took this very hard mode. I did try.
Brent: On the Pi 400 last week, I tried to get Steam going, which I understand is a very bad idea.
Chris: All right.
Wes: Good man. Good man.
Chris: Let's total it up here. All right. What's your total?
Brent: Well, here's where I have to fight for some points. You suggested that I should
Brent: get 0.5 points for my record audio from your working desktop,
Brent: but I'm going to push back on this one a little bit.
Wes: Question, how did it sound if you played audio?
Wes: Because if that worked cleanly, then that sounds like more points.
Brent: Like playing audio from any audio source sounded perfectly fine.
Brent: Playing that audio sounded identical.
Brent: So it was definitely a recording issue, but audio worked out of the box.
Chris: I will concede, and for the full point for the audio, because I think...
Chris: The rules didn't say how good the audio has to be.
Wes: That's true.
Chris: Which is something maybe we keep in consideration for the next chapter.
Wes: I'm being a bit of a purist here. Yeah, you're right.
Chris: We did not say, we just said you had to be able to record audio.
Wes: As usual, the problem is in the spec.
Brent: Well, here's my argument. This particular line has two aspects to it.
Brent: Record audio from a working desktop.
Brent: So I think working desktop, I get a full point.
Brent: And record audio, I think I should get a half point for that.
Brent: No, I was going to give you the full point. Well, I know you were,
Brent: but let's keep this interesting. So I think 1.5.
Brent: You were going to give me 0.5. I want to argue for 1.5.
Chris: Oh, I see. I like this. All right, I see, because it's a double,
Chris: because you compounded it.
Brent: It's true.
Chris: All right, let me do the math again. Okay, and have you done your totals?
Chris: Let's see if, what do you have?
Brent: Well, my total here, it looks like if I've done this live properly, 25 and a half.
Chris: Oh, 25 points.
Brent: Yeah, let's see you guys beat that one.
Chris: I don't.
Wes: Know what the rubric should be but it sounds very impressive and you've definitely beaten me.
Chris: Yeah that is that might be hard to beat I don't know if I'm going to do it oh
Chris: boy okay all right well I'm going to need you you'll have to keep track of my
Chris: points because I don't think I totaled mine up but I like this compounding point
Chris: idea you may have just set precedent we'll see,
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Brent: Well, Wes, I'm curious to hear how your week went. Did you do as I did and BSD this week?
Wes: I did. I did run into a slight complication. I was dealing with a bit of an
Wes: illness, so I didn't get to spend as much time in the BSD universe as I wanted.
Wes: but I did, of course, end up having a lot of fun. So, let's see.
Wes: Maybe we can look through the
Wes: challenge rules again. Brent, you nicely summarized yours, but I did not.
Wes: I definitely installed BSD, no problem. I got it running on a VPS.
Wes: I got it running in a VM on my laptop.
Chris: Okay.
Wes: And this part I didn't get to do as much with as I wanted, but I did get it booted on my T480.
Chris: Oh, nice. There's some decent points here.
Wes: Yeah. I did not manage to get audio working. I think I definitely could have.
Wes: It was probably my fault on the host platform side in terms of the VM.
Wes: And then in the hardware mode, it seems like it should have been supported.
Wes: I think I just didn't actually manage to enable the right thing.
Chris: You actually have to turn it on. Yeah.
Wes: And I just didn't have enough time to quite get across that.
Chris: One of my systems, it saw the devices, but it wouldn't play anything unless
Chris: I implicitly went into like rc.conf and did like sound equals on or whatever.
Chris: And then the devices could play sound.
Wes: I did want to touch on just, I
Wes: think it's neat that the BSDs still kind of have the whole C shell thing.
Wes: It's just a different Unix heritage that you really don't see in the Linux side of things.
Wes: I did ultimately just end up installing Fish because I love Fish,
Wes: but I used the C shell for a bit, TCSH.
Chris: All right. I mean, you're doing better than I thought for somebody who was down
Chris: with the plague for the week.
Wes: I did also manage to get one server or service running, which meant I did have to set up a firewall.
Wes: I did manage to lock myself out of the VPS briefly while playing with firewalls.
Chris: Nice.
Wes: Also, like what? There's like three firewalls that you get to choose between.
Wes: Obviously, there's PF, which came from OpenBSD, which got a port to FreeBSD.
Wes: And then there's the IPFW, which is the one I tried.
Chris: Oh, OK. I did PF. Interesting.
Wes: I didn't do anything crazy with it. I'd like to play with it more,
Wes: but that wasn't bad. Totally reasonable to use. Well documented.
Chris: No problem. Yeah.
Wes: I got Jellyfin running.
Chris: Oh, that's a good point. So remote service working.
Wes: That one I just ran on the host, but I did manage to set up a jail.
Wes: I didn't do a ton with it, but I just ran a little built-in Python web server,
Wes: and then I added in a ZFS dataset from the host.
Wes: So that was my little mock. Oh, this is kind of the container-y thing I would try to do.
Wes: I want to spend more time with that. I didn't get Podman going,
Wes: although that seemed quite promising.
Brent: Well all of a sudden I feel like I'm not doing so well here.
Wes: Well, a lot of this I managed to do the previous week, sort of,
Wes: because I was doing a lot of the servery stuff first.
Chris: Before the plague really struck you?
Wes: Yes. So I did manage to get Tailscale going.
Chris: Oh, yeah.
Wes: I just did the ports version, because I saw that was in there.
Chris: I'm glad that you got to try that, because we didn't try the ports version, so that's cool.
Wes: That worked fine. I did not end up trying GhostBSD or NetBSD or OpenBSD,
Wes: so I don't get any extra BSD points. FreeBSD only.
Chris: Are you tallying up right?
Brent: I'm tallying.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: Sadly no video gaming or uh nix bsd okay.
Chris: Okay all right that might be something we come back to sometime i could see
Chris: it's maybe all three of us revisiting that implicitly.
Wes: I did try to play briefly with the linux compatibility mode.
Chris: Oh yeah okay.
Wes: I got reaper to launch oh in a vm oh but the audio stuff wasn't working so it
Wes: didn't actually do anything for me and i don't i'd seen other people report
Wes: that like crashed trying to pick the audio device so i don't know if it would
Wes: worked i did get ardor working because that has a port um but once again i because
Wes: i didn't get the audio parts all i didn't quite get that was the last stuff i was working on i.
Chris: Think i was passively using linux compatibility during uh my challenge which
Chris: i'll talk about i didn't actively use it but i think some of the software i
Chris: was using was relying on it.
Wes: And you know that should be another big point in freebsd's favor if we're telling
Wes: in those twos because like windows had to basically copy this with WSL v1.
Wes: That's a great point. And then they ended up pivoting to a virtualization layer,
Wes: whereas FreeBSDs, I mean, they've got their own virtualization layer,
Wes: but also, you know, their compatibility mode's working pretty well.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: And they have different goals, and obviously they have a kernel that's a lot
Wes: closer in many ways to Linux than the, you know, NT kernel is.
Wes: So part of the problem, not problem, but I got, I thought it would be funny
Wes: if I could manage to get FreeBSD running on the ThinkPad and then show up to the studio,
Wes: looking like I was running Windows but running Windows via Beehive because I
Wes: saw that it's possible and I actually got the installer going but I must have
Wes: done something wrong because when Windows booted it wasn't happy about some
Wes: sort of driver thing so I got to play with that more.
Chris: That would have been hilarious You did pretty good I don't know if it's 25 points but it's.
Brent: Close I have a clarifying question here.
Wes: Wes.
Brent: Did you get a desktop up and running?
Wes: Oh, yes, yes. So in playing with
Wes: Beehive and eventually trying to get that going, I did get Plasma going.
Chris: Ah, good, good, good.
Wes: I didn't get, it wasn't like a fully featured, it was a pretty bare bones sort of Plasma setup.
Chris: 527 release and all that.
Wes: Yes.
Chris: Yeah.
Brent: So it seems on the same point item here, we might have a split.
Brent: So you did not record any audio, but you did get a desktop going.
Brent: So did you get one point for that one?
Chris: Yeah, all right.
Chris: So, okay, I think that's fair.
Brent: So total here for Wes looks like 20 big BSD points.
Wes: Hey, that is better than I thought I might do.
Chris: Congratulations, Wes. I honestly, you know, I thought this would be the one.
Chris: I really thought this would be the one where one of us would,
Chris: I mean, maybe I won't make 20. We'll see. Maybe I'm the Windows user.
Wes: I think I feel just a little bit like maybe letdown's the wrong.
Wes: I think Brent's phrasing of this isn't enough time because like,
Wes: I played a bit with like when I was setting things up with like Gpart and some
Wes: of the ways that FreeBSD does storage on that layer.
Wes: But then FreeBSD has also got the whole Geom framework.
Wes: That's really cool. Obviously, they've got tons of ZFS integrations and all
Wes: the boot environment stuff, which I didn't really get to play with in any real
Wes: way besides them just sort of existing.
Wes: So I'm left with there's a lot more that I want to dabble in.
Chris: Yeah, actually, there's a couple of reasons why I feel like there's more to dabble in.
Chris: First of all, there's FreeBSD 15, which we could talk about.
Wes: Oh, yeah.
Chris: Hank wrote in, and he got FreeBSD 15 working on his Pi 4, which we were having
Chris: troubles with the 14.2 release.
Chris: He says, I've got FreeBSD 15 current running headless, but not before I applied
Chris: a tweak, which he links us to.
Chris: I got lucky. This was posted two days before I gave it a go. That's not fair.
Chris: He got really lucky. I installed it on a 4-gigabyte Pi 4B.
Chris: I'm not sure if I'm going to enter the challenge. I have no interest in a desktop
Chris: or FreeBSD, but I just wanted to see if the ZFS corruption bug I'm working on also affects FreeBSD.
Chris: And it looks like it does. Oh, I'd like to know more about that, Hank.
Chris: He says, so I lose points for no desktop environment, but I feel like I should
Chris: get points for doing real work on FreeBSD. Yeah.
Wes: Fair.
Chris: That is fair. IMHO, we should get a point just for figuring out how to configure
Chris: NTP in the time zone. I agree.
Brent: I agree 100%.
Chris: Yeah.
Brent: So what are we giving Hank here? Install BSD, get online, that's two points.
Brent: NTP, I think we'd give him that one for another two points. That's at least four points.
Chris: Yeah, and I think we give him five at least for doing real work.
Brent: All right, five for real work. So that looks like nine points at least.
Chris: Not bad for, and you know, and for writing in, we give him another point.
Chris: Let's round it up for another point. He gets 10 points. There you go, Hank.
Brent: 10 points for Hank.
Chris: Thanks, Hank. 10 points for Hank. All right, so let me tell you about my challenge.
Chris: Started off the first week pretty good, just using good old classic free BSD.
Chris: One of my early wins was tail scale. I was really impressed with that.
Chris: Before I left the FreeBSD world, though, I did want to get my remote service
Chris: working. And because I thought, why not do it the hard way?
Chris: I wanted to see what it would be like to get it working with Podman.
Wes: Oh, yeah. I'm glad one of us got to go down this.
Chris: And so the first Podman container I tried to run after you. So you install Podman.
Chris: I think you have to install a lot of the Linux. That's why I was saying the
Chris: Linux compatibility stuff gets installed.
Chris: You do have to set up PF. So I had to set up a firewall in there and do some
Chris: basic network routing. so that way my containers could communicate with my Ethernet.
Wes: Right, you wanted other things to be able to access it.
Chris: And I'm really impressed. I mean, I think it may have literally been one line
Chris: of config for PF to do this, maybe two.
Chris: It might have been two lines of config. And then I had to start the PF service
Chris: and enable it to come on at boot.
Chris: And I think there's like a one line in rc.conf I had to add.
Wes: I think we're like finally getting closer to this with nftables in some ways at least.
Wes: But yeah, there's a reason Docker does a whole bunch of IP tables commands under
Wes: the hood. And you don't when you set up a container on Linux.
Chris: However, Jellyfin, I got an error. And it was basically complaining of the wrong architecture.
Chris: It says the architecture either needs to be AMD64 or FreeBSD.
Chris: And they didn't have a FreeBSD architecture available.
Chris: I didn't really dig into this too much further because I, A,
Chris: figured I probably could have just installed it locally. And B...
Chris: realized i don't need another jellyfin server so pivoted
Chris: and i went and got vs code the podman
Chris: container for vs code up for the server version yeah
Chris: for the web version of vs vs code running via podman on freebsd and you better
Chris: you better believe it worked great i i like i said i had to get pf working before
Chris: i could actually pull it up in another on another computer on the land but once
Chris: i did i was able to pull up visual studio code editor on all my machines on
Chris: the land running off FreeBSD on Podman.
Wes: Oh, that is neat.
Chris: It was great. And, you know, for the most part, I was able to troubleshoot all
Chris: of the errors relatively quickly.
Chris: So I enjoyed that and used it for a little bit and moved on to GhostBSD, which is fantastic.
Chris: These guys are really cooking. If you want to check out the BSD desktop world,
Chris: just go right to GhostBSD.
Chris: Mate Armate looking great. It auto detects your video. If that fails,
Chris: it brings up a nice end curses-like UI to select your GPU drivers and then continues to boot.
Chris: If you use their sort of relatively synaptic-like basic package manager GUI,
Chris: it also lets you auto-create boot environment backups using ZFS that then get added to the boot menu.
Wes: Slick.
Chris: To make it easy to roll back at a reboot. Really like that. and a decent selection
Chris: of packages, which meant, boys, it is so easy to get retro gaming going on Ghost BSD.
Chris: And I'll link to a couple of wiki entries on this. If you're an old school gamer,
Chris: really, you're going to have no problem on a free BSD, Ghost BSD setup.
Chris: Packaged in there, right there, is a great NES and SNES emulator.
Chris: So I was able to get SNES and NES games running no problem on FreeBSD,
Chris: which is a non-native FreeBSD game check.
Chris: And follow some of the wiki stuff to get other things installed.
Chris: Just playing around. I also got Wine installed. And I came across.
Chris: How do you think I say this, Wes? It's M-I-Z-U-T-A-M-A-R-I.
Wes: Mizutamari?
Chris: Yeah. Okay. This is really neat to see.
Chris: It's an open source, user-friendly Wine front end built for FreeBSD.
Wes: Wow.
Chris: So we have a community out there that is building user-facing desktop applications
Chris: that are designed to make things just easier to get up and going.
Chris: We've seen versions of this. You know, Bottles is a fantastic version of this on Linux.
Chris: And it's a wine front end that gives you a GUI. It's pretty much just all bash
Chris: scripts on the back end, but it gives you a GUI with a predefined library of applications.
Chris: So I was able to get things from like Angry Birds to common Windows applications installed.
Chris: installed it automatically handles the 32-bit package stuff
Chris: that you might need it knows some of the things it needs to do
Chris: to get it working on free bsd like a little bit of a like there's like a
Chris: memory patch thing it does that you don't have to do on linux they take
Chris: care of that they also make it easy to access things
Chris: so once you get the application installed you get a sub menu to like access
Chris: wine tricks or execute the application or browse the
Chris: file system where it's at like you can manage the wine applications once
Chris: they're installed with this application so i was able
Chris: to get lots of things up and going through wine just as an experiment
Chris: and the interface is really simple but fully effective and it's packaged at
Chris: least it was on ghost bsd you can just do package install m-i-z-u-m-a and i
Chris: think that was the package and it'll install and you can just run it and you're
Chris: cooking with wine and a bunch of good old retro games too so that was nice.
Wes: I didn't even think about trying that that is slick.
Chris: I really had no idea if wine would work you know i i imagine the Linux compatibility
Chris: stuff that I already had installed for Podman might have helped.
Chris: I have no idea.
Wes: Yeah, is it using that? Or do they have a version that just hooks into the necessary
Wes: things on the FreeBSD side? Either way, very impressive.
Chris: Okay, Brent, have you been tallying up my score as I go along?
Brent: Well, reluctantly, because Wes, I think he might be pulling ahead here.
Chris: Oh, really?
Wes: That's fair. That's fair.
Chris: Okay, what are we at?
Wes: He's got a Podman-based VS Code server. I'm going to give it to him.
Wes: And while he's not working on his fancy coding stuff, he's retro gaming.
Chris: Jeez.
Brent: Like we were together this week and i don't know where you fit all this in so
Brent: i have a question for you sneaky did you get any audio recorded chris i did
Brent: not get audio recorded all right so maybe you get half points yeah i did get audio.
Chris: I got audio playback once i enabled sound.
Brent: But i never got audio recorded.
Chris: Yeah i know.
Brent: Okay so let's see here install bsd two
Brent: points there for you record audio and get it working from a
Brent: desktop half points you get one point there uh get
Brent: a service running you get two full points now
Brent: moving ahead podman you got going so that's five points
Brent: install a firewall well you had to do that too that's
Brent: another five points oh get tail scale
Brent: working yep five points there for you try out two bsds you sure did that that's
Brent: another five points you did not try nick's bsd right correct correct correct
Brent: correct so zero points i think we have got some homework there for later uh
Brent: get a non-bsd native video game running You are the only one to complete that
Brent: one. That's another five points for a total.
Brent: Let me see here. Uh-huh. Yeah. Yeah.
Chris: Doing the math, doing the math, doing the math.
Brent: Total of?
Brent: 30 BSD points.
Wes: Whoa!
Brent: So that's 30 BSD points for Chris, 25 for Brent, 20 for Wes, and, well, Hank got 10.
Chris: Not bad at all, boys. And I know
Chris: we have probably some in the booths we're going to be getting to as well.
Chris: I think for the next challenge, the rule should be whoever gets the lowest points has to run Windows.
Chris: Wes, that wasn't the rule this time. The rule was if you had to bail.
Wes: Yeah, I squeaked it out, I think.
Chris: Yeah, if you had to bail. I think we change it to lowest points at least amongst
Chris: the three of us has to run Windows.
Brent: I agree completely with that one.
Chris: I want to hear how the audience did, so I do want to hear people's boost reports.
Wes: I also think that means we're going to need another challenge, right?
Chris: Yeah, and we definitely need some suggestions on our next challenge.
Chris: These are a lot of fun and it gets us out of our comfort zone.
Chris: This one in particular, it got us out of our comfort zone in a way that I haven't
Chris: been in a while and I loved it.
Chris: And it felt good and it was really nice to check in with the BSDs.
Chris: I feel like Ghost BSD is kind of a star here, obviously because I'm coming at
Chris: it from a Linux user's perspective.
Chris: I would love to know if you're a FreeBSD purist out there and you're listening,
Chris: are you rolling your eyes when I talk on about GhostBSD? Is there like a thing there?
Wes: I don't know how active it is, but they did have a release in 2024.
Wes: Did any of us try? I did not. Hello system?
Chris: No, I forgot about that.
Wes: That'd be another follow-up maybe.
Chris: So check this out though. GhostBSD is, quote, making some important changes
Chris: to how GhostBSD is built and released to provide a better, more stable experience for our users.
Chris: So they're switching to the free BSD release, future Ghost BSD versions will
Chris: be based on free BSD release instead of stable.
Chris: This will improve stability, reduce unexpected issues, and allow us to focus
Chris: on more software updates and tool development.
Chris: Aligning with free BSD's release schedule, Ghost BSD releases will now be planned
Chris: for the same month as free BSD releases, ensuring better synchronization with free BSD updates.
Wes: Sounds like a big change, but also sounds good.
Chris: Yeah, it sounds really good. I think the project's got a good future.
Chris: They got a nice desktop. I mean, the only thing is can they handle the workload, but,
Chris: They're on top of it. So one of my takeaways is if you're a Linux desktop user
Chris: and you just want to dip your toe, just start with GhostBSD.
Chris: And you got a good free BSD system with a lot of the heavy lift on.
Chris: But if you want to build it up from the, you know, sort of the bolts,
Chris: then you start with free BSD proper.
Brent: I have to say a huge thank you to our community. You listeners,
Brent: you were BSDing right there alongside us.
Brent: We have a couple I'd like to mention here. So we did have Vic,
Brent: who ran it on a RockPro 64,
Brent: XFCE that is, got some audio recorded, and also hosted a piehole in Podman along
Brent: with Tailscale and DOSBox. So impressive.
Brent: SUCD also used FreeBSD via Proxmox, recorded some audio, and got a Spice console
Brent: working and a bunch of other Spice fanciness. So very, very fancy.
Brent: Code Compost.
Brent: maybe the fanciest of all, shared a file of a desktop with us on a Nextcloud
Brent: instance, running a jail, routed through a Raspberry Pi 4, running Caddy in
Brent: a jail as a reverse proxy.
Brent: Screenshot is the main desktop running tail scale on the very same machine.
Brent: How many points does that get them?
Wes: I'm going to say at least 30.
Brent: Let's say 31 because I beat Chris out.
Wes: There we go.
Brent: So thank you for everyone for playing along with us. It was super fun and sharing
Brent: what you learned and your struggles.
Brent: Now we do have Sheetman here who is in Mumble via FreeBSD.
Brent: Sheetman, what was your FreeBSD experience like?
Mumble: So I installed FreeBSD on a 2014 MacBook Air and discovered that its Wi-Fi card
Mumble: was not supported at all.
Mumble: So I pulled out my old 2011 and I got that running, had to recompile the kernel,
Mumble: but I do have working Broadcom Wi-Fi and Plasma, and the whole darn show works perfectly.
Mumble: It's a useful system. It was built for BSD, and I'm keeping it this way.
Chris: Well done. You're right. It's true to its heritage that way.
Chris: That's really great. Thank you, Sheep Man.
Chris: Just because our challenge is over doesn't mean we don't want to hear your experiences.
Chris: If you're still trying it out there or you give it a go and you're listening
Chris: after the fact, you can still totally let us know how it goes.
Chris: We love hearing the adventures.
Wes: Yeah, it's really made it kind of a special little event.
Chris: You know what? Adversary 17 deserves this one.
Chris: Very reliable, consistent supporter of the shows. And they get the baller booster
Chris: spot this week with 20,000 sats.
Chris: That's a good guy.
Chris: Regarding transcripts, I listened to the bootlegs, So please don't worry about
Chris: it for the bootleg feed. Sounds like a ton of work.
Chris: Yeah, the bootleg feed is two hours and 30 minutes right now. Ironically.
Wes: And you hand transcribe them.
Chris: That's true. And I have been actually for months, adversaries.
Chris: The thing is, is that things like a fountain don't display them because it's a private feed.
Chris: So ironically, there is a transcript for the bootleg. It's one of the places
Chris: we first started experimenting.
Chris: But because it's a private feed, some podcast clients don't show it.
Wes: Tebidog boosts in with 12,345 sets.
Wes: Finally got a live episode. Happy to be here to listen as it's all happening.
Wes: This was for last week's episode, our challenge check-in.
Chris: Right on. Thank you, dog. Nice to hear. I always appreciate,
Chris: too, people's comment or experiences with the live stream. Always appreciate those boos.
Brent: Well, SatStacker number seven sends in 5,000 sats.
Brent: Heyo, I finally got to set up Audiobookshelf for my Audible library.
Brent: Really love it so far. and wonder, what is your workflow for transferring newly bought books?
Brent: At the moment, I manually convert them using Libation and then upload them to Audiobookshelf.
Brent: Would love this to happen automatically when I buy a new book.
Chris: Yeah, man. Me too. I was doing this last night.
Chris: You know, pick up a couple audiobooks. I don't ever use the Audible app anymore.
Chris: I buy them on Audible, and then I immediately fire up Libation,
Chris: download them, and then what I've done,
Chris: right is i've just added a bookmark in my file manager both
Chris: in dolphin in files that is just an fc sftp mount
Chris: to my audiobooks directory and then
Chris: once they download i just copy them over i i would
Chris: love an automated process as far
Chris: as i know there is libation cli but i've never seen a way
Chris: to do it automatically that'd be there it'd be so
Chris: sweet to just buy an audible and have it show up an audio bookshelf does anybody
Chris: know let us know gene beans here with 4444 sats says i use my laptop screen
Chris: plus two external monitors every day and have for more years than i count okay
Chris: so checking in on the multi-monitor we didn't get a lot of responses to this
Chris: did any of us end up trying multi-mon no.
Wes: I did not.
Chris: I think i did either actually darn that was one of our chris you and i We were low.
Brent: On HDMI cables, so we were sharing HDMI cables. And I was like,
Brent: once you leave, I'm going to try that. And never got around to it, so that's so sad.
Chris: The battle bench definitely had a HDMI shortage.
Brent: Also ether.
Chris: And that was a problem. Yeah, yeah. There's room for improvement on the bench. There's that.
Wes: It's new.
Chris: Jing continues, when I'm out and about, I generally use more than one screen
Chris: of doing any real work. This little gem has come in super easy.
Chris: And he links us to a Vision Owl portable monitor, which is a 15.6-inch travel screen.
Chris: And it's USB-C 1080p, and it even has speakers built in.
Chris: I've actually used something very similar to this.
Wes: Yeah, I don't hate this idea.
Chris: Yeah. I at home- I really want this. I at home have a laptop mount,
Chris: like a Visa mount, that's just a laptop tray.
Chris: And then it's all on one pole. And then the other mount is one of these little portable monitors.
Chris: so I just put my laptop on the Visa mount and plug in the USB-C cord and I'm
Chris: off to the races thank you for the feedback Gene Bean we're still curious too
Chris: to get more feedback on people's multi-monitor use.
Wes: User 63 comes in with 10,000 SATs,
Wes: This is kind of fun. It seems like we're getting some stream of consciousness
Wes: boosts during the challenge.
Chris: I actually watched these ones come in live. I knew what he was up to.
Wes: The first one. No way. Xorg didn't work because the root account was not in
Wes: the video group, which is insane, as root should have access to everything.
Chris: Yeah, you're not really supposed to run X's root.
Wes: And then comes in with a second boost. Okay.
Wes: I give up. Well, I mean, I don't.
Wes: Like DJ Khaled famously said on Hot Ones, I promise you, if I stop,
Wes: it doesn't mean I gave up. I'm going to teach you something today.
Wes: We can't play ourselves. We can't hurt ourselves. We can't hurt our health.
Wes: Now you see, that's the key.
Chris: That's some wise-sounding stuff. I don't know if it's wise in itself,
Chris: but it's wise-sounding.
Chris: Thank you very much. I appreciate that, Deezer. I love the stream of consciousness.
Brent: Well, Podbun sent us two rows of ducks to share a little feedback.
Brent: Here's one about our little YouTube rant. So many times podcasts that upload
Brent: to YouTube aren't very audio friendly.
Brent: They'll refer to stuff that the YouTube audience can see and seemingly as an afterthought.
Brent: Describe what's happening in the video quote for audio listeners.
Chris: Yeah, it's the worst when an
Chris: audio podcast transitions to a YouTube live stream and starts doing that.
Chris: And YouTube just did last week this round of publicity about how they're taking
Chris: over podcasting, And how proud
Chris: they are that YouTube is the place for all forms of entertainment now.
Chris: The number one place for all forms including podcasts.
Chris: And that they're going to give out more money to more podcasters to get them
Chris: to move to YouTube next year. Or this year.
Brent: Bob Budden continues here. After working with two monitors at work,
Brent: I've not been able to go back to computing on a single monitor.
Brent: I have a main high hertz monitor and a lower hertz monitor on the side.
Brent: I've stuck with 1080p as I don't see the use for 4K for me.
Chris: I do like 1440p. I do think that's a nice sweet spot.
Chris: So the way I've gotten by at home, because now I'm using the B-Link and I'm
Chris: no longer bringing the laptop home since the laptop is a goner.
Chris: I hook the B-Link up to one of those Samsung crazy ultra-wide monitors,
Chris: the curved ultra-wide ones.
Chris: It's just ridiculously wide, and you can fit like three full window applications in the screen.
Wes: It's like the enterprise view screen for the RV.
Chris: And it kind of reduces my need for multi-monitor at home. I find it works really
Chris: well. And that's why I think Gnome Shell has worked so well for me at home.
Chris: Everywhere else where I have multi-monitor, I have to have plasma.
Chris: Thank you for the boost. Appreciate the feedback on the multi-mon.
Chris: Fabbean comes in with 5,000 sats.
Chris: I'm running my Framework 13 laptop plus two stacked ultrawides every day.
Chris: Each ultrawide is 3440 by 1440.
Chris: That sounds normal, right? I mean, it sounds like the kind of setup I'd like.
Chris: Now what you got to do is turn those things on their side, right?
Chris: Make them go vertical, Fab. that's what you gotta do how.
Wes: Else can you look at logs.
Chris: Appreciate the boost and the love of the setup.
Wes: Tomato comes in with 8222 sats,
Wes: Something seems to have gone wrong with my daemon update boost,
Wes: which shows is anonymous on the Fountain website. But that was me, tomato.
Chris: All right. All right. Thank you.
Wes: Oh, but, oh, here we go. Now we're getting a daemon update. Last Saturday night,
Wes: I sat down to install FreeBSD.
Wes: I hadn't really done so since 4.something, but I'm sure it'll be easy.
Wes: I'm a NetBSD user, after all.
Chris: Okay.
Wes: Well, the FreeBSD installer is not as easy as NetBSD. I eventually gave up trying
Wes: to get ZFS to booze on my T440p and started thinking about Comic Sans.
Wes: Didn't boost in last week, out of shame.
Chris: There's no shame in the game, no.
Wes: This week, I tried on a new machine, a more modern ThinkPad.
Wes: Got rude on ZFS working, thankfully, which for me is kind of the whole point of trying FreeBSD.
Wes: And eventually, X11, KDE, and sound. Alright.
Wes: I still can't get my preferred keyboard layout, though. I went for a sync thing
Wes: in a jail to get seven points instead of just two.
Brent: Hey, that's not fair.
Chris: No, that's good. That's good game strategy was what that is right there.
Wes: I also did a fresh install of my favorite NetBSD, which I don't normally run as a desktop.
Wes: But I have to say, getting the graphical environment working there was actually easier.
Wes: In general, I find the NetBSD installation process much more pleasant, though I'm,
Wes: of course more familiar with it sure wes you might enjoy looking at the net
Wes: bsd boot process it's wonderfully simple you can even get root on zfs though
Wes: it's a manual process that makes for a slightly janky boot procedure no worse
Wes: than how linux boots though yeah.
Chris: That's good and also you see he did his own math for us there too you see that.
Wes: Oh look at that yeah okay six points for free
Wes: bsd installed online audio recording uh apparently
Wes: owes us a link to that or maybe we missed it
Wes: that's totally probably in the chat yeah uh and sync thing
Wes: 15 points for sync thing in a jail firewall
Wes: configured and i also installed a net bsd desktop right i don't think i'll keep
Wes: the free bsd installation all said and done but i am going to keep net bsd on
Wes: this laptop it not only suspends which free bsd couldn't do it even resumes that's.
Chris: Definitely that's definitely good.
Wes: But in general i'm sticking with linux as a desktop yeah.
Chris: That was our take too like It was nice to visit. It's cool to see.
Chris: Really impressive stuff over there.
Chris: But Linux, you know, there's just a whole world of compatibility and options
Chris: over here. And things work much easier.
Wes: Although now I'm kind of thinking, I do want to try Nick's BSD.
Chris: Yeah, I want to try Nick's BSD, I'll tell you the truth.
Brent: Well, VMAX came in with 10,000 sets.
Brent: If any of you out there do multi-room audio or even any audio through Home Assistant,
Brent: try out Music-Assistant.
Brent: It has an incredibly well-designed plug-in system to let you choose a provider
Brent: plug-in and then a player plug-in.
Brent: I verified it works very well with Spotify and LMS Squeezebox, Chromecast, Snapcast.
Wes: Now that is compelling.
Chris: I really do, really do, really do want to get into music assistant this year,
Chris: especially now that the Nebukasa folks are selling the voice assistant preview
Chris: hardware that has an audio out jack.
Chris: And each one of these can show up in home assistant and thus probably music
Chris: assistant as an output destination.
Chris: And you could do synchronized audio across all of these things.
Chris: And they're like, you know, 20 bucks a puck.
Chris: So I really could change the synchronized audio game. I think on our goal list
Chris: for this year is to get both Wes and Brent on Home Assistant.
Wes: Absolutely.
Chris: And then together, we'll, for a first time, all look at Music Assistant, which could be a blast.
Wes: Done deal.
Chris: So it's not in the works at the moment, but it is in the planning stages.
Chris: And I really appreciate the boost, Vey. Nice to hear from you.
Chris: Caso Mears here with, I'm going to say, 4,000 delicious sats.
Chris: Says they enjoyed the FreeBSD challenge. They scored a humble four points after
Chris: getting KDE Plasma. It felt like cheating a little after the audio just worked for them.
Chris: Hey, you're lucky. Sometimes you get lucky like that.
Chris: Love the reports. Keep them coming if you try to. And also want your ideas on
Chris: future challenge ideas.
Chris: Ideas on ideas, but you know what I mean. And thank you, everybody,
Chris: who boosted in above 2,000 sets. That is our cutoff line.
Chris: We had our sat streamers come in with 31 of you streaming 59,569 sats.
Chris: Thank you, SatStreamers, doing a nice heavy lift today.
Chris: Really appreciate that. And then, of course, when you combine that with our
Chris: boost, we stacked a grand, humble total of 144,224 sats.
Chris: Not a killer week for us, but after a couple of great weeks,
Chris: we just really still appreciate the support.
Wes: That consistent support.
Chris: We appreciate it very much. In fact, if you'd like to join in and get your message
Chris: on the show and boost us, just grab something like Strike so you get some sats
Chris: or whatever you prefer to buy your sats. Maybe something like the Bitcoin Well or River.
Chris: Then get a podcasting 2.0 app like Fountain or Podverse. There's lots.
Chris: Listen to podcastapps.com.
Chris: And then you can boost in and support the show. And you can also check out all
Chris: the cool new standards and stuff that's getting worked out as an open source community.
Chris: And there's more things coming all the time. And if you have one of those podcasting
Chris: 2.0 apps, you now have transcripts for this here Linux podcast.
Chris: And that's always nice because you can look things up, see what we said word
Chris: for word, or get the name of something that hopefully it got right.
Chris: That's now available in podcasting 2.0 apps.
Wes: I also think it was definitely one of those, you know, V for V weeks where if
Wes: the value wasn't totally in the sat column, it was most definitely in the experience report column.
Chris: Definitely. And the contributions to the show, that's always a great way to
Chris: also send value back. It's not just treasure, it's time and talent too.
Chris: All of it keeps the show going and it together helps us create the world's largest Linux podcast.
Chris: Keeps it on the road with the listeners as the biggest customer.
Chris: I wanted to give a shout out since it's sort of beginning of the year.
Chris: We haven't mentioned it in quite a long time. We have told you about this pick before.
Chris: But because we use it so extensively to produce the show, it felt only fair
Chris: that we give them another plug.
Chris: And it is HedgeDoc, H-E-D-G-E-D-O-C, HedgeDoc, which lets you create real-time
Chris: collaborative markdown notes, licensed in GPL3.
Chris: HedgeDoc 1 is nice and stable. We've been using it for years.
Chris: Love it. Depend on it. And HedgeDoc 2 is coming along very nice.
Chris: It's a rewrite of HedgeDoc completely from the ground up.
Chris: It's got some new improvements in the UI, just sort of a refactoring of the way they do things.
Chris: and so HedgeDoc 1 is in maintenance and if you've been curious about HedgeDoc at all I think it's worth,
Chris: now to start tracking hedge doc 2 they're both uh improvements in how it's built
Chris: but also they refactor into two components the back end and the front end you
Chris: can run both together or run them independently oh.
Wes: I'm curious about.
Chris: This yeah.
Wes: I will second just you know it's super easy to get going at least for v1 and
Wes: um where it really shines is it's just got great markdown support it's a markdown
Wes: implementation supports all the things that you're used to having in markdown.
Chris: And it's good as google docs and real-time editing yeah.
Wes: That's just it they like the eventual consistent sort of like merging things cleanly.
Chris: Yeah superb it's got it's got a
Chris: bunch of great features around there too but if uh you know a collaborative
Chris: markdown editor that runs a web browser doesn't interest you then perhaps if
Chris: you like me do have a gnome system from time to time you might want to add water
Chris: this is a utility that makes firefox look like a native Gnome applications.
Chris: Like, you know how it just sort of doesn't quite fit? Not like Epiphany or Gnome Web does.
Chris: It just sort of looks a little bit out of place. Well, when you add water,
Chris: which was the name of the app, it helps you with just a few checkboxes,
Chris: keep Firefox Gnome-ly fashionable and fit right in with the old Gnome design ethos.
Wes: Oh, this is fun. I know there's been various like extensions or other ways to
Wes: sort of go about the same idea.
Chris: Like a hundred years ago, I did like a guide. It was like, get this plugin,
Chris: get this plugin, change this on the config add this extension here this is just.
Wes: A flat pack i can get with some.
Chris: Toggles okay yeah it's really pretty nice and it makes firefox look like it
Chris: belongs on your gnome desktop you can see they'll have some screenshots um up
Chris: on flat hub and it doesn't that looks more like gnome web than it does firefox yeah,
Chris: I used to do this, and I think I'm going to do it. The only problem is that
Chris: I run Plasma and I run GNOME.
Chris: And I run a lot more Plasma than I run GNOME. And it syncs.
Chris: My Firefox syncs. So when I make it look all awesome on one desktop,
Chris: it looks out of place on the other desktop. So I just kind of go for the baseline look.
Wes: I was just going to joke. Yeah, should we get it going on all of our KDE just because?
Chris: No, but if you are an all GNOME user, definitely add water. I give it a good recommendation.
Wes: Hey, okay, we've got to do our license check, as True Grits rightfully points out.
Chris: Oh, for Add Water.
Wes: Well, and HedgeDoc.
Chris: No, HedgeDoc is, yeah.
Wes: Yeah, GPL3, great.
Chris: Yeah, HedgeDoc is GPL3. Add Water, I could go, are you pulling it up right now?
Wes: I'm looking.
Chris: I'm feeling like it's also GPL, you know? I'm feeling GPL3.
Wes: This app is developed, yeah, GNU GPLv3.
Chris: Yeah, I had that, yeah, GPL3, yeah. Had that sort of GPL feel,
Chris: you know? That sort of smooth, sort of velvety feel.
Wes: Software you can trust.
Chris: Yeah, I want to take a second before we run and just say thank you,
Chris: everybody who decided to get into the FreeBSD challenge with us.
Chris: It was a lot of fun to do it with you.
Chris: And to see some of you updating us in the Matrix or via Boots or email,
Chris: all the avenues of communication were popping throughout the couple of weeks
Chris: that we did this with people's experiences.
Wes: And it lets us get a better, you know, sense of it.
Wes: We can't, again, we've been complaining there's just not enough time in a two-week
Wes: challenge, but we kind of get more of the landscape thanks to everyone else doing it in parallel.
Chris: Totally. Yeah, I'm really, I don't know what our next challenge will be.
Chris: I'm really looking forward to doing it This one sort of reinvigorated my interest
Chris: in it So we'd love to hear your ideas Please do send those in to us I.
Brent: Would also love to hear if anyone ended up Losing the challenge and needs to
Brent: run Windows With Comic Sans Let us know.
Chris: Jeff is that you? That's me Oh good I'm glad somebody ended up I thought for
Chris: sure one of us would Here you go Jeff That's just for you Feels like home.
Chris: All right we'd love to have you join us live too it always makes it
Chris: a lot of fun of course we make it a linux tuesday on a sunday yeah that's
Chris: right noon pacific 3 p.m eastern over at jblive.tv in your web browser or jblive.fm
Chris: and whatever can stream an mp3 stream just go to jblive.fm directly and of course
Chris: the mumble room has that low latency high quality opus stream coming right off the mixer.
Chris: Details at jupyterbroadcasting.com slash mumble.
Chris: And don't forget the launch is going to have a live stream 11.30 a.m. Pacific.
Chris: And we'd love to have you come and hang out for the open mumble hour or half hour, whatever it is.
Chris: Links to what we talked about today, linuxunplugged.com slash 602.
Chris: Thank you so much for joining us on this week's episode of your Unplugged program.
Chris: We'll see you right back here next Tuesday, as in Sunday.