Chris: Before we get started today, I have like a little announcement,
Chris: but I don't want to tell everybody. I just want to tell like you guys and like
Chris: the really long time listeners.
Chris: Wednesday morning over at jupiterbroadcasting.com, we're launching something
Chris: special for the long time community.
Chris: So go grab yourself the all show feed, maybe check out Jupiter Broadcasting
Chris: during like, you know, your Wednesday moment of downtime, because we'll have
Chris: something special for you.
Chris: Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris.
Brent: And my name is Brent.
Chris: Well, hello, gentlemen. It is great to be with you.
Chris: Today, we're going to update everyone on how the FreeBSD Challenge is progressing
Chris: and which one of us might be awfully close to installing Windows.
Chris: Plus, a special guest will join us later in the show to talk a bit about Planet
Chris: Nix and what's going on over there.
Chris: And then we'll round out the show with some great booths, some picks, and much more.
Chris: So before we go any further, let's say time-appropriate greetings to that virtual
Chris: lug. Hello, Mumble Room. Hello. Hello.
Brent: Always great.
Chris: It's nice to have everybody in there. Thank you for being here.
Chris: And a big good morning to our friends at Tailscale. You've got to go to Tailscale.com slash unplugged.
Chris: Support the show and get yourself Tailscale on 100 devices and three accounts. for free.
Chris: Tailscale is the easiest way to connect your devices and services to each other,
Chris: wherever they are. It is modern networking.
Wes: I think we're outnumbered today, boys.
Chris: And it connects all your devices and your applications directly to each other.
Chris: I have it on my NAS. I have it on my mobile devices. I have it on my home assistant
Chris: system. I have it on the Apple TV.
Chris: I have it on the Android TV. I have it everywhere. And all of it on a flat mesh
Chris: network that is protected by...
Chris: That's right. What else could you ask for? And it's fast, really,
Chris: really fast. Privacy for every individual and every organization.
Chris: I started using it with the free plan. In fact, my personal account,
Chris: I'm still using the 100 free plan. No credit card required.
Chris: But then after using it for more than a couple of years, I realized,
Chris: well, we could actually fundamentally improve the way we do some of the network
Chris: for JB. And so now we use it as a business, too.
Chris: And so do thousands of other companies.
Chris: There's lots of ways to just plug it in with your existing infrastructure,
Chris: too, and it's programmable. So you can manage it like a private network the way you would expect.
Chris: It's really very powerful. Try it out for yourself.
Chris: Go get a free plan, 100 devices, 3 users, and support the show.
Chris: Head on over to tailscale.com slash unplug.
Chris: The easiest way to connect your devices and services wherever they are,
Chris: tailscale.com slash unplug.
Chris: Now, gentlemen, it is time for us to update everyone on how the BSD challenge is going.
Chris: And should we start with a reminder of the rules, Brent?
Brent: I think that's a good place to start. So if you'd like to join us in the free
Brent: BSD challenge, I'm not sure why we have subjected ourselves to this, but it lasts two weeks.
Brent: So we're just coming up on week one anniversary. And so you have one week left
Brent: to join us in this challenge. I think you can get it all done in one week.
Chris: Yeah.
Brent: So just a reminder of the free BSD challenge rules here.
Brent: So, number one, you can use hardware or a VM if you can manage to get that working.
Brent: All good there. So do what pleases you.
Brent: Also, you have about a week left to join us. And I think you could fit all of
Brent: these challenges into a week.
Chris: Yeah, I think a week. You've still got time to join us.
Brent: So please join us. And importantly, we want to know how it went.
Brent: So there are a few points here. You can self-score yourself or just tell us
Brent: and we can just give you better points.
Chris: And we'll have this linked in the show notes. It's up on our GitHub.
Brent: Now, if you install BSD and get it online, you get two points.
Brent: For another two points, you can record audio of yourself and send it into the
Brent: show from a working desktop.
Brent: Of course, a desktop of your choice. Again, for two points, you can get a server
Brent: or service running that's accessible via the LAN.
Wes: Wow.
Brent: But you can also petition for some extra credits, five points each,
Brent: if you want to go this far.
Brent: So some possible options are getting an app running inside Podman or jails,
Brent: installing, configuring a firewall, get Tailscale running on a BSD system.
Brent: You can also try out two BSDs, maybe like a net BSD or ghost BSD and free BSD.
Wes: Yeah, that was still really early.
Brent: There's also this project, Nick's BSD, which if you're feeling extra adventurous,
Brent: you can dive into that or get a non-BSD native video game running.
Chris: There is one thing that everyone needs to be aware of if they decide to participate
Chris: in the challenge, Brantley.
Brent: There is a caveat. If you so choose to join us in the challenge and you do not
Brent: get this working, there are some consequences.
Brent: So if you bail from the challenge, you must, and I think Chris is on this route,
Brent: you must install and run Windows 11 for a week following the challenge.
Brent: And your font system-wide must be Comic Sans.
Wes: Podcast classic.
Chris: So not only Windows, but Windows with Comic Sans.
Brent: It's the double punishment.
Chris: Wow. Well, you know, I was a little concerned this might be me.
Chris: I'll be honest with you, because I was surprised at how little it was like riding
Chris: a bike. Just getting started.
Brent: Wait, you've BSD'd before, right?
Chris: I have. And I was trying to remember when.
Chris: no yeah it was before a lot.
Wes: Of podcasts were on youtube but it was sort of like a well people are on here
Wes: you know this gets me a couple thousand extra views for folks that like don't
Wes: listen to podcasts otherwise.
Chris: I was digging through my kind of like notes from when i was doing some it contracting
Chris: oh and i want to say just based on the timeline that i was looking at I was
Chris: probably experimenting with FreeBSD between FreeBSD 7 and FreeBSD 9.
Chris: So kind of that era of FreeBSD. So FreeBSD 7, if my research is right,
Chris: came out in February of 2008.
Brent: Okay.
Chris: Yeah. And FreeBSD 8 came out in 2009 and FreeBSD 9 came out in 2012. Okay.
Chris: And I do recall ZFS kind of coming along right as I was kind of leaving and
Chris: just going full-time Linux.
Chris: And I initially had a problem to solve in that I was having real performance issues with a NAS.
Chris: And it was over Samba, and the users would connect to it, and the throughput was just abysmal.
Chris: And it would cause login delays and all these kinds of problems.
Chris: And it was kind of a stressful situation because I had convinced upper management
Chris: to bail on Windows NT because it was having a similar problem.
Chris: It was hitting the wall much earlier. But then it turned out the Linux server,
Chris: while it could go further, this was a SLS, SUSE Linux Enterprise server,
Chris: while it could go further and handle more connections, it was also hitting the wall.
Chris: And I went through everything trying to figure out what is this, what's causing this.
Chris: And one late night working you know bringing in
Chris: the overtime i decided screw it
Chris: i'm gonna set up a free bsd server i'm not gonna even tell anybody
Chris: because i have to get permission for all this stuff and go through a change
Chris: control committee and all that it's also i don't have time for that i need this
Chris: fixed tomorrow morning if you so i set up free bsd and i also had to have what
Chris: is the model for that and then i wrote a bash script to like manage all of the
Chris: acls and permissions because things didn't directly map to like the same UIDs and whatnot.
Chris: So like all of the company's user data and everything was under totally different
Chris: UIDs and GIDs that all had to be swapped over. And I don't remember.
Chris: I don't think there was a direct one-to-one to extended attributes either. It was tricky.
Chris: And the next morning when the users logged in, it didn't hit a wall at all. There was never a limit.
Chris: The disk performance was exactly what I expected from the system and expect it for.
Chris: And so I was like, okay, there's something here. Why is free BSD so much better?
Chris: And I initially, for some stupid reason, expected it was something to do in
Chris: the networking stack or something like that.
Chris: So I started looking into the differences in the networking stack thinking maybe
Chris: BSD has some sort of optimization here. And it's like a, it's a connection.
Chris: It's a TCP connection limit that I'm hitting on Linux. And BSD doesn't have that.
Chris: And I dug into it, and it simply wasn't the case. And what I discovered after
Chris: about two weeks of kind of coming back to the issue every couple of days,
Chris: trying to figure it out and doing different testing, is that it was the Dell SCSI driver.
Chris: And on Linux, there was just simply a bug.
Chris: And on BSD, that version that they wrote for BSD didn't have the bug in the
Chris: SCSI driver. And so it was affecting disk performance.
Chris: but during that time i had and then i had to
Chris: go i had it and it was working so i kept it and i left i
Chris: left it running i went through a couple different upgrade cycles so i
Chris: got to manage a free bsd box in production doing some
Chris: samba and nfs file sharing stuff nothing too serious but you know probably eight
Chris: nine hundred users concurrent and uh it was interesting and it was a really
Chris: really solid system and it turned out the reason why it was all fast and better
Chris: wasn't necessarily because of some crazy optimization they'd done,
Chris: but just the differences in drivers.
Chris: And inevitably, that problem was solved in a patch in Linux.
Chris: And from that point forward, we just deployed Linux.
Brent: Given that positive experience, I'm curious why you didn't kind of go down the
Brent: FreeBSD road a lot further.
Chris: You know, part of what we're going to get into today, I think,
Chris: it affected me back then too, and it's still part of the issue.
Chris: You know, time is precious.
Chris: But let's get into that. So let's talk a little bit about the hardware you tried
Chris: FreeBSD on so far and how it's going.
Brent: Yeah.
Brent: In setting up our little BSD battle station here at the studio,
Brent: Chris, you and I just found whatever hardware was around and figured,
Brent: hey, that's going to be fun.
Wes: Let's try it. People go on podcasts and then people talk about it on social media.
Brent: This is the little keyboard integrated Pi.
Brent: and number one, I had never used this thing so I was excited to use the hardware
Brent: but also I thought, hey, this is going to be an interesting little challenge,
Brent: and a challenge it was a challenge it certainly was You know, I realized...
Chris: How much we were starting at zero because i thought to myself i don't even know how you get,
Chris: a free bsd image for raspberry pi is it an image file is it an iso like you
Chris: can do with some linux distros you know like with susa and others or fedora
Chris: it can just be like a standard linux install yeah which right Right.
Chris: But then on top of that, like with Linux distributions, you just assume if it
Chris: is an ISO with an installer, it's going to be a graphical installer.
Chris: But then I realized, well, that's not necessarily the case with FreeBSD at all.
Chris: And so I said, wow, we're really starting at zero here. So what was the image
Chris: route? Was it a pre-made image? Was it an ISO?
Brent: Well, they did have two options, actually. They had ARM ISOs that were more
Brent: generic, but they did have Pi-specific images.
Brent: And so I figured, well, I should probably go down that route.
Brent: But I did try the ISOs first on a variety of different. We tried Ventoy.
Brent: It didn't quite work for me.
Chris: Yeah, Ventoy gave us like a boot loop.
Brent: Oh, yeah. I mean, that's my personal experience with Ventoy every time I try
Brent: it. But we're always trying weird things.
Chris: That is like a two or three release behind version of Ventoy, too.
Brent: Oh, well.
Chris: Maybe newer versions are better with FreeBSD.
Brent: Why does everybody always tell me that? And we get to start slacking off.
Wes: And he goes to work.
Brent: I'm trying Ventoy. Anyways, Ventoy has not worked great for me.
Brent: although we hear in our community constantly that it's amazing.
Chris: So Brent hates Ventoy.
Brent: No, it's just the bug field, I think. I tried Ventoy with BDSDF. Brentoy.
Brent: But that said, I tried a bunch of those routes and ended up trying the image,
Brent: which also ended up locking up on boot for me.
Brent: And I was surprised by that, because it specifically said on the image,
Brent: raspberry pi 4 so i figured this would be pretty compatible so.
Chris: It wasn't a pi 400 image but you shouldn't need one it should if it's a pi 4
Chris: image it should work just fine on the 400.
Brent: Because i ran into this does depend on your particular client which was a little
Brent: uh disappointing i ended up needing to figure out how to get this thing worked
Brent: because i wasn't going to give up at that point i was like on step one of our challenge so with.
Chris: Freebsd where do you even begin to figure out did you go like re-release notes like what do you do.
Brent: Well i ended up reaching
Brent: out to um perplexity to
Brent: say hey i don't know what i'm doing clearly the confidence i came into this
Brent: thing with is all vanished and i need some help and i did discover just just
Brent: like a few reports that a newer bsd version wasn't working on the pi 4 like.
Chris: Just in like forms or whatnot you saw this.
Brent: Yeah, what I read was that FreeBSD14 wasn't working and FreeBSD13 would work.
Brent: Oh. And so I thought, okay, well, I'll give that a shot.
Chris: So go back one release.
Brent: A whole release. And I gave that a shot. Sure enough, it booted.
Brent: Okay. So I was making progress.
Brent: That said, I was trying 14.2 and there was a 14.1.
Brent: So then I re-imaged and tried 14.1 and that worked. So it seems like 14.2 for
Brent: me on the Pi 400, just locked up.
Brent: But 14.1, sure enough, went through and booted, and I was able to get that working just fine.
Chris: So at Boots, do things like graphics work and Ethernet and all of the standard
Chris: stuff on the Pi? Did it all get detected and supported?
Brent: Mix bag.
Chris: Oh, really?
Brent: Let's say.
Chris: Okay.
Brent: So it seems like Ethernet worked out of the box. I did have to,
Brent: you know, turn it on and configure it. But I think that's pretty standard for FreeBSD.
Brent: So that was nice. After that, the graphics were certainly in a safe mode, like massive fonts.
Chris: Like 640 by 40 or 1024 by 768.
Brent: I could work with it, but I knew if I was going to try to run a desktop on this,
Brent: which I was, that that would likely be an issue.
Chris: I bet you that must have been frame buffer mode. I think FreeBSD just uses frame buffer mode by default.
Brent: Okay.
Chris: Yeah.
Brent: Well anyways it got working and i was excited by this
Brent: point because like i had spent an hour and a half just trying to
Brent: get the thing to boot that said it you know i don't have to install because
Brent: i'm running an image so i didn't have to go through that install method right
Brent: yeah oh i'm i'm realizing now that one of the points specifically says install
Brent: bsc so maybe i disqualify myself from that yeah there's a lot of.
Chris: Future room here yeah one of the things was I.
Brent: Feel like we're going to end up with a giant checklist of all the things we
Brent: forgot to do and we're going to have to do this week.
Chris: I'm just going to do them all, so that's what I'm going to try to do.
Chris: I don't want to run Windows really, really bad. I don't necessarily want to
Chris: run FreeBSD either, but I don't want to run Windows even harder.
Chris: I just, I feel like it haunts me, you know, in the distance I can hear, you know.
Brent: So sweet.
Chris: So you also, when you were experimenting with it, noticed performance was a
Chris: little lackluster, right?
Brent: Well, I got some help because I needed it, it seemed, on how to run this on the Pi.
Brent: And there were a few specifics that seemed to be defaulting,
Brent: you know, similar to the video, just defaulting to bass.
Brent: and get it running, but this is not optimal.
Brent: And one of those things was the CPU itself.
Brent: It was just constrained to 600 megahertz and would just sit in there.
Brent: That's it. That's all you get.
Brent: So one of the configurations I had to make, which was fairly easy to do,
Brent: but if you didn't know about this, then I think you'd feel really disappointed
Brent: about the performance of your little Pi 400.
Brent: So I was able to bump that up to like a reasonable CPU frequency,
Brent: but it was just locked by default to 600. I'm not sure why.
Chris: That was just like add to your RC.conf?
Brent: Exactly, yeah. You can add a little, you know, you could just change your RC.conf
Brent: and add, you know, pretty much triple the CPU frequencies in there.
Chris: One thing that you had a problem with that I have not had a problem with,
Chris: but I think it's because you're on ARM, Firefox just does not work for you.
Brent: Well, it installs.
Chris: Yeah, and it gives you a warning about a bunch of stuff that doesn't work.
Brent: I got a massive list of off-by-default compatibility.
Brent: So basically it said, well, if you're expecting Firefox to be like it is on
Brent: Linux or Mac OS or Windows.
Chris: It doesn't support any DRM video, so there's no Netflix.
Brent: Yeah, you're actually not going to get a bunch of stuff.
Chris: Obviously, there's no Wayland support. There's a lot of things.
Chris: Honestly, my comment when I saw the list was, oof, it really feels like the
Chris: world is not building for FreeBSD at all.
Brent: Well, and to add insult to that,
Brent: I could really only get it running for 10 seconds and then it would crash.
Chris: Now that I did not. See, at least for me, I could browse the web and whatnot.
Brent: I think it might be specific to the Pi itself.
Chris: Yeah, maybe the ARM build on FreeBSD just isn't that stable yet.
Brent: I do realize I'm pushing in a few different directions in this particular case.
Brent: But no Firefox for me. I might try to solve that one just for fun,
Brent: see what it is. But so far...
Chris: Yeah, I wonder if you could go to Firefox and get their extended release build
Chris: for ARM if they have one that would be for FreeBSD and try running that and see if that would...
Chris: It does seem like FreeBSD tends to kind of default to older package releases,
Chris: maybe because these things tend to be better accounted for.
Brent: Yes, I would say my experience, at least up to this point, on the Pi 400 has been quite mixed.
Brent: I'm learning some new things, and I'm also realizing a lot of stuff that I expect
Brent: to just not even be an issue is turning out to be quite an issue,
Brent: and I need to go solve those things.
Brent: So, mixed. Very mixed for me.
Chris: So far.
Brent: Mm-hmm.
Chris: Maybe next week will be better.
Brent: I'm hoping.
Chris: You can try it on Intel hardware or AMD hardware next week?
Brent: Well, I figured it would probably be a good idea to try my framework,
Brent: given they've been doing some work on modern laptops, trying to get that all running.
Brent: So I thought maybe that would be a good place to go next week for me.
Chris: So I don't think any of us so far have tried FreeBSD with a multi-monter setup,
Chris: have we? Have you, Brent?
Brent: No.
Chris: No, I haven't either. And I'm wondering, I'd like to know from the audience,
Chris: It's boosting and tell us, are you using a multi-monitor setup or a single screen?
Chris: Tell us a little bit about your setup because I kind of want to know what the
Chris: audience's position on the monitor setup thing.
Chris: And if this is something we should be testing or not, I mean, I'd like to know.
Brent: I remember in Linux, it was a little bit of a problem years ago and has become
Brent: way better. I don't even think about it now.
Chris: I didn't even think about it until I was thinking, yeah, we're all trying these
Chris: on single screens. But maybe that's what most of the audience would be running
Chris: it on. So maybe that makes sense to test there.
Brent: But should they is the question.
Chris: Yeah. So you're...
Chris: yeah that sounds perfect i wonder how our audience skews so boosting and tell us,
Chris: so okay you're on a good path you're not totally secured yet from having to
Chris: run windows especially if you have a bad time i don't know for extra fun you
Chris: might try it on the Atari VCS.
Brent: You just want to see me suffer.
Chris: I do. Now, Wes, do I see a Windows desktop in your future? How is your BSD challenge going?
Chris: I do. Very badly, actually.
Brent: No, I think...
Chris: Oh, yeah?
Chris: What piqued your interest?
Chris: Yeah. How it all works.
Chris: I agree. I do agree.
Chris: Yeah.
Chris: Oh, that's where I thought you were going. I love it.
Brent: How did he sneak that in?
Chris: I knew it. I had a sense it was going to get worked in somewhere. I felt it coming.
Brent: Well, I was curious.
Chris: Right. I could imagine. That seems right up your alley.
Chris: My my impression of the installer was it felt very utilitarian utilitarian what
Chris: am i trying to say like utilitarian yes thank you like it felt like a professional
Chris: tool like you know not really something that's even trying to aim at a brand new user,
Chris: but a brand new user who's maybe following some documentation could definitely still work through it.
Chris: But when I was using it, I was thinking I bet Wes likes this. Did you like it?
Chris: Yeah, I loved it, too. I thought, look at this. It's exposing some great options
Chris: that are just common sense security precautions that you might want to set on
Chris: a brand new system right there.
Chris: And I think you probably also noticed ZFS is just front and center.
Wes: It only took me 500 episodes to convince you.
Chris: I like that.
Chris: Yeah. Yeah.
Chris: Yeah, I'll have a comment on that too, but before I get to my bit,
Chris: I'm curious if either of you have tried ports yet and saw anything from the ports tree?
Chris: Yeah, no, a Thomas knows, like, backy in or anything.
Chris: Yeah, for sure. Right, right.
Chris: Yeah, a core set of stuff is in the repo in the native package manager and then,
Chris: you know, AUR equivalent with the ports.
Chris: It's nice to have it just on the file system. You can just browse the file system and see your options.
Brent: I did run into issues that I want to mention for anyone trying this.
Brent: I did try to just install some stuff and ran to some certificate errors,
Brent: which ended up being just a time clock synchronization issue for me.
Brent: It took me a really long time to figure out that was the deal.
Brent: So I just enabled NTP and got my clock back up and running. Everything worked fine.
Brent: But I wasted a ton of time on that. So that's your PSA in case you run into that.
Brent: What? What?
Brent: Did I take the hard method?
Chris: Yeah, because I did that. I turned that on.
Brent: Yeah, I did too. You guys didn't tell me anything about this.
Chris: I was like, sure, why wouldn't I? Why wouldn't I want?
Chris: I expected my path to be easy mode. I thought I was taking the easy hack because
Chris: I took an old B-Link and it's all Intel. It's like, you know, a laptop from years ago.
Chris: And I thought, this is going to be a slam dunk. Intel CPU, old Intel video, Intel Nick.
Chris: This thing's going to boot right up. Everything's going to work out of the box.
Chris: I'm going to start checking off and earning points right away.
Brent: He gave me the pie for him.
Chris: So I sat down at the BSD bench with Brent, where he and I have everything set
Chris: up there, and Brent's nicely... Have we talked about that? Yeah. You like the bench?
Brent: There is very much of a BSD bench. It's our battle station.
Chris: Guys. The BSD battle station bench with Brent is what it is. Yeah.
Chris: And it's great because we have like Ethernet ready there with a switch and power
Chris: so we can hook up different stuff and HDMI and the monitors.
Chris: Just plug a machine and try it.
Chris: And so the first thing I went to was easy mode B-Link. It was a long week.
Chris: And I thought, okay, I just, I want to win. I want to win.
Chris: And it did boot. It didn't really do much else than that out of the box.
Chris: I was surprised really how much there was to do.
Chris: But, you know, so I bailed on the live environment pretty quickly.
Chris: And I just went over to the installer image that boots, and I chose the installer option.
Chris: And I really, like you, Wes, I really do like the installer.
Chris: It's really just a nice utility to get the job done.
Chris: And the options around ZFS integration were really slick.
Chris: And the options around, like, do you want to start these particular things or
Chris: secure these types of things? I just, I like that since it's coming in,
Chris: you know, I'm coming in fresh. It also felt.
Chris: It felt classical while also still feeling like it's a maintained piece of software. Yeah.
Chris: And, you know, I love a good in-curses interface, even if it's not technically in-curses.
Brent: I feel like you had some muscle memory on this one. I was over your shoulder
Brent: watching you go through this install process, and you were zooming through it in a way that I...
Chris: It is very reminiscent to the installer back in the FreeBSD 789 era.
Chris: I mean, it just does more stuff, and yeah.
Chris: It was very much like, oh, yeah, I've seen this before. Let me send them a bunch
Chris: of new infrastructure so I can spend the money. I like that aspect of it.
Chris: So I was able to get FreeBSD 14.2 booting because I was going the Intel route.
Wes: So I didn't have any issues there. I think 600,000, but then maybe some of these
Wes: extra boosts kind of tallied up.
Chris: After it was done installing, I kind of immediately was like, well, what do I do now?
Chris: What is the first thing you do with a blank BSD system?
Wes: When you go to FreeBSD route, you just get a terminal. You get a TTY.
Wes: There's nothing else going on. But we had another issue with missing metadata.
Chris: Well, let's go install Plasma.
Wes: So we're going to investigate that.
Chris: See if it might be an upstream LSP issue. If you want to jump through a split.
Wes: Just not the message.
Chris: Plasma 5 is still where we're at. It's still on X1.
Wes: So we got 327,170 sats.
Chris: But it doesn't include things like, you know, SDDM and other things like that
Chris: that you kind of actually need to go into a full graphics.
Wes: Now, that was going to be a more reasonable 65K. So thankfully,
Wes: pretty easy to look that stuff up.
Chris: So I do the old package install and install all that stuff.
Wes: Not sure if it's working means...
Chris: And like a total Linux user, I reboot the system, and I just expect it's going to boot into X.
Chris: Right? Because if I've implicitly installed the meta package and SDDM or whatever,
Chris: like, probably want that to the start.
Brent: Probably.
Chris: And a Linux package manager, you know, in the BSD parlance, you go from init
Chris: 3 and you install your graphical desktop, and now you're on init run level 5,
Chris: right? Like, and it just, that's what I expected BSD to do.
Chris: It does not. It just boots right back to the TTY.
Chris: Because then you still have to do quite a bit of manual configuration in,
Chris: you know, a couple of places like rc.conf to actually start everything,
Chris: like all the D bus stuff you need around there.
Chris: And there's quite a few manual commands I had to run to get all that stuff talking
Chris: and get those services started.
Chris: So you very quickly get familiar with the FreeBSD services command and how to
Chris: start and stop and how to add things using the sysrc command or whatever it
Chris: is to add things to rc.conf.
Chris: And so you go through and you just kind of trial by error, figure out the bits that are missing.
Chris: And this is where I noticed a trend around the LLMs that I wanted to follow up with you, Wes, is...
Chris: For getting things going, like a graphical desktop environment or jails, an LLM sucks.
Chris: Because in the Linux world, you can just, you know, install this command.
Chris: And when you install that command, there's a package script or whatever it is,
Chris: and it invokes the service, and all those things are done for you.
Chris: And the LLM doesn't need to also tell you, by the way, you're going to need
Chris: to install dbus, you're going to have to run these three dbus commands,
Chris: you're going to have to add this dbus service to rc.com, then you're going to
Chris: have to set that thing to start.
Chris: And then, oh, by the way, you're probably going to want to start it right away.
Chris: The LLM doesn't tell you any of that stuff.
Chris: Where guides that are written by human beings do.
Chris: But what the LLM is really good at is specific commands. Like,
Chris: I want to do XYZ. What's the command on FreeBSD for that?
Chris: Like, getting real narrow specific stuff, having something like perplexity makes
Chris: transitioning to FreeBSD so much easier than it would have been a couple of
Chris: years ago. It's bonkers.
Chris: It's just so much better. but it absolutely misses the context around like dependencies
Chris: and all that stuff where how to guide still really nice.
Brent: I agree with that completely in my experience. How was your experience with
Brent: troubleshooting using LLMs?
Chris: Pretty decent. You know, I mean, honestly pretty decent. I think it might be
Chris: an easier target for LLMs because BSD just doesn't change at the rate Linux does.
Chris: And so, you know, when these things got locked in a couple of years ago with
Chris: their base knowledge, that it's essentially the same stuff.
Chris: So it's still valid. Where with Linux, sometimes I'm getting stuff for Nix that isn't valid anymore.
Wes: Yeah, at least one of us should. I think that's a good idea.
Wes: I think that's another system.
Chris: How do I integrate this into the rest of the game? Yeah, perhaps.
Chris: Maybe I'll talk about this next week, but it was particularly glaringly obvious
Chris: in trying to get Podman working.
Chris: It was really where it became like, oh, this is only giving me a small slice of the picture.
Chris: Yeah, yeah.
Chris: Yeah, definitely. So the other thing I was kind of surprised about is,
Chris: you know, after you go through the process of installing sound,
Chris: again, you can have the sound devices show up, but you can't play sound.
Chris: I didn't expect this. I didn't expect to be able to see the volume levels,
Chris: see all the sound devices, but I actually had to go into rc.conf and actually
Chris: say play sound before sound would actually work on those devices.
Chris: I was kind of surprised by that.
Chris: I am really glad, though, that I took the FreeBSD route first so I could get
Chris: the idea of what it's like to build up a modern Plasma desktop and get to a
Chris: functional Plasma desktop.
Wes: Tomato comes in with 22,000.
Chris: I think next week one of the things I want to do is I want to try what that path is like now.
Wes: I'm excited for you lads to do a FreeBSD challenge.
Chris: But as a server.
Wes: FreeBSD assumes less is more. I run NetBSD on some of my servers,
Wes: but I haven't given free a try at all.
Chris: Yeah, it makes sense.
Wes: I was also glad to hear Chris made the connection with Nix OS.
Wes: I mean, as someone who's been using Linux and BSD since the 90s,
Wes: the central point of configuration was a nice familiar feature of Nix.
Wes: I wish I could have organized a local meetup for 600, but everything's coming first.
Chris: Yeah, like some distributions, most of them go way too far in that direction.
Chris: OnePassword.com slash unplugged. That's all lowercase. It's the number one password.com slash unplugged.
Chris: Okay, I have a question for you. Do your end users always, and I mean always
Chris: without exception, work on company-owned devices and IT-approved apps?
Chris: I don't think so. I don't think it's possible. So I think the next natural question
Chris: is, how do you keep your company's data safe when it's sitting in all those
Chris: unmanaged apps and devices?
Chris: Well, OnePassword has the answer to this question. It's extended access management.
Chris: 1Password extended access management. It helps you secure every sign-in for
Chris: every app on every device because
Chris: it solves problems that traditional IAMs and MDMs just can't touch.
Chris: And it's also bundling 1Password. You know 1Password.
Chris: We've all had those situations where we've seen the passwords under the keyboard.
Chris: We're stuck to the monitor, or somebody uses the same password everywhere.
Chris: You think, God, if they just had a great password manager that would solve all of this.
Chris: Well, 1Password's award-winning password manager is trusted by millions of users,
Chris: 150,000-plus businesses from
Chris: IBM to Slack, and now they're doing more than just securing passwords.
Chris: Now with extended access management, they're taking it to the next level.
Chris: Plus, 1Password is ISO 27001 certified, and they have regular third-party audits,
Chris: and they have the largest bug bounty out there.
Chris: They just exceed the standards set by everybody else.
Chris: Secure every app and every identity, even the unmanaged ones.
Chris: Go to 1password.com slash unplugged. That's all lowercase.
Chris: Again, support the show, check it out, and try it out. It's 1password.com slash unplugged.
Brent: Well, given we're all in the studio together this last week,
Brent: we have some excitement.
Brent: We're quite excited about Planet Nix and do have some things in the works in the background.
Chris: Yeah, I've been cooking and I've been talking to the good folks over at Phlox
Chris: to see if they can make it possible for us to get down to cover Planet Nix and things are lining up.
Chris: And so I think we're going to be able to take our coverage up to a whole other level this year.
Chris: And it's really because of Phlox. So I'm going to tell you more about that as
Chris: we get closer, but we wanted to just get this event in front of you so you know
Chris: what's going on. So we wanted to bring Zach on the show.
Chris: well zach mitchell is joining us on the show
Chris: for the third time he's in a rare guest club really and zach is a software engineer
Chris: who's building reproducible software at flox and he's here to talk about planet
Chris: nix like we've mentioned kicks off march 6th through the 7th in pasadena california,
Chris: Zach, welcome back.
Zach: Thank you for having me. I feel honored to be in such a prestigious club of return guests.
Chris: The third guest tier. Yeah, that's pretty great.
Chris: And the reason why we like having you on is because we're always very excited about big Nix events.
Chris: And we kind of have a fresh start with Planet Nix. Give me the layout. What's happening?
Zach: Yeah. So this is a Nix conference.
Wes: Hey, guys. Thanks for discussing my posts. Nix, death by a thousand cuts.
Zach: This is laid out for our spread out over two days.
Wes: Coming up more these days and we're going to have two tracks going.
Wes: Including from multiple C-suite folks.
Zach: Both days, you're going to have a mix of talks and workshops.
Wes: Clearly, y'all have drank the Nix cool.
Zach: At the end of the first day.
Wes: We have lightning talks. This is why I use Nix everywhere.
Zach: But this article was very focused on desktops.
Wes: Nix is great on the server, but are you guys using Nix all day.
Zach: Every day on the desktop?
Wes: For my work, I regularly get pulled and compile open source projects from many languages.
Wes: I think the story for server production I just kind of put up a whiteboard and
Wes: I should highlight that fact.
Wes: I get the sense that maybe Wes uses it daily and perhaps is your local flake
Wes: guru who likes to dig deep on solutions.
Zach: And then we have kind of a voting process to see like what groups we break out into.
Wes: This is really better as a conversation and I'm working on a follow-up blog post.
Zach: So I won't rebut each point here.
Wes: But I will agree with you that comparing Nix to traditional Nix is really comparing
Wes: happens to approaches. They are different beats and really provide different features.
Zach: You get a bunch of nerds you want to talk about one very specific thing.
Wes: See you in March. You can kind of congregate and have dedicated time to go talk
Wes: about that. We'll have some tables set up.
Zach: How this is exactly going to work is still kind of being figured out.
Zach: Like the details are still being finalized.
Zach: But we'll have some space for kind of community projects to set up a table,
Zach: talk to people who want to either get involved or learn about it, stuff like that.
Zach: So we'll have a lot of space for the community to kind of self-organize or talk
Zach: about whatever they want to talk about. in addition to all the talks and workshops
Zach: and stuff that we have set up.
Zach: But yeah, so I'm really excited about that.
Chris: As a Nix user, I have the strong sense that there's a need for a community event like this.
Chris: I feel like there's a lot of people excited about this idea.
Chris: And being right alongside scale really worked well last year.
Chris: And tell me a little bit about like there's like a combo there that you can do, right?
Chris: Where you could be like a planet Nixer and go to scale combo pack.
Zach: Yeah i i believe if you buy a scale pass that gets you into planet nix automatically
Zach: there's also i think an expo pass but i think that's a separate thing so i'd
Zach: have to get back to you about specifically whether that's correct if.
Chris: Somebody's just doing planet nix do they need to get a independent planet nix pass.
Zach: I think that's actually just part of the scale pass scale so So you just get scale. Okay.
Chris: All right.
Zach: Yeah. And I'll follow up if that's not correct.
Chris: Okay. Well, we'll put links in the show notes if it's, if it's, if it's otherwise.
Chris: I'm, I don't know. I'm, I'm not really even sure exactly what I'm looking forward to.
Chris: I think it's like meeting people, you know, getting to know people that are
Chris: doing things and changing things in the Knicks community.
Chris: And I looked at some of the presentations, obviously attending some of those
Chris: is going to be a big part, but will you have a sense of what you're looking forward to Wes?
Wes: Always should have been.
Chris: Yeah yeah yeah yes that was awesome,
Chris: definitely definitely i feel like too we're going in knowing we have a little
Chris: bit different sense of what to expect, I think, because last year was totally
Chris: a whole new concept to us.
Wes: So we're going to come in with a bit of an idea of how to get going to compile up and trust projects.
Chris: Zach, I imagine that's just kind of true for Planet Nix in general.
Chris: There must be some lessons learned that are getting applied to Planet Nix.
Wes: I think as a DevOps.
Zach: Sysadmin, developer desktop, that might be one area where it's kind of the hardest
Zach: if you're not also like a Nix developer to meet the expectations that you have
Zach: from a different she was sending signs from scale on the scale side.
Zach: And so we didn't quite have signs set up. And so people didn't quite know where to check in.
Zach: And there's also a little bit of a shortage of volunteers at the very beginning.
Zach: So we were just kind of grabbing people and saying, okay, you're helping people check in now.
Zach: And I think one attendee brought their girlfriend with them.
Zach: And I don't think she quite knew what this all was, but she ended up being one
Zach: of the people setting up or like checking people in at the tables. Oh, that's great.
Wes: And without some of the- While awesome.
Zach: I would prefer if we have things a little bit more nailed down.
Zach: That's one of the things that we've figured out this year.
Zach: Yeah, the submission process for the program and stuff like that was basically the same.
Zach: Then I think went pretty smoothly. We doubled the amount of talk and workshop slots.
Zach: We're doing two tracks over two days this time.
Chris: Wow.
Zach: Whenever you make that commitment to have twice the...
Chris: It's a lot of organizing.
Zach: Yeah. So you commit to having twice as many slots to fill. And you kind of wonder
Zach: like, okay, is there going to be enough interest to fill all these slots?
Zach: And the answer was unequivocally yes.
Zach: Good. So like that all, yeah, that all went very smoothly. I was really happy
Zach: with that. I'm really happy with our talk lineup. We have a lot of talks and workshops.
Zach: I'm really excited to see personally some of these talks.
Zach: And so as one of the organizers, I will like have to force myself to pass the
Zach: baton to somebody so I can go watch talks and stuff like that.
Zach: Otherwise, I'll just be in organizer mode the whole time.
Chris: Yeah, yeah.
Zach: I tend to oversubscribe myself, but it's always like kind of for something fun.
Zach: So like, yeah, last time I was kind of running around like mad because like
Zach: I said, the ground game was not quite as figured out as it will be this year.
Chris: There's always something. It does get better every year.
Wes: Yeah. I was hearing about this setup. And yeah, it seems like it's working.
Chris: And you're always trying something new too.
Wes: It's a nice setup.
Zach: Every time we do this, there's a chance to kind of do it better.
Chris: Well i think the only question i have is we were doing can i count on you to
Chris: uh you know give us the hookup on the great after parties and places to go after
Chris: that you know each day that's can i can i count on you for that zach you.
Zach: Can absolutely which works.
Chris: Especially well if you know you want a full yeah last year.
Zach: We had some disc requirements kind of like an off-site karaoke thing neat.
Chris: Oh my goodness really yeah.
Zach: That was that was.
Chris: Pretty fun if you have any ice spring skating with 5 000 I'm in.
Brent: I'm definitely in.
Wes: Congrats on success.
Zach: So speaking of ice sports and things that are popular in Canada.
Wes: I recently picked up Curling.
Zach: So I've been curling for the last year.
Chris: Uh-oh.
Wes: I hate throwing out stuff that works.
Brent: Well, we can be friends then.
Wes: My laptop is 10 years old and my mom is still happily using the one that I had before that.
Chris: All right, Zach, well, we'll let you go and see if you enjoy the rest of your
Chris: Sunday, but thanks for coming on and giving us the updates. Good to chat with you again.
Zach: Yeah, I'm really excited to see you all out there.
Wes: I'll see you all of these days. If I could do all my sensitive stuff like banking
Wes: on my computer, I wouldn't really have to worry so much if I just stuck with the bits of class.
Chris: You know, we are going to bring you the best Planet Nix coverage possible.
Chris: Thank you again to Zach for joining us. Also, keep it on your radar.
Chris: If you can't make it to Planet Nix, maybe you can make it to LinuxFest Northwest,
Chris: April 25th through the 27th in the beautiful Bellingham, Washington.
Chris: Once again, at the Bellingham Technical College, 25 years of LinuxFest Northwest.
Chris: You know, your boys are going to be there. Whoop!
Brent: Heck yeah.
Chris: So we'd love to see you there. And you can get information at linuxfestnorthwest.org.
Chris: Oh, and look at you, Wes Payne, on the website.
Chris: Wes Payne on the website.
Brent: Really? What's your talk about?
Chris: If you want to just come say hi, come check it out. You know what?
Chris: We always have something going on, and we'll have more plans coming up soon.
Chris: But right now, we're going to get laser-focused on Planet Nix.
Brent: Well, we did receive some amazing boosts last week. Thank you to everyone who
Brent: boosted episode 600. And we certainly are starting with a baller.
Chris: That's right. Our baller booster this week is a mania. Well,
Chris: I'll send it to Brent here. I've got my initial Matt.
Wes: I gave you a slack.
Chris: Coming in with 600 thousand sats Oh my god,
Chris: Yes Yes he wanted to send 600 for episode 600 thanks for all the shows and he
Chris: says see you at Linux Fest Northwest amazing yes beers on us,
Chris: beers on us thank you for the boost appreciate that Dev and really looking forward
Chris: to seeing you at Linux Fest Northwest,
Chris: and thank you for the 600 acknowledgement too does feel like a big milestone
Chris: we're on the other side of it now and feeling good feeling really good appreciate that,
Chris: It is a daily day.
Wes: In a similar vein, John Spriggs in our Matrix chat suggested grease pencils on ceramic walls.
Chris: There you go. Okay.
Wes: Right.
Wes: neural p comes in with 6 000 sats happy 600 here's to more.
Chris: Thank you for the great boost aaron that's very reasonable that's true thank
Chris: you we do i always love knowing what's going on in the home lab too it doesn't have to be nicks well.
Brent: 40 000 shotoshis came in from rotted mood.
Chris: You're not going to make show Toshies a thing over there.
Brent: I'll just slip it in and see if it catches on.
Chris: All right.
Brent: Some thoughts on the Tuxies. Please keep them.
Brent: I think they're great, and I look forward to them at the end of every single year.
Brent: I think getting the community more involved to take some of the work off y'all's
Brent: hands is a good idea, and I'm happy to help in any way I can.
Wes: Well, thank you, Rodman.
Chris: So we are still in discussion. I think it's going to be back in some form,
Chris: although we don't have firm commitments on that, but we have everybody who's kind of interested.
Wes: Congrats on 600. Thanks for putting in all the seen and unseen effort to make this show every week.
Chris: Oh, you're right.
Wes: I've listened to at least 500 of these episodes.
Brent: Each week it feels like hanging out with the kids.
Wes: Be proud of what you've accomplished.
Brent: That's on 600 episodes and follows that up.
Wes: I feel the Broadcom acquisition of VMware has had a similar size change in many aspects of IT.
Wes: One difference is that the change is economic conversations regarding.
Chris: Why do I love that so much?
Brent: Are they in the plane?
Chris: I wonder, right? Flyover Friend comes in with 22,222 sats. That's an Aflac.
Chris: Congratulations on 600. Here's to 600 more. Concerning the book conversation
Chris: in the pre-show, I'll add a big upvote for the Expeditionary Force series.
Chris: And the reader for the audiobooks is top-notch.
Chris: He's good. I'm having a little hard time falling asleep to him sometimes.
Brent: Oh, it's too exciting, isn't it?
Chris: And he's got a lot of, you know, he gives a presentation, as I like to say.
Chris: He gives a presentation.
Brent: Can you mimic his presentation?
Wes: He's just got a range.
Chris: You know? There's a lot of energy.
Brent: Oh, you wait.
Chris: Yeah, okay.
Wes: Happy 600 from the Atlanta meetup.
Chris: Yeah, where you can just sort of tune out. Yeah. I guess so.
Chris: Oh, hey, how about that? What do you suppose a 20,000 sat is?
Wes: Hello, Oakland!
Chris: We got anything for that? You want something? How about...
Chris: Ah, yes.
Wes: Gretton comes in with 5,000 sats. Cheers from ATL BitLab.
Brent: Okay. Something goes wrong.
Chris: Yep.
Wes: Thank you, PJ.
Wes: Oh, super happy to brief.
Wes: Including Drew. Oh, heck yeah.
Chris: It's true. It's good.
Brent: I love this.
Chris: That's good. Thank you, Derivation. You know, Brent and I were doing an oil
Chris: change, and I just bought a kit. Because I've always just bought this kit.
Chris: But this time, I got fancier oil. So it was a different kit.
Chris: And they didn't include all the oil. And so we're done. We're wrapping up,
Chris: and we're like, we're still short, like at least two liters or something of oil. It was bad.
Chris: We're like, well, now we have a non-functional car, and we don't have the oil.
Chris: And, of course, it's fancy boy oil, so I can't just, like, go to O'Reilly's.
Chris: linux thankfully we had another car but you know it's like in a way I should
Chris: just have a very prescribed process that I follow I shouldn't rely on these
Chris: pre-made kits and I should order the pieces myself and yeah it the analogy works I tell you what,
Chris: thanks derivation appreciate that.
Brent: Well the dude is abiding with 20,000 sets I was re-listening to yesterday's
Brent: live feed and I don't believe anyone mentioned It really should be 1.6.
Wes: Because that doesn't include the manual, Nick Lang, because I didn't get to that. Even better.
Chris: Oh, everything everywhere all at once. Right. We didn't mention it,
Chris: but I think people kind of knew, right? It felt like it was a riff.
Brent: By the way, I also voted for this one since it was clever, despite the fact
Brent: that the other title was the one I proposed.
Brent: I know that you joke about the site speed of 1Password all the time in the live
Brent: feed, but did you know it's built with Hugo?
Chris: Oh, I did not know that.
Brent: The support site is, but I think the rest of the site as well.
Chris: Oh.
Brent: No wonder it's so fast.
Chris: It does pop right up. OnePassword.com slash unplugged. Just pops right up.
Chris: Thank you, the dude abides. I learned a little bit in that boost. Appreciate that.
Chris: Ham is...
Brent: Hamish McLean.
Chris: Hamish McLean. Clean? Clean. Comes in with 6,666 sats.
Chris: Devil's donation from the London gang with love. Oh, that's amazing.
Brent: Nice.
Chris: Thank you, London gang. thank you well uh well i think that's good right maybe
Chris: i don't know thank you very much,
Chris: Hey, thank you.
Chris: No, never.
Brent: Shapira Me came in with 2,000 sats in total.
Brent: Chris, you said that it's ironic that now podcasts that are really relevant
Brent: are being kidnapped by YouTube.
Brent: But on the other hand, it does make sense that as some media formats become
Brent: more relevant, these big platforms want to try to dominate it.
Wes: Right?
Brent: I guess that those like you become highly specialized in this format,
Brent: a niche, and somehow suffer the most because of it.
Brent: I think moving to V for V was the right move.
Chris: Well, first of all, I really appreciate your insight and how you really do seem
Chris: to get it. And that's, I think, a very valid point.
Chris: As these things got more relevant, of course big money would get in.
Chris: And in fact, to that point, it's a well-known fact that YouTube just wrote checks
Chris: to some podcasters to move over to YouTube as their primary distribution platform.
Chris: just like Spotify did several years ago. They just write checks.
Chris: Yeah, it's just how they do it. And I do, I still want to keep an open ear to
Chris: the audience that wants to advocate for video.
Chris: Like I don't want to shut it down entirely, but I like our focus on audio because
Chris: it means we can do multi-track audio. We can try to clean it up.
Chris: We can do things that we just can't really do with video on a budget that's sustainable.
Chris: But yeah, he follows up there.
Brent: Yeah, Shapirami continues here on the topic of shower thoughts and our crazy
Brent: wacky methods of trying to record them.
Brent: I have a glass door on the shower that separates it from the rest of the bathroom,
Brent: so I decided to try a pen that writes on glass.
Brent: Thank you for the tip. What a great idea.
Chris: How many people are solving this out there? I love it. Yeah. Yeah.
Chris: I feel like this is a show swag opportunity because if we could come up with
Chris: a product, I would buy it. You guys would probably buy it.
Chris: It sounds like people in the audience would buy it. This would be a great unplugged
Chris: product is the shower thoughts accessory.
Chris: Yeah. The unplugged shower thought saver. That's really funny. That's really funny.
Chris: Somebody write that down. Cause I won't remember, but I think that's, I would, I would own one.
Chris: The immunologist is here with, thank you for the boost. The immunologist is
Chris: here with 6,000, 10 sats.
Chris: Happy 600. Stay decentralized. I wanted to try free BSD on my Raspberry Pi four,
Chris: but I realized it needs a USB keyboard for that.
Chris: And I use Bluetooth for everything, even my sound.
Chris: So no BSD for me this time.
Chris: Wow. A hard line on the blue teeth.
Chris: Interesting. Yeah. We went, we just went real simple wired just cause you know,
Chris: even ethernet just wanted everything to just work as easily as possible.
Brent: I'm not sure why we instinctively started there, but it seemed to work out well for us.
Chris: Yeah. I think the, I think if we were going blue teeth, it'd be a challenge.
Chris: Well, howdy.
Brent: Nice.
Chris: Wow. Well done.
Brent: On BSD, right?
Chris: Yeah.
Chris: I kind of feel like that's what we've been doing with people boosting and telling
Chris: us. I'm getting some signal on this.
Chris: All right. Well, thank you for setting Balbi up. I know you had a split fail. Yeah, just so.
Chris: Yeah, yeah. We won't get the sats, but you'll keep the sats.
Chris: But the other, we have several nodes in the process, so we will generally, most of them get it.
Chris: It's very rare, but things change from time to time, and we just have to stay
Chris: on top of it. They are like a Tamagotchi pet.
Chris: Oh, that's nice of you.
Brent: A lot of packs sent in 10,000 shotoshis.
Wes: Yeah.
Brent: Happy 600. Been a huge fan since around episode 200.
Chris: Right on.
Brent: And we'll happily keep tuning in for that next 600 and beyond.
Chris: Well, thank you, Lod. Nice to hear from you. Thanks for boosting in.
Chris: True Grits is here with 17.010 sats. Is that a start trick?
Brent: Sure.
Chris: Hello. Apologies for missing the past window to make it into 600.
Wes: Should there be a component? And we could discuss it on the show. Oh, that's great.
Chris: That's always nice. But I finally pulled the trigger on getting my sats off the exchange.
Wes: Can you argue for some points?
Chris: You can thank the Cash App not supporting Graphene OS for that.
Wes: I think it represents. That should be a two-pointer.
Chris: And also happy belated birthday to Chris. Cheers to 600. Thank you,
Chris: True Grits. It's great to hear from you.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: There he is.
Wes: Oh, there might be both versions, depending on how much you did.
Chris: Word word yeah.
Wes: I think like.
Chris: That drives me crazy especially when you've been listening to an
Chris: audio podcast right like and then they go to a youtube live
Chris: stream and they spend so much time like addressing the live chat or what they're
Chris: leaking at or you set up zfs or you know whatever you were an audio podcast
Chris: or you got like a desktop going that was yeah you could run stuff if you don't
Chris: get at least one of those whisper seems like you didn't actually try it we're
Chris: still working on the actual refining process.
Brent: We might just do a little bit on it.
Wes: You got to run Windows for a week?
Chris: Yeah, right now, yeah, we're manually running them.
Wes: That's why it's a punishment.
Chris: We plan to write processes and scripts around that.
Chris: So it's nothing magical at the moment. It's just hard work. And I don't think
Chris: we've gotten anybody, not a single person said anything about the transcripts.
Chris: But with Gene? Well, Gene did. Gene. But I mean, outside.
Chris: Oh, okay, good, good, good, good. I was like, oh, man, we worked hard on that
Chris: and people said they wanted it. And then nobody said anything.
Chris: Maybe. Just works, right? Just works.
Brent: Well, exception boosted in a row of ducks.
Chris: Hey, look at those ducks.
Brent: Happy 601. Why? Because it's a prime number.
Chris: Nice. Thank you.
Wes: But it's got to be like a system-wide thing.
Chris: Hey, Oppie1984 is checking in with 4,000 sats.
Chris: Related happy 600 boosts. Also, just say no to video. Nice, Oppie.
Chris: Thank you. vote registered. Ha ha ha ha.
Chris: Oh, man.
Chris: So, Sire, if you want to take another pass at it, FreeBSD is just going to use
Chris: framebuffer by default unless you go into your rc.conf and tell it which video
Chris: driver to load, and you've got to install those drivers.
Chris: Like, even with my Intel system, I had to go in there and tell it to use the
Chris: Intel, manually, and tell the Intel.
Chris: I had to install stuff, and then tell it to use the Intel driver and load that.
Chris: Otherwise, it just won't try.
Chris: There's a mod and all that, But you find out how to, you get that working,
Chris: and then you'll be cooking, right?
Chris: I'm sorry to hear about the trouble. I'd love to hear other people's success or trials with FreeBSD.
Chris: Next week is the episode to really report in and let us know how it's going.
Chris: Thank you, everybody, who boosts in and supports episode 601.
Chris: This here little crazy podcast is made possible by our community,
Chris: our members, and the folks who submit value back to the show,
Chris: either through time, talent, or treasure.
Chris: And we had 37 of you just stream those sats as you listen to the podcast,
Chris: and we stacked 54,723 sats through the streamers. Thank you very much, SatStreamers.
Chris: When you combine that with the boosters, the show stacked a very reasonable 892,649 sats.
Wes: And we're going to want to see a screenshot of the Windows Comic Sans desktop.
Chris: Thank you, everybody. we are planning a long bright future and,
Chris: Being able to directly support the show means that your value comes into the show.
Chris: We can manage that in the future to give ourselves runway, perhaps leverage
Chris: this to really be able to go on trips or have episodes that don't require sponsorship
Chris: at all. It's a bright, bright future.
Chris: And it's made possible by our audience that makes the content sustainable.
Chris: Like, it's just a beautiful cycle of life there. And we really appreciate it.
Chris: If you'd like to boost in, you can probably do it the easiest way by getting
Chris: the Strike app to grab those sats and then the Fountain app to send a boost.
Chris: Or if you don't want to try out a different podcast app, you can do it with Breeze, B-R-E-E-Z.
Chris: And there's a couple of ways to get the sats into that, including Strike.
Chris: There's a lot of great podcasting 2.0 apps, and you get lots of features in there.
Chris: Like our live stream, when we're live right now, in the app,
Chris: it would tell you right at this moment that we're live.
Chris: Additionally, you get the full transcript support, and sometimes you get the
Chris: full dieterized transcript version in the podcasting 2.0 apps.
Chris: It has cloud chapters, which are an improved version of chapters.
Chris: When the show is released, you get released announcements within 90 seconds.
Chris: And then, of course, it also supports things like Boost.
Chris: And there's an entire category of things coming to podcasting to do apps like audiobooks and more.
Chris: And all of this is an open source spec. It's just trying to make podcasting
Chris: competitive with platforms like YouTube and Spotify.
Chris: But doing it in a decentralized way where the RSS feed is always the source of truth.
Wes: Not a proprietary platform.
Chris: Not a script hosting provider. Your XML file is the source of truth.
Wes: It wasn't even in the document. And anyone can read that.
Chris: That's what podcasting 2.0 is all about and I encourage you to go get a new
Chris: app at podcastingapps.com and we appreciate the support so.
Wes: This is sort of it's an overture to.
Chris: Folks that you know you can use Durham like Durham plus Nix in various ways
Chris: David and Nick Shells really nice because Durham I'm just like I love an Apple
Chris: watch replacement got me a Garmin watch connected with my,
Chris: Garmin watch really been loving the health stats really been liking the functionality
Chris: You were using it this weekend while you were rock climbing to kind of keep
Chris: track of how you're doing and recovering.
Chris: But there is this sort of uncomfortableness with it's tied into the Garmin Connect app.
Chris: I don't know how I would move this to another device in the future or if I ever wanted to leave Garmin.
Brent: Well, I know you absolutely love having all that history as well.
Brent: And I recently came across this little project, Garmin DB.
Brent: It basically downloads and parses data from Garmin Connect or Garmin Watch.
Brent: But it also does Fitbits and Microsoft Health CSV files.
Chris: Nice.
Brent: So it goes and grabs all of those and allows you to analyze that data in a SQLite
Brent: database, basically, through Jupyter Notebook.
Brent: So you can also visualize all of that data with this project.
Brent: And it pulls down everything. And when I mean everything, it's like your heart
Brent: rates, activities, your climbing, your stress, intensity, minutes,
Brent: like all that stuff from the daily summaries page on Garmin, if you know that.
Brent: But it also does all your sleep and weight and basically pulls everything you possibly can get.
Chris: Yeah, and then the tools to analyze it and visualize it.
Brent: I imagine, Chris, it's not too much of a stretch to get this to implement this
Brent: data into your Home Assistant instance.
Chris: I would not be surprised if somebody's already working on that, Brent.
Brent: Maybe we should look into it.
Chris: Yeah. Maybe I don't want to know, though. But, you know, it is nice that it
Chris: supports other devices, too. I didn't realize that.
Chris: I'm kind of excited, you know, with the potential of the Pebble stuff,
Chris: maybe kind of getting rejuvenated with Google open sourcing and all of that.
Chris: It'd be nice to plug that into this as well.
Chris: So there could just be one more device you could export your health data from.
Chris: So it's called Garmin DB, but it also, like Brent said, supports a lot of the Fitbits.
Chris: And whatever the MSHealth file format is, it supports that as well.
Chris: And it looks really great. And GPL, too.
Chris: GPL, too. So you got yourself a nice open source app, too.
Chris: And that's, you know, I got to say, one of its killer features over the Apple Watch.
Chris: There's probably ways to export Apple Watch health data. If anybody knows,
Chris: I kind of would like to know. I wouldn't mind going to get any of my old health data.
Chris: But this is just, this is the difference right here, right?
Chris: It's tools like this basically just sit on top of Python and SQL and CSV files.
Chris: And it makes it possible.
Wes: Maybe put it in the feedback room.
Chris: But don't take anyone to start. Thanks for sharing.
Wes: We'll check on it there.
Chris: We're live at 9 a.m. No, 10 a.m. Pacific.
Chris: Got to get that right. And, of course, you know, I'm going to screw it up.
Chris: We're live at 10 a.m. Pacific, which, what is that, Wes, in the East Coast? Is that plus three?
Brent: Yeah.
Chris: Okay, so, yeah, we used to be three. So, now, yeah, it's 1 p.m. Eastern. Right.
Chris: And we will also be live in your podcasting app. And you can plug jblive.fm,
Chris: jblive.fm in wherever you're at.
Chris: and listen to the show. We like it when you get in the Matrix,
Chris: too, and help us title it.
Wes: Classic by Michael W. Lucas.
Chris: It gives a nice vibe. So that's all over there. And we'd love it if you'd join
Chris: us live next week. Who knows?
Wes: I was thinking we'd use one of those new fancy AI tools to turn it into an audiobook.
Chris: I think so. And you could always pipe in and tell us how it's going,
Chris: too, and that mumble room will be running as well.
Chris: Now, links to what we talked about today are over at linuxunplugged.com slash 601.
Chris: You'll also find our contact form, the RSS feed, details about the matrix and
Chris: all that kind of stuff. I'm slipping into an accent.
Chris: I don't know why you find the details. Also the rules for the free BSD challenge.
Chris: Those are going to be in our show notes. Just look down in the links.
Chris: You'll see the rules for the free BSD challenge. And we'd love to hear how it's going for you.
Chris: Don't forget. We also want to hear about your multi-monitor setup.
Chris: Are you using multi-monitor single screen? Tell us your setup.
Chris: We'd like to know if it's a popular thing in our audience or if it's something
Chris: we don't have to worry about.
Chris: Anyways, thanks so much for listening. We'll see you right back here next Tuesday, as in Sunday.