Chris: Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris.
Wes: My name is Wes.
Brent: And my name is Brent.
Chris: Hello, gentlemen. Coming up on the show today, it's been a full week of Berkeley
Chris: suffering distribution. And
Chris: today, it's our BSD challenge results as the challenge comes to a close.
Chris: We'll find out who survived the install, who made it to the desktop,
Chris: and who had to learn the hard way that one tiny, innocent mistake could send
Chris: the whole BSD box straight into the void.
Chris: I don't know who that could have been. And then we'll round out the show with
Chris: your booths, your picks, and, you know, just a tiny bit more this week.
Chris: Just a little bit more. Not too much more. We don't want to overdo it.
Chris: So before we get there, let's say time-appropriate greetings to our virtual
Chris: lug. Hello, Mumble Room.
Wes: Hello.
Chris: Hi, you guys.
Chris: Thank you, guys. And shout out to you up there in quiet listening,
Chris: too. It is fun. Big. You know, it feels like, I don't know.
Wes: It's a milestone for the show, I think.
Chris: Also, good morning to our friends over at Define Networking.
Chris: Go meet Manage Nebula from Define Networking, Define.net slash unplugged.
Chris: It's a decentralized VPN built on the open source Nebula platform that we love.
Chris: And Nebula was engineered for scale and performance from day one.
Chris: Very low CPU usage, minimal network overhead, and the kind of reliability that
Chris: you actually control yourself.
Chris: It's decentralized design, keeps your network resilient, whether you're running
Chris: a home lab or connecting a global fleet, like the size of Slack itself.
Chris: There's also the option to self-host Lighthouse nodes so you can own critical
Chris: pieces of the network end-to-end.
Chris: It's fast, it's lightweight, secure, it's built to last, no big tech login required.
Chris: You can get started for free 100 hosts, no credit card required at defined.net slash unplugged.
Chris: Go to defined.net slash unplugged and redefine your VPN experience and big shout
Chris: out to Defined for supporting the Unplugged program.
Chris: Defined.net slash unplugged.
Chris: Texas Linux Fest 2026 Call for Papers is open. Wow. They're really ahead of it, aren't they?
Wes: Mm-hmm.
Chris: Yeah. So the deadline is June 1st, 2026, and then there will be one final deadline,
Chris: July 1st. But put June 1st in your head.
Wes: Yeah, get in early.
Chris: We're going to try to make it. We don't really, of course, have this figured
Chris: out yet, but November 6th through the 7th is when it's going, Texas Linux Fest.
Wes: So stay tuned for more details and maybe go check out that CFP.
Wes: I will say, as someone who presented last year, it was a great experience.
Wes: great to work with the organizers very easy conference very friendly.
Chris: Good solid community high signal great.
Wes: Great place to give a tuck.
Chris: Not a very big event but that's what i like about it.
Wes: But a lot of people who are who are hungry nerdy linux folks who um want to learn more.
Chris: Yeah also we did want to make you aware of dirty frag a new copy fail like vulnerability
Chris: which we'll have details linked in the show notes but it's another one of these
Chris: if you can get local access to the box, you can escalate privileges.
Wes: And another page, cash abuse. So, you know.
Chris: And there is a proof of concept in the wild, and the responsible disclosure
Chris: schedule got breached, and so it's out before the patches are.
Chris: There are some mitigations.
Chris: We'll have those linked for some of the more commonly shared ones right now.
Chris: And we also have more in-depth details in this week's bootleg edition of the Unplugged program.
Chris: But before we get out of housekeeping, I have a personal question I want to
Chris: ask the audience. So please boost in or email.
Chris: How are you doing your home router? Specifically, those of you that are doing
Chris: a Linux router for your home networking, I'm setting up something pretty cool
Chris: at home that does involve using a Linux router to do failover between production
Chris: network and backup internet connection.
Chris: And I will tell you more about it. It's probably one of the projects I'm the
Chris: most excited about in years.
Wes: Me too.
Chris: For my home network. Oh, Wes, I can't wait to get your input on it. It's in like the...
Chris: I mean, it's past the design phase. It's bolted to the wall and secured inside a sealed box.
Chris: This thing is production grade, and I'll tell you more about it.
Chris: But the piece I'd like to get more insights on is how people are doing routing
Chris: in their home network, especially if they have failover networks, not mandatory.
Chris: And if you're using Linux, I'd like to know about that setup.
Chris: So boost in a link or some details.
Wes: Can BSD routers apply or no?
Chris: We'll get into that, Wes. We'll get into that.
Chris: So for episode 666, we thought we'd check in on our Unix cousin once again.
Chris: It's been well over, well, not well, but just over a year. And a lot can change in that time.
Wes: This is true.
Chris: Especially in Linux land, a lot does change. What about in BSD?
Chris: Have things improved to make switching more viable in one year?
Chris: I don't know about that. So just a very quick overview. The BSD challenge has four levels to it.
Chris: The daily driver, the power user, and the bonus round.
Chris: you know really phase one and
Chris: or level one and level two are really about getting the system up
Chris: getting a functional desktop browser making some
Chris: sounds then it starts getting to things like in the power level level three
Chris: ssh starting and stopping services and then if you can get all the way to level
Chris: four and start a bsd jail and run a service inside it then you know you can
Chris: start counting up and everything's been everything has a total of points to
Chris: it if we fail we do like to add a little bit of stakes to it.
Chris: So whoever gets the lowest score here on the show, whoever ends up essentially
Chris: failing the BSD challenge must pay the fail tax.
Chris: And this year the fail tax will be becoming our official Red Hat correspondent
Chris: for the Red Hat Summit for the week.
Chris: So next episode, they'll have to report back with what they learned from the
Chris: Red Hat Summit that's taking place this week.
Wes: From BSD to Bootsy.
Chris: That's hard work. It's a lot of on the grounds. It's, it's, that's a,
Chris: That's the hardest thing we could think of, and it's work that needs to be done.
Chris: So whoever comes, it's basically a second job.
Wes: There's a lot of corporate details that need to get filtered for the open source folks.
Chris: Yeah, so whoever fails, whoever gets the lowest score, has to become the official
Chris: Red Hat Summit correspondent of the week.
Chris: And we'll see where that lands. So before we get into how we did,
Chris: let's talk about what we did, what we used for our BSD challenge setups.
Chris: Brantley, tell me about the hardware. Don't give us too much details yet on
Chris: the results and your score. Just give us a sense of the hardware you used or
Chris: virtual machines or whatever, whatever the stack was for the BSD challenge.
Brent: Well, I had high hopes. I had hardware sitting, waiting in the wings,
Brent: and that's where it ended up staying.
Brent: So that's a little maybe foreshadowing.
Brent: I don't mean to foreshadow too much, but I had certainly got some success in
Brent: a virtual machine. And I used a, let's say, rather insane VPS to help me with that challenge.
Chris: All right. Okay. That's a good tease. Okay. Now, Wes, I want to know what your
Chris: hardware setup was or software setup, whatever the stack was it used for your BSD challenge.
Wes: Yeah. It was a combo of virtual machines, of course. And then also the old trusty show T480 ThinkPad.
Chris: Oh, yeah.
Wes: With an all Intel stack, which is a pretty kind of a cheat code for some of
Wes: these things, honestly.
Wes: And then I also put for server mode, I got it running on an old NUC I have laying
Wes: around that TBD needs to be Nixified, but needed to get paved anyway.
Wes: So this seemed like a good opportunity.
Chris: All right. So I had, of course, a couple of VMs where I experimented with a few ideas.
Chris: And that was just, you know, QMU, KVM and remote viewer on my desktop.
Wes: Which works pretty well, I got to say.
Chris: It does. The hardware I decided to go with, I talked about it last week,
Chris: we revived a Dell Precision 7000 series kind of custom...
Chris: r&d machine and it's a big box two xeon processors in there i slapped a new
Chris: ssd well new you were ready.
Wes: To get some bsd work done.
Chris: Yeah man big old screen it has two different video cards in it which is a bit
Chris: of a challenge but not impossible and i just needed one of them to work right
Chris: and then i also thanks to uh yeah thanks to olympia mike had me a spare nix
Chris: book which is like a dell something or other,
Chris: you know, nice mid-tier Dell laptop from years ago.
Chris: And had that to test on as well. So I will acknowledge that I think the flaw
Chris: perhaps in some of my approach was it was too biased to laptops.
Chris: I'll get into that later.
Chris: But I also think that's a very modern workflow. It's the most common kind of
Chris: computer people buy these days.
Chris: But thinking through this, I think I would have liked to have tossed a nice
Chris: standard desktop into the mix.
Wes: It would be maybe worth trying to do something like this where,
Wes: like, you know, in the older days of Linux, like, we might not have thought
Wes: it super fair if you didn't do the steps where you're like, well,
Wes: were you being, it's like, it's fine to test a random thing.
Wes: But like, is that what you would do if you were really trying to plan around doing this long term?
Wes: So, yeah, maybe it would be worth trying to think like, if we were trying to
Wes: build a really nice BSD box, what would it be and what would that look like?
Chris: Although the Dell next book I used, a little spoiler there, but really had full
Chris: hardware compatibility. So that was nice.
Chris: Before we get to our results, we had a few people email in. We also have some
Chris: that boosted in. We'll get to those as well.
Chris: And Jeff wrote, and he tried out NetBSD. He's a longtime free BSD home labber,
Chris: but he's never tried out NetBSD.
Chris: He got through levels one through three and the stretch goals.
Chris: He got an NPF firewall going and QMU Linux VM running on his BSD bots.
Wes: Nice.
Chris: He set up ZFS snapshots. But he hit a wall at level four because Podman jails
Chris: would not work on that BSD.
Brent: Ah. Yeah.
Chris: Fair.
Brent: Fair.
Chris: He also has open BSD on an Orange Pi 5, which he uses as a tail scale endpoint.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: And he sent us a nice detailed write-up. He did have some audio quirks and some
Chris: Wi-Fi performance issues. And he goes by TuxMM in our community. Thank you, TuxMM.
Chris: So FreeBSD15 with XFCE as his desktop on that one. XFCE was pretty popular there.
Chris: Oh, no, I'm sorry, that wasn't Tux. That was Jeff. TuxMM was using FreeBSD15
Chris: with XFCE. Jeff was using NetBSD. Sorry.
Wes: Yeah, TuxMM was a cardiology nurse practitioner, Linux user since 2019.
Chris: Hey, nicely done.
Wes: Installed FreeBSD15 on an external NVMe, got Ethernet and Wi-Fi working.
Wes: Firefox with online radio and YouTube VLC, OBS Studio, LibreOffice.
Brent: Why?
Wes: Mega Command sync to backup NGINX SSH from a MacBook Air mounted USB and wrote
Wes: a bash script. System updated via package.
Wes: FreeBSD 15 uses package for base too. Yeah, which is a cool new thing in the BSD world.
Chris: So I'm looking up Mega Command. A command line interactive and scriptable application
Chris: provides a non-UI access to mega services.
Chris: Ah, the mega storage. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Chris: Very nice. FreeBSD 15.
Wes: That's an impressive setup.
Chris: Well done on the points, too.
Wes: Mm-hmm.
Chris: Eddie tried out GhostBSD. Bare Metal install would not boot for him,
Chris: so he moved over to a VM. He got about 20 points, he said.
Chris: GhostBSD for him made levels one through two, getting the desktop rolling pretty easy.
Chris: But level three, he hit a struggle there. He called BSD like visiting the early
Chris: days of Linux and closes with long live Linux.
Wes: Amen, Eddie. Amen.
Brent: Hey, it's good to be reminded of why we do what we do.
Chris: You see here, Joe had a suggestion for you. He says, I think Brent should give
Chris: Ghost BSD a try. Nick's BSD doesn't work.
Chris: He mentioned ZFS snapshots to another BSD host.
Chris: And he says, Alan might have a tip for you there.
Brent: Ooh. I did look at my, well, things were going very bad for me at one point.
Brent: So I did look at, I promised that I would look at the community's suggestions
Brent: for what my backup plan should be.
Brent: and on matrix uh we got the most votes for dragonfly bsd so i went and read
Brent: all sorts of things about dragonfly
Brent: bsd and i decided i should just try harder on nick's bsd so i did.
Chris: Now mr mayhem sent in a thorough report brantley did you see this.
Brent: Oh yeah so mayhem like uh jumped
Brent: the gun and did a full week before the challenge and
Brent: said hey i got the max points but i was just
Brent: looking at uh the nice blog post that they wrote up and it it's worth visiting
Brent: we'll have it linked in the show notes um there's an update for week two and
Brent: there's a nice photo here of mayhem with mini mayhem uh their son doing all
Brent: sorts of the challenges that i didn't find success with,
Brent: so they did some of the stretch goals and got a bunch of stuff going there's
Brent: a note here i thought That was pretty funny.
Brent: PF was easy. Just edit the pf.com file to block all those evil Californian IP
Brent: addresses and that's it.
Brent: And there's screenshots of all sorts of like gaming on here.
Brent: There's a cringe shirt that he wants us to ignore. But.
Chris: A good looking desktop.
Brent: Yes. Yes.
Chris: Good looking desktop.
Brent: And it looks like they spent many hours with this thing but he has a little
Brent: bonus point here. Weirdest place.
Brent: They got, here it says, there were bonus points for installing it in a weird
Brent: place. So I put it in my car.
Brent: This is a proof of concept so far. And there's a photograph of a proof of concept, let's say.
Brent: But I actually intend on making this a long-term reality with a smaller screen
Brent: reflecting off of my windshield with a smaller screen.
Brent: This could be a legitimately useful heads-up display for working my mail route.
Brent: And there's a little conclusion here. All things considered, the
Brent: last two weeks have been absolutely horrible to the
Brent: degree that i'm surprised my dog didn't die but this challenge
Brent: could have been a cherry on that cake if not
Brent: for free bsd it was an absolute dream to get
Brent: installed and run and i intend to keep it running
Brent: in a world where linux is constantly becoming more and more mainstream in both
Brent: good and bad ways free bsd is a reminder of why i fell in love with linux almost
Brent: 20 years ago it's still got that old cowboy feel to it that i remember feeling
Brent: back in 2009 when i first I spun out my garbage Ubuntu laptop at Fort Leonard Wood.
Chris: I love that. That's what I was hoping somebody would find. That's great.
Brent: There's a lot more in this blog post, and I would say dive in. It's a fun read.
Chris: I want to call out one thing.
Wes: And Brent will be quoting from it instead of his own experience.
Brent: Oh, yes.
Chris: He tried to give Pinchflat a go, which I'm a big fan of, how I watch YouTube offline on Jellyfin.
Chris: And he says it should have been easy to port. It's written in Elixir.
Chris: You know, it's VM power programming language. But he could not get it running.
Chris: he could not get it to build, so he switched over to something called Cinch Flat.
Wes: Oh, yeah.
Chris: Yeah, it's a simple scriptish wrapper around YouTube DLP, or maybe, no, that's Pinch Flat.
Chris: Anyways, I wanna look in, I think I've seen the name. Oh, good, he did link to it.
Chris: So, let's link to Cinch Flat in the.
Wes: Oh, I hadn't thought about Pinch Flat, but yeah, we know early.
Chris: So, BSD first Pinch Flat alternative, look at that. Look at that, oh, that's so great.
Chris: You know, the stuff you get through the, thank you for that.
Chris: That's a lot of effort that went into that blog post too.
Brent: Yeah.
Chris: It was really nice. Put that in the old show notes there. There's also,
Chris: we'll put some links to some resources. I did mention kind of being laptop biased.
Chris: Well, there is a resource for laptop users that want to try out FreeBSD.
Chris: And it's the FreeBSD Foundation's Laptop Support and Usability Project.
Chris: that aims to deliver packages for FreeBSD that improves functionality for that
Chris: kind of out-of-the-box experience you might want on a broad range of different laptops.
Brent: Do you think this is what helped you, Chris?
Chris: Definitely came in clutch for me. Definitely made all the difference.
Chris: And after this, I had no problems, and I just stacked all the points.
Chris: Thank you to our members. If you're not a member yet, use the promo code 666,
Chris: and you can take 6% off every month's subscription.
Chris: The lifetime of the subscription applies to new purchases, reactivations, and upgrades.
Chris: We just want to say thank you to those of you that are considering becoming a member.
Chris: You get access to the bootleg or the ad-free version of the show,
Chris: so you probably wouldn't even be hearing this right now.
Chris: But also the bootleg's getting more and more valuable these days, I'd say.
Chris: There's some good content in there for you. And if you're already a member,
Chris: just thank you so much for keeping us going.
Chris: This year has been completely made possible by our members. Starting in January,
Chris: the first episode of the year.
Chris: And since then, it's only been possible because of our members.
Wes: You want to keep us going? We all are underwriting this.
Chris: Yeah, you are. LinuxUnplugged.com slash membership or jupiter.party.
Chris: You can use promo code 666 for either membership.
Chris: And we do greatly appreciate it.
Brent: Well, I guess my BSD week was an interesting one.
Brent: If you remember, last week I was in the studio and feeling pretty good about
Brent: this challenge. So I gave myself a few extra crazy handicaps.
Brent: I don't know why I did that.
Brent: But I decided to try out Nix BSD.
Brent: We talked about it last week a bit, but it's basically trying to meld the declarative
Brent: concept of Nix and Nix OS with BSD.
Brent: And it turns out that's actually a really fun idea. It is also quite an experimental one.
Brent: So, yeah, I gave myself that challenge before really reading the project documentation.
Chris: All right.
Brent: But tell us your trouble.
Chris: Son.
Brent: I dove right in. My trouble started when Wes on that episode said,
Brent: oh, you might have to build a thing or two.
Brent: And that's Wes's low-key way of suggesting that it may take several hours.
Brent: Yeah. Turns out many hours.
Brent: uh i decided to try to get
Brent: it installed that's the very first point you can get actually the first two points
Brent: i suppose um i spent most of my time here um and
Brent: i but i decided to do it the right way and spin up a vps that has the maximum
Brent: you know uh performance for building stuff yeah so i decided to offload the
Brent: build to a vps that was just like maxed so that it could build it as quickly
Brent: as possible so that I could just iterate.
Brent: But that still took, you know, like an hour and a half or two hours or something like that.
Brent: Because it turns out I'm doing something that's not commonly done.
Brent: And there is in the project documentation, a binary cache that is suggested
Brent: you can use. And I was like, oh, that's amazing.
Brent: Turns out it's 404, totally gone. Nobody's, you know, used it. So...
Brent: That meant I spent a great amount of time in this particular stage trying to
Brent: get my very first two points, but I got it.
Brent: I got it booting and it turned out building on my laptop was just torturing
Brent: it. So that was totally the way to go.
Brent: And then once I got an image, most of the building was all done.
Brent: So if I had to build another thing or two, it wasn't actually that bad to do
Brent: on the laptop, bring things down. So I learned a lot about Nix OS,
Brent: which was not at all part of the challenge, but a good exercise to do.
Chris: Okay.
Brent: So I got my very first two points like only a couple of days ago.
Chris: Congratulations, buddy.
Brent: Thank you. I would say NixBSD is fascinating. It is really fun to do it in a
Brent: way that you're not supposed to.
Brent: It also means I deeply handicapped myself in ways I didn't realize,
Brent: still got further down the list. but I did get connection to the internet.
Brent: So got it running in a VM, got a connection to the internet.
Brent: I did install a package because, well, ping wasn't installed.
Chris: So to, Oh, wow. Really? Wow.
Brent: Yeah.
Chris: Okay.
Brent: Luckily it was pretty easy because I have an X config.
Brent: So I was able to just enable ping in the next config, which was like literally a super simple thing.
Brent: Reading the man pages. Well, I had to read all about,
Brent: jails because uh that is also a thing you can
Brent: enable in the next config but then so i got that part very easily
Brent: but then that's great didn't know what to
Brent: do with it at that point so enabling jails is very simple using
Brent: jails maybe less so but here's the point where i
Brent: just deeply handicapped myself the next psd project
Brent: is not really designed to run a desktop
Brent: and you would need to like do
Brent: a lot of work that i'm not skilled to doing to
Brent: port things over to this so oh so level
Brent: two was a little disappointing for me this is
Brent: when i started looking at dragonfly bsd as a backup because
Brent: uh couldn't get a graphical desktop going could not
Brent: get a web browser going so that's five points i didn't get right there
Brent: uh-oh however i did get my own user account pretty easily because i was able
Brent: to declare that in the next config so that was super simple nice okay very very
Brent: simple um mount usb also wasn't able to get to audio well yeah so level two
Brent: is a little depressing for me.
Brent: So i decided just quickly go to level three because why not that's the power
Brent: user part right um and here's where i'm going to start begging for points i
Brent: believe uh i know that was uh Suggested it might be allowed.
Brent: So updating packages is an interesting one because I can't use,
Brent: you know, PKG you would use on FreeBSD to update your packages.
Wes: Right.
Brent: Well, NixBSD doesn't really have PKG because everything's done with Nix.
Brent: So that's impossible and would just have broken everything. However,
Brent: I did build the VM by pinning the most recent pin that was available in the NixBSD project.
Brent: So, would you give me some points for, like, updating the system before deploying it? Question?
Brent: Half a point?
Wes: Hmm. Half a point?
Chris: Half a point. Then we got to do...
Brent: Okay, well, you can give me a full point. I'm fine with that.
Chris: I just feel like we give you a pity point.
Brent: I think that's fine.
Wes: I'm okay with that. Is producer Jeff all right with that?
Chris: Yeah, we're checking with PJ. PJ, you want to override one pity point for Brent
Chris: for his half-assed system update there?
Brent: Okay all right um so moving through uh getting services running at boot um,
Brent: i don't know i'm not going to give myself that point you can do it in the next
Brent: config i didn't really get it done or i didn't yeah so um but moving on jails
Brent: i got to create jails really easily, because that's a one-liner in the Nix config.
Chris: Yeah.
Brent: Nice. So in some ways, using Nix BSD.
Wes: Declared of jails via Nix config.
Brent: Yeah.
Wes: I want that.
Chris: Yeah.
Brent: Yeah. One thing about the Nix config was it made some things really easy and
Brent: made other things really impossible.
Brent: So it was a blessed Nix blessing, I would say.
Wes: So it's kind of like Nix OS.
Chris: Do we have a total here? Yeah.
Brent: Yeah. So in total, given, you know, tying one hand behind my back the entire
Brent: time, I've got about 14 points plus a pity point.
Chris: So we'll give you 15 points. Okay. I'm going to need you to keep track of mine
Chris: because my story is very emotional. Oh, okay. And I've been on a journey.
Brent: Let me get a pen here.
Chris: I couldn't bring myself to tally up my points.
Chris: So I hated this. And I don't mean to go ahead, but I got to go ahead here.
Chris: I have to talk about this because I got to get through this.
Chris: I have to be over with this. I cannot wait any longer.
Wes: Yep, let's do it.
Chris: Like yourself, I spent most of the week getting to level two.
Brent: Okay.
Chris: Because it doesn't matter what boot medium or hard drive configuration I used,
Chris: I could not get a BSD to boot on that Dell Precision laptop.
Chris: Couldn't do it. And then when I tried to do it in a VM, I hit a bug with the
Chris: current version of Ghost BSD. It prevents X11 and like Plasma and all this other
Chris: stuff from working or Mate or XFCE. So I couldn't do it in a VM.
Wes: Yeah, because they're using Mate on Xlibre, I think, in the most recent release.
Chris: Sure, it's fine. I got nothing else to do, right? So then I got to go dig up
Chris: other hardware. So I find this old Nick's book from Olympia, Mike.
Chris: Well, let me back up. So first I think, this is the worst part,
Chris: actually. This was the part, I can't believe I almost skipped this.
Chris: I start to realize, what if Brent's right?
Brent: Oh.
Chris: What if Brent's right?
Wes: A dangerous thing to think.
Brent: I know.
Wes: Go on.
Brent: We're all surprised at this one.
Chris: What if I put bang in my head against a Ventoy issue all day?
Brent: Oh.
Chris: Because I'm using Ventoy to...
Wes: Oh.
Chris: And I'm getting this weird air that GhostBSD is waiting on the boot medium.
Brent: That does seem, and it is the boot medium.
Chris: Right? It is the boot medium. So I'm thinking to myself, after like a day of
Chris: this, I'm like, cause I'm trying different ISOs, I'm trying older versions,
Chris: I'm trying the community edition.
Brent: Which I'll get to.
Chris: Which was a highlight. I'm trying, cause I really wanted to make GhostBSD work
Chris: again. Cause that's what I visited before. And I just kind of wanted to check the Delta.
Chris: So I go dig up an old traditional thumb drive. You know, a classic real thumb drive.
Brent: It's probably one of mine that I've left there. Probably.
Chris: 32 gigger, you know?
Brent: Nope, not mine.
Chris: I flash it with the Ghost BSD.
Wes: Just like a straight flash.
Chris: No nonsense. Old school, like it used to do. And with the old DD.
Chris: And I go over, and it starts to boot. And I'm like, oh, God,
Chris: it's something different's happening.
Chris: And it locks up in a completely different place. Completely different.
Chris: So progress? I'm like, is there something wrong with this machine?
Chris: It is a weird machine. So I'm like, maybe it's because it's a blank CD.
Chris: So, or I mean a blank disk. So I'll just install Windows, right?
Chris: Because I'm sure that's a common scenario in the real world.
Chris: That's how desperate I am.
Chris: So I install Windows 11 on this Dell, and it works perfectly fine.
Chris: And nothing changes. I'm like, okay, so it's not that. So I redo it,
Chris: and I install Ubuntu 24, whatever. I think it was like the one version back.
Chris: works fine everything works out of the box 3d acceleration wi-fi
Chris: no problems booting i'm thinking okay now there's
Chris: a file system there this thing's going to recognize as a
Chris: real disc and whatever the problem it's having with loading the
Chris: boot image it'll keep going now and i pop back in i mean
Chris: on my custom crafted usb thumb stick that i've carefully
Chris: dd and i pop it in there and ghost bsd boots up and i put it in verbose mode
Chris: i put it in safe my trial these different a no a god forbid you try no acpi
Chris: if you try no acpi it won't even boot at all but so i try safe mode i try verbose
Chris: mode i try all these different modes it never boots never booted so uh i pivot free bsd 15 won't boot.
Brent: Whoa no way.
Chris: Yeah and i go okay it kind of makes sense ghost bsd is based on free bsd all right.
Wes: Yeah it's just interesting because i've had other issues but not booting free bsd.
Chris: I know and like i can boot everything else from windows to the ubuntu's on this
Chris: thing so i don't So I pivot and I go get the Knicks book and GhostBSD boots
Chris: up just fine on the Knicks book.
Chris: And what I decided to do was try out their Gerwish desktop environment.
Wes: Their what now?
Chris: Yeah.
Brent: Say again.
Chris: Gershwin. It's a GNU step like environment.
Wes: Whoa.
Chris: Kind of taken from the days before Apple acquired Next and Apple was working
Chris: on kind of this new UI design that was called Copeland and all these things
Chris: that never made it to the light of day.
Chris: And it comes with a terminal, a text editor, some basic system preferences,
Chris: file manager, and it's crazy light.
Chris: The entire desktop environment's under 50 megabytes of storage.
Wes: Yeah, wow. This says it can be built in like a few minutes?
Chris: Lightning fast. It's very early.
Chris: But you don't have to use GhostBSD to use it either. Although it's from the
Chris: GhostBSD community, they also make a general free BSD live ISO available,
Chris: a Debian-based live ISO available, and an Arch ISO.
Chris: And I tried out the Arch one as well, and it's a little bit more up to date
Chris: than what comes with GhostBSD right now.
Chris: It's a very MVP desktop environment, but if you have any nostalgia for that
Chris: era of computers, it's a lot of fun. And then just the pure speed of it is just a thrill.
Chris: It's basic, but it's a lot of fun. So that was a highlight, I think,
Chris: and that's what I used for my GhostBSD desktop stuff.
Brent: Next week, we're getting Vibe Gershwin.
Wes: Can it run on linux.
Chris: I like that idea well it runs on arch right so runs on the old debian
Chris: it's really it was really nice it was like going back in time um
Chris: so here's what i did so let's let's go through the points and i i'll tell you
Chris: what i got working what i didn't get working and where things went sideways
Chris: all right so i think i got through all of level one that was no problem because
Chris: i read a man page about beehive and all that so that was fine and i had to do
Chris: lots of pings and test to make sure my network you installed some packages yeah
Chris: yep i in fact i Updated the entire system.
Brent: All right.
Chris: Got some audio working. Browser was working. All of that was fine.
Chris: I did stop and start multiple services, but I'll tell you, here's where things started to go sideways.
Chris: I made multiple changes to rc.conf and nothing went sideways. It was fine.
Chris: Maybe I got a little complacent after making multiple changes,
Chris: but I decided, screw jails.
Chris: Oh, fancy namespaces. Ooh, Capsum. Oh, okay.
Chris: I wanted Beehive. I wanted to try out Beehive.
Chris: so I go into rc.com and
Chris: I add three lines like one of them is like
Chris: enable beehive the other is to set up bridge networking and
Chris: this other line which I'm reading from a guide online is like some kind of tunnel
Chris: I don't really know and I I look it up I don't find anything I'm like okay so
Chris: go and I uh do a google search and okay here's a guide and it's like the same
Chris: exact guide copied from this other I'm like okay all right it looks like these
Chris: are these instructions are four years old, but whatever. All right.
Chris: So I add the third line to my RC.com, which when I reboot should give me Beehive
Chris: with bridge networking. All right.
Wes: Yep.
Chris: I reboot, and what I get is just an endless boot script loop,
Chris: just scrolling text forever, nonstop.
Chris: System never recovers. It just scrolls and scrolls and scrolls and scrolls.
Chris: If I hold down the control and I just smash C over and over and over and over
Chris: again, I get a completely failed system.
Chris: And so that one, like, I'm assuming it's, like, either a bad,
Chris: it's either a bad, like, stanzas, it's a bad syntax, it's something.
Chris: And it just reminds me just how fragile this is.
Chris: And now i would have to go through an entire live session recovery process take that line out,
Chris: just to recover my system um now i know that you could set up zfs boot environments
Chris: and things like that but this was just a basic brand new system i haven't even
Chris: gotten that far yet and i completely took it out just trying to get beehive
Chris: working so that was that's kind of when i was like this is,
Chris: you know it i can see why there's a great market fit if if you have a shop with
Chris: a lot of storage you need native zfs support you're really deep into the zfs
Chris: ecosystem and you're fine with bsd,
Chris: that seems like a use case to me but i have to say boys in and i don't know
Chris: why i feel this way but in in the age that we are in now with all of this crazy
Chris: llm generated code and agents and All of the stuff that Red Hat's going to be
Chris: talking about this week, which is going to be some major announcements around that.
Chris: And it just feels like BSD is more irrelevant than ever in these last eight months.
Chris: Like, I really struggle to understand the genuine market fit.
Chris: I mean, if you enjoy it, that's great.
Chris: Like, if you enjoy Land Trek, that's great. I don't like Land Trek.
Chris: I don't like it. But I'm happy you like it, right? But to me,
Chris: I don't quite see who the audience is for Land Trek. Just like I don't quite
Chris: see who the audience is for FreeBSD, or BSD in general, because.
Chris: It is it's like hard mode for computers.
Chris: It's like it's like ignoring all of the improvements that we are benefiting
Chris: from and stacking in the last two or three years that are bringing us massive
Chris: productivity gains and scale.
Chris: I mean, again, I'm not trying to crap on it as a technical achievement.
Chris: And if you enjoy it, I think that's great.
Chris: But it's still solving problems.
Chris: That we were solving 30 years ago. And I really struggle with why I would want that.
Wes: I wonder how much of this is BSD versus Nix, and how much would you compare,
Wes: say, if you were trying to just run a stock Debian server versus a stock-free BSD?
Chris: I don't think it changes it much because there's still 20 years of technological
Chris: innovations that would be in Debian that are not present in BSD. Like what?
Chris: Well, take the Beehive, for example.
Chris: It's a great product in its own. but they're too late and it's too little.
Chris: And all they're doing is backfilling functionality that all the other operating
Chris: systems around them built up.
Chris: And now they're backfilling. Okay, well, they have it now. Great.
Chris: But why would I want it on this small niche weird product?
Chris: Like this was a valid argument 30 years ago, right?
Chris: But 30 years of Linux evolution have taken place now and they've only pulled in a few things.
Chris: Like ZFS is their strongest feature. That's their strongest thing.
Chris: But Linux can do that, right? Then the next strongest thing is jails and Capsum.
Chris: But Linux can do that with namespaces and things like SC Linux.
Wes: And I think then you're just arguing from a default then.
Chris: Well, I'm arguing for what is, who's the audience?
Chris: Who's the customer?
Wes: Well, I mean, I think you have to consider how much you want to consider the
Wes: learning a blocker versus just the outcome.
Wes: Because I would argue you can make a very nice free BSD server that from the
Wes: outside you would not have any idea.
Chris: But then you have something that only a small niche of the market can support.
Wes: That's true, but that's exactly what Linux was.
Chris: But like I said, we've had 30 years where now there is a free alternative that
Chris: doesn't have that downside.
Chris: Like 20, 30 years ago when they were both at the starting line,
Chris: that made sense. That argument made sense now.
Chris: But now we have something that's free. We have something that's widely supported.
Chris: We have something that has a deep expertise base on.
Chris: We have something that's very flexible that can do all the things that BSD can
Chris: do in a way that is better supported by an industry, either be something like
Chris: RHEL or just at the employment base.
Wes: There are things that that matters for, but that's not everything.
Chris: Okay, but what is that?
Wes: I mean, it's a similar thing like, why would you run NixOS, right?
Wes: You can't get RHEL support for NixOS. We're locking ourselves out of this entire support base.
Chris: That is at least Linux. And I would argue there is still a wider base there.
Chris: But what I'm trying to say is if you're looking at the two bases and you're
Chris: going to build like infrastructure for your company, a virtualization infrastructure,
Chris: or you're going to build something that runs in containers or something that runs on the cloud.
Chris: I don't know why you would choose BSD. And it feels like, just like BSD is kind
Chris: of sitting out all of the AI stuff, and just like it sat out all of the cloud
Chris: stuff, it's like it just, once again, is just not relevant in the conversation.
Wes: I think you're right at a certain scale, but I think there's a certain amount
Wes: of room and value to the diversity, especially in a week where we're getting
Wes: constant vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel.
Wes: because the thing about BSD is I think it's simpler and more elegant than Linux.
Wes: If you're going to compare, I would think it feels more like a closury or like
Wes: a well-crafted ecosystem and Linux is kind of the node.
Chris: Linux is JavaScript to that. I would agree, or I would say BSD feels more intentionally engineered.
Wes: Yes. And so I think if you value that and if you have full scope over what you
Wes: want to operate and you don't need the esoteric features of Linux,
Wes: those can be a liability.
Wes: and the simplicity and the security of the FreeBSD system, say,
Wes: where you can do jails and capsicum and things like that.
Wes: It's not that Linux can't do it, but Linux has to kludge together multiple systems
Wes: in a much more complicated way.
Wes: And so I think for a particular goal that is well-fit on both systems,
Wes: you may have a simpler and easier to reason about setup if you understand both
Wes: systems well on the BSD side.
Chris: Couldn't a cynical take be that you're arguing just that, well,
Chris: it's security through obscurity, basically?
Wes: No not it's not about obscurity it's it's there's less going on so it's easier to get correct.
Chris: Okay i dig that and i i think because what this whole thing i'm trying to be
Chris: like who's the customer who's the market who's the audience who's the user yeah i'm,
Chris: An embedded firewall device, maybe?
Wes: Yeah, I think folks may be building appliances, right? We've seen a lot of use
Wes: cases for that kind of stuff. I think you see it, folks use it to run some of
Wes: like the core DNS infrastructure of the internet.
Wes: You have situations where you have like a clear goal and you could solve it
Wes: in a variety of valid ways.
Wes: And then there can be value to just having the diversity or a stack that like
Wes: doesn't have all that extra stuff that Linux brings in in terms of complexity
Wes: where that core goal is very well supported.
Wes: And then you might have it in a very simple, clean, elegant way.
Chris: Okay.
Wes: Now where I think the Nix OS side for me, this makes it more complicated.
Wes: But if I'm comparing it to something like running a traditional Ubuntu or RHEL
Wes: server or something like that, that's where I see that there's a lot of elegance.
Wes: So think about encryption and disk maintenance.
Wes: We kind of have to stack all of these pieces together. They don't really know
Wes: about each other. You have the Lux side, you have the device mapper part of the kernel.
Wes: On the BSD side, they have Geom and Gelly, and it's all one tightly integrated
Wes: system that understands all of the pieces. It won't let you kind of abuse it in the same way.
Chris: Let me tell you about my iPhone.
Chris: I mean, it's like, okay, that's great, but you're describing an iPhone,
Chris: you're describing a Mac, you're describing the Apple approach,
Chris: and I like the x86 ecosystem, I like the Linux and Open ecosystem.
Chris: And I do prefer putting together my own solution that better address it.
Wes: Well, it's not that you can't put it together. It's actually,
Wes: in a way, it's more composable. It's like composability because it's intentionally designed in that way.
Chris: But you're so limited in your options.
Wes: Yeah, and that's true. So I think the market fit is maybe then where those core
Wes: things that it does in a rock style, like they thought about that case.
Wes: And it's kind of like, right, we had ePoll on Linux.
Wes: They had KQ, which was like better thought out. Now, IO, Euring,
Wes: there's been changes, but they just, they got a better API implemented.
Wes: Now, maybe fewer things target it, right? But for the things that do and target
Wes: it well, if that's the core of what you need,
Wes: then maybe that's what you, and that's where it's like you're talking about
Wes: ZFS is one of those situations if that's the core of what you're doing i think
Wes: there are other sort of services or for a long time networking there were particular
Wes: networking use cases that bsd was at linux has caught up a lot there but there
Wes: can be situations like that.
Chris: So i could that would explain really then why the desktop experience is just
Chris: so god-awful rough yeah um and i i maybe drew's gonna have to censor this if
Chris: you're listening on the bootleg version you might want to skip ahead a minute
Chris: here in a second i'm going to play this clip because i was recording this using
Chris: nomad bsd which is one of the BSDs I tried,
Chris: and I really like it. I think it's actually one of the better ones.
Chris: It's a live BSD session that has persistent storage.
Chris: But even what I would consider to be one of the top-tier user experiences still
Chris: has a god-awful user experience, and my mouse was dying.
Chris: I was having so many problems. I was really at my limit when I got to the screen.
Clips: Even the nicest distributions miss the smallest usability thing.
Clips: Like, I have to choose a keyboard layout, and it starts with user-defined and then Arabic.
Clips: How many of these users in these countries are even downloading this?
Clips: And the entire interface is in English right now.
Clips: So why not just English, right? So then you get to English.
Clips: Well, my goodness, how many versions of – okay, all right, there's U.S.
Chris: There's a dozen different English versions.
Clips: Okay, well, how many versions of U.S. English keyboards are there?
Chris: Thirty.
Clips: Well, oh, oh.
Clips: Oh, no, not that one. Okay, no, I'm not Dvorak.
Clips: Macintosh? No, I don't think I'm. Am I Norman? Am I symbolic?
Clips: I must be international. So I'm not Euro or Workman or whatever.
Clips: Oh, no, I don't think I'm Russian US.
Clips: Okay.
Chris: None of them are right.
Clips: I guess I go with that one?
Chris: No, no.
Clips: Like, why am I doing this? And then look at this. More keyboard stuff.
Clips: Why is there so much keyboard stuff?
Clips: The entire interface is in U.S. English. It doesn't make sense.
Clips: It's just, it's this little stuff that's just, and it's everywhere.
Chris: I was having a rough time, boys. I was having a rough time. I don't feel so bad anyway.
Chris: Yeah, so it's just, and it's like, even when you get to the good stuff,
Chris: and what you're saying, it must be the actual use cases are mostly headless.
Chris: They're mostly in hardware or in file storage or in DNS or something.
Brent: Specific intentional devices. Yeah, the one that always stuck out with me was
Brent: I think a couple of years ago, Netflix decided to share that they were using
Brent: BSD for their infrastructure.
Brent: Right, right. That was interesting. Okay, someone's using it for something real.
Brent: And I know a lot of people are.
Brent: They're just not necessarily as public with it. But that one always sticks out to me.
Chris: That is always the use case we've heard for the last 10 years.
Brent: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah.
Chris: Yeah.
Chris: Oh, you're right. So I'm guessing Wes must have had a great time.
Chris: So BSD love and Wes over here.
Brent: We've got to tally up your points here.
Chris: Chris. Oh, you're right. Sorry, I forgot.
Brent: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't want to let you go that easily.
Chris: I forgot about the F-ing points.
Brent: Okay, let's try to do this in a quick, fast way. So level one,
Brent: I think you got everything. So seven points.
Chris: Yep, seven points.
Brent: It took you all week to boot it, but like me, you got somewhere else, so that's good.
Brent: Daily Driver, you got graphics going in a browser, I'm assuming. Yeah.
Chris: And sound.
Brent: Wow. Okay. Sound going. And did you mount like a USB or some kind of external?
Chris: I did not. I mean, well, I couldn't verify. It may have mounted,
Chris: but that was also when the system went into a horrible boot loop and I never got it back up.
Brent: Well, it specifically said you had to prove and you can't prove.
Brent: So I'm taking that one away from you. Did you create your own user?
Chris: Oh, of course.
Brent: Okay. Well, I don't know.
Wes: Now, what did you name the user?
Brent: Magnolia called his jail poop. He said it was very late at night.
Chris: Jailbreaker would be a good one for a BSD box.
Brent: Okay, you might have moved into the power category then.
Chris: Yeah, because I did a full OS update.
Wes: Nice.
Brent: Full OS update.
Chris: Nice. And I had to install multiple packages. By the way, EE,
Chris: not a bad little editor by default.
Chris: Not a bad little editor. And I also had to stop and start numerous services, including SSH.
Brent: But were you able to SSH into your system?
Chris: Yes. I got SSH.
Brent: All right.
Chris: And I never, ever used any AI assistants in this. Never used any AI.
Brent: Nicely done.
Wes: Nicely done.
Chris: Nicely done. It was like, once I had SSH up, I was like, I could.
Wes: You could.
Brent: Did you write a shell script and execute it?
Chris: Okay. So I edited a shell script, but I did not create the shell script.
Chris: And I think it was already executable. So I'm going to say no.
Brent: The wording says write a short.
Chris: Yeah, I'll say no.
Brent: Okay. No point for you on that one.
Chris: Yeah.
Brent: All right. Bonus round. You ready for this one?
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Brent: Did you create and start a BSD jail or equivalent? No.
Brent: No, but that you're, you know, beehive might've.
Chris: Yeah, I know, I know. I tried to get beehive going.
Brent: But it didn't work. So, so you basically get zero in this entire category.
Chris: For all we know, it worked. For all we know.
Brent: Okay, well, tell us next week if you can prove it. But for now,
Brent: I won't give you any of those points.
Chris: All right, so...
Wes: He got the pity points, but he don't give pity points.
Chris: No, no, no, no.
Brent: Here's the point where you can ask for some kind of bonus point somewhere.
Brent: Did you run this anywhere crazy?
Brent: I mean, I'm going to give you a point because you tried a lot of different BSDs.
Brent: and some i've never heard of it's fine what is my total
Brent: what's okay you got seven points plus uh five six seven another seven that's
Brent: 14 plus another uh two horses eight do this plus uh zero so uh you know yeah
Brent: you don't have to say how do you feel about uh oh 22 points oh.
Chris: I feel pretty good about that although i think wes is gonna beat me although
Chris: i think pj is gonna beat all of us but all right,
Chris: Wes Payne.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: Can you beat 22 points?
Wes: Well, I guess let's find out.
Chris: So how did your experimentation go? Did you get it up and running as a daily
Chris: driver with a desktop environment web browser?
Wes: I did. Yes, indeed. Yeah, I got... Well, first I played a tiny bit around with
Wes: Dragonfly and a VM, but it didn't seem like it had been updated super recently.
Wes: I just wanted to play more with Hammer, too, because it's kind of an interesting file system.
Chris: Yeah. And that's one of the neat things about it is it has Hammer.
Wes: And they've done a lot of work on their, like, SMP stuff.
Chris: I wanted to give Hello Systems a try.
Wes: Right.
Chris: But it doesn't look like they've updated since 2024.
Brent: Yeah.
Wes: So, ultimately, I went back to FreeBSD, and I tried a couple of things.
Wes: Started out with Awesome, and then switched over to Sway.
Chris: I think that was probably a good move. Pretty straightforward to get going.
Wes: Yep. I was going to try Plasma, but I just didn't quite get there.
Chris: I imagine you created a user account.
Wes: Oh, yeah. I got to have a WES user.
Chris: Did you mount an external disk?
Wes: Yeah. Yeah. plugged in a USB drive you keeping track that worked totally fine
Wes: I'm attempting to I did get audio working I think that's all 14.
Brent: Points I have a question before you continue.
Wes: Yeah at.
Brent: What point in the week was this,
Brent: Like currently where you are here, getting the audio going?
Wes: The Wednesday?
Chris: Yeah, I think you had it going early on because I got.
Wes: Awesome going last.
Chris: Week in the first week.
Brent: You and I didn't even have anything booted by this point, Chris.
Wes: Yeah, I was able to piggyback on sort of the setup I had because I saved all
Wes: the comp files when I destroyed the VM that I made the first time and then kind
Wes: of let that help that bootstrap the one I installed.
Brent: That's not fair.
Chris: All right, so he's got all of level one, including the bonus point.
Wes: I did also get Duaz going. I don't need a point for that, but I like Duaz.
Wes: I think it's kind of nice.
Chris: All right, let's see how you did as a power user, Wes. Did you update your packages?
Wes: I did, yes.
Chris: Okay, did you perform a update installed packages with the native tool and perform
Chris: a full OS update? Did you do a full OS update?
Wes: I don't know if I did. I might not have.
Brent: Whoa.
Chris: That's kind of a weird one, because if you're updating the packages.
Wes: Yeah, I didn't intentionally try to, but I did update, and I did install a bunch of stuff.
Chris: Okay.
Wes: And I did get ports going.
Chris: Okay, all right. I think that's probably, that's probably good.
Wes: And then, yeah, SSH was not a problem. But services, you know.
Brent: RC comp stuff.
Wes: You could just stop there.
Brent: Wes. you could keep going.
Wes: And then i did make a shell script and then i but i was trying out my hand because
Wes: they use seashell by default and so i was trying my hand at writing a seashell
Wes: script which i'm not very good at so i did run i was able to you know print
Wes: some stuff out and you know write it to a file and like that nice so i'm not
Wes: a not as good at bash which i'm also not that great at but.
Chris: All right so i think that's,
Chris: all the points.
Brent: For level three no well what about the services getting a service to start at boot that was yeah i.
Wes: Got nginx going.
Brent: Yeah okay all right well did you lose parts anywhere did you go to.
Chris: Jail west did you start a jail.
Wes: Yes i did get some i got an nginx going into jail as well because i figured
Wes: that seemed that seemed like a good thing to run did you.
Chris: Try to access the service from a host.
Wes: Uh yeah i was able to expose that to my local home network.
Brent: That's okay that's.
Chris: Like a i.
Wes: Did not get a vm going but i did get zfs boot environments working which was cool.
Chris: Well you're definitely definitely in the beast beastie whisper category with
Chris: me but i think it beat me i feel like you you kind of blew it out there.
Brent: Well um it was easier to track how many points west missed which was only two
Brent: so i think he did pretty good that that looks like i don't know depending if
Brent: you think the math on our bsd challenge was correct or not something like 28 or 29 yeah.
Chris: I'm gonna say 29 i think that's what i tracked was 29.
Brent: For west so that's pretty couple questions for you west yeah did you run anywhere
Brent: interesting or what surprised you the most.
Wes: Hmm no i just tried it on the i got the nuck going with free bsd i didn't end
Wes: up that's where i ran engine x i didn't really end up doing more on it i was
Wes: thinking it could be fun to play with so i might leave it around with free bsd
Wes: for a little bit oh no we'll see it'll be next we've lost him.
Brent: Lost him he's gone we need a.
Wes: New host.
Brent: Everybody if you're willing.
Wes: It's interesting to see i also wanted to try the
Wes: linux compatibility but i didn't quite get there either um so
Wes: it's interesting to see let's sort of see the frequency and
Wes: the cadence of how they port over that stuff and like what those environments
Wes: look like and how updated they are or not and their
Wes: work to port like i wasn't lucky because like the i the i915 stuff
Wes: works for this laptop and that is well supported in free bsd but
Wes: not all are then you kind of have to learn you know oh where do
Wes: i go to find out like what was it most recently synced over from the linux side
Wes: and like that kind of stuff i was surprised to see that like wayland is in better
Wes: shape not everywhere not on all graphics tax and it doesn't work very well or
Wes: at all really in qemu right now seemingly but that was a thing that before this
Wes: I hadn't even I just assumed we would all be using an X exclusively yeah yeah um so I find it I'm,
Wes: I know it's coming on as a stand earlier. Like, I don't know if I have a lot of places for it.
Wes: And I think Nix has made it harder because there's just so much more on top
Wes: that it's like, like maybe if it was, like Nix BSD would almost be closer.
Wes: Like at that point, if it was just sort of, it swapped out the underlying implementation
Wes: and that was fine from the config, then like that would make it more likely
Wes: I would run it because I'm almost, the Linux is now almost an implementation detail.
Wes: Not really, because it's Linux Unplugged. We love Linux here,
Wes: but so it's almost like I'm also sort of in your camp where I'm like,
Wes: I find a lot of it very elegant and appealing and fascinating but i don't quite
Wes: know where i would put it yeah yeah i would like to have a place to put it i
Wes: just don't know where that is.
Chris: That was where i was at the last time we gave it a go and this time we gave
Chris: it a go it feels even less relevant than it did more than a year ago we tried
Chris: it but that's just my personal opinion just.
Brent: Because you felt like maybe nothing changed or you didn't notice anything changing in this limited use.
Chris: It was a collection of things like that yeah yeah yeah.
Wes: It does seem like there has been some more effort i just think they're early
Wes: Like we've seen over the past year or so more foundation work towards the desktop
Wes: and like some some things like that.
Chris: So did any of you like manually connect to Wi-Fi?
Wes: Yeah, that was the first time I got Wi-Fi working.
Chris: It's fine. It's basically like the process was 15.
Wes: Like the WPA supplicant type stuff, right?
Chris: It was fine, but it was a whole effing, just bring this interface up,
Chris: this is in this interface.
Chris: It's like, okay, I remember doing this 15 years ago, and it's fine,
Chris: but it just seems like there could have at some point in time been tooling created to make, you know.
Chris: It's like, acknowledge that Wi-Fi is actually a thing, but they don't.
Chris: They just assume if you need Wi-Fi, then, I don't know, it's just, that's all of BSD.
Wes: Well, and that's where you were kind of talking about, right?
Wes: Like, maybe it would, if it was like a desktop sort of workstation thing that
Wes: had Ethernet, and there's just...
Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or if you're going with something built for the desktop,
Chris: like your Ghost BSD, or something like that. They do a much better job with
Chris: that sort of stuff, but...
Wes: You are right that it kind of, it does, especially on the desktop side,
Wes: feel like going back in time on Linux World.
Chris: Well done, 29 points is, that's going to be pretty darn hard to beat there,
Chris: PJ. do you think you do you think you scored more than 29 in the old BSD challenge,
Chris: oh really I count okay I'll take BJ's score if you want to I was I was also
Chris: counting while I listened I.
Brent: Was lazy mathin.
Chris: Oh okay BJ's.
Brent: Coming in with.
Chris: Fire yeah I get better let's.
Wes: Go
Wes: yeah,
Wes: i give you the full point i love the bsd native part yeah.
Chris: Yeah that's fine because.
Brent: It didn't say you had to you know mount something that wasn't native so you.
Chris: Get you get the whole thing,
Chris: Nice.
Wes: Good choice.
Chris: You got a web browser going, you did system updates, all that good stuff.
Chris: Net installer, yep.
Wes: Nice.
Chris: Oh, cool. I wanted to. That was all I wanted to do. I did not.
Wes: Tell us more.
Chris: Oh, that's fantastic.
Brent: So StarCraft, Jeff and I had a side deal. Whoever could get StarCraft working first.
Brent: And definitely Jeff beat me, like, by days and days. I'm not even, geez.
Chris: Well done, Jeff.
Brent: So extra point, I say, for him, because I failed.
Chris: 27 Brent giving away points.
Wes: He just hands them out.
Chris: No.
Brent: What?
Wes: Wow.
Chris: All right, now you're just showing.
Wes: He is just showing off. This is awesome.
Chris: I nuked my install, and he's sitting there editing video? Jeez.
Chris: Oh, wow. Okay. I don't know. That's the kind of suffering I remember.
Brent: Your own challenge over there.
Chris: Great. Next is going to be the VNC challenge.
Chris: Remote desktop challenge. Good back. Yeah. All right. Okay. You got SSH going. Good. Good.
Chris: Uh, you got jail going? Did you go to jail?
Wes: Oh, nice.
Chris: All right. That's the bonus points. So 26 is what you're going with.
Chris: How did we get to 29 for a while?
Wes: I have no idea.
Brent: I don't actually know. Uh, yeah, the math is rough on this one.
Chris: Oh, 27. Okay. All right. All right. Now 27.
Wes: Yeah, he should get some bonus. Some line bonus.
Chris: All right. You want to give them a bonus for, I think, I think a bonus for the
Chris: desktop environment choice and a bonus for the gaming.
Wes: Yeah.
Brent: Hardware acceleration too.
Wes: Yeah. Bump them up to 30.
Chris: I think that puts them at 30. Oh my God, PJ. Well done, sir. Well done.
Chris: 30.
Brent: So will you keep it around?
Chris: Yeah.
Brent: Yeah. Yeah.
Wes: Nice. Uh-huh.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Wes: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Wes: Right.
Chris: Yeah.
Chris: yeah i think you know after being hard on it i will add uh
Chris: if you kind of do have a soft spot
Chris: for the way the systems used to work and it and it
Chris: works well for you you you could really get somewhere nice with like a gerwish
Chris: desktop or an xfce desktop and free bsd and you could probably just settle in
Chris: for a long while and you'd really have a very functional system as long as you
Chris: didn't need large scale compatibility with new and exciting applications or
Chris: hardware yeah or hardware yeah.
Wes: Ooh nice is that 31.
Chris: Well done sir.
Wes: Oh yeah well did you be able to run anything in there Linux program wise just basic stuff or,
Wes: uh-huh,
Wes: did you did you.
Brent: Run it on some interesting hardware or anywhere interesting,
Brent: But no problems as far as hardware goes. Jeez.
Chris: Now, if you want to write in or boost in and advocate for why maybe you could beat 30 points.
Brent: Or why Brent should get extra bonus points.
Chris: Yeah, boy, oh boy.
Wes: We did have someone who I don't know if we had in our earlier feedback summary
Wes: who sent us like a detailed PDF.
Chris: Oh, that was so great. I meant to call that.
Wes: Yeah, user LKF, I think Lars.
Chris: Thank you.
Wes: This document, it's like, I don't know, 10 pages and very well typeset LaTeX document.
Chris: Beautiful report.
Wes: Detailing all of the stuff they did. They have their own score. They might have.
Chris: Yeah, that was genuinely, there were some really nice write-ups that came in.
Chris: We had to pop through them quick for obviously time purposes, but man.
Wes: We were really impressed.
Chris: So, you know, Brentley, I just want to say, get excited, get ready.
Chris: It is time, my friend, because this week is Red Hat Summit.
Chris: Have fun out there, Brent. At Red Hat Summit 2026. Looking forward to it.
Chris: As the loser of the BSD Challenge, you will be our correspondent.
Wes: The least winner.
Chris: Yeah. And, you know, being that you went last year, you're already kind of up
Chris: to speed on what the game is, so it should be no problem at all.
Brent: Well, thanks, guys. I feel honored.
Chris: Congratulations.
Brent: Thank you.
Chris: Hey, if you'd like to support the show, you can send us a boost.
Chris: Fountain.fm makes it really easy.
Chris: There's also AlbiHub, which you can connect to lots of different projects and
Chris: podcasting apps. And please do boost it and tell us about your router setup.
Chris: I'm building a new home router, brand new little baby.
Chris: And it's a very special project. And I'd like to review as many ideas from the
Chris: hive mind as possible. So do boost those in. It'd be a great way to support the show.
Chris: And, you know, maybe a great chance to try out a boost if you haven't done it
Chris: yet. I don't know. Support the show with a boost.
Brent: Well, we have quite the baller boost here that I am hesitating to read now that
Brent: I read the first line or two. But it is for a row of McDucks.
Brent: 22,222 sets.
Chris: Hey, is that a row of McDucks? Is that what it is? Or is it an Aflac?
Chris: Which one would you like?
Brent: I like the Aflac every time.
Chris: Let's do it. There you go. Let's do an Aflac for once. But also,
Chris: why not? That's what I say. He does, too.
Brent: So our baller booster here is uh pj
Brent: and he says uh bsd me
Brent: calling it right now i beat brent at least 25.5 points at the time of writing
Brent: this excluding bonus points install the linux comp hat stuff but i couldn't
Brent: run a game due to libgl issues but i was able to cheroot into an ubuntu jammy
Brent: instance and get nano going i.
Chris: Mean that's worth it right there.
Brent: Very fancy nano.
Chris: I did not Actually, I was just stuck with EE. Did you try it?
Wes: No, I didn't, actually.
Chris: Editor, it's not bad.
Brent: Yeah, I just was- He writes other details about how he beat me in various ways.
Chris: He also got some zonotic going.
Brent: Yeah, that's true. Super tux cart. So, good job, PJ. You win this round.
Chris: At least he sent a little sugar along for that salt in the bowl.
Wes: Yeah, that's right.
Chris: I appreciate the boost. Turd Ferguson comes in with 22,222 SATs.
Chris: The history of 1-800-ITS-UNIX is a fun one.
Brent: What?
Chris: BSDI put ITS-UNIX on a toll-free number. AT&T took it personally.
Chris: BSD got lawsuited into limbo and gave Linux time to take off.
Chris: 1-800-ITS-UNIX.
Wes: Huh.
Chris: And, yeah. Really?
Brent: No.
Chris: I guess so. I do remember there being a massive lawsuit that AT&T launched.
Chris: Yeah, so, okay. Here's what Google says. 1-800-ITS-UNIX was a marketing phone
Chris: number used by Berkeley System Software Design, BSD-I-NC, in the early 90s to
Chris: sell their BSD-386 operating system.
Chris: It was at the center of a major legal battle between AT&T Unix Systems Laboratories
Chris: over the trademark infringement, forcing the company to stop using the number.
Brent: That's like back when lawsuits were fun.
Chris: Yeah, I don't know. It doesn't sound too fun. It doesn't sound too fun.
Wes: Yeah, I mean, I suppose we've had our own fun of eternal lawsuits on the Linux side, haven't we?
Chris: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Wes: Well, our dear Odyssey Westrebusin with 5,000 sats. Just to say, live meep.
Chris: Hello, Odyssey. Thank you.
Wes: Thank you.
Chris: Appreciate that.
Brent: We've got a Moonanite here with, oh, cleverly, 6,666 sats for episode 666.
Brent: Maybe instead of calling mysterious binaries magic boxes or,
Brent: quote, blobs, We can call them, quote, danger zones.
Chris: Hmm.
Wes: I like that idea.
Chris: Yeah. Yeah. It comes with some bundled danger zones.
Wes: It's actually perfect. It might be too exciting sounding, though.
Chris: Yeah. It's a little edgy. I want that. I want the danger zone.
Wes: Yeah, right. I love any danger zones. This is yours, Seth.
Chris: Right. Autobrains here with a Spaceballs boost. One, two, three, four, five sats.
Chris: Well, we agree with this. I love our community. We have so many diverse perspectives
Chris: from around the world. That's our super strength.
Chris: I'd love it if we could find a way to keep growing, get more women in STEM on
Chris: board, get more young people and old people and every age in between people,
Chris: all sorts of background. Let's get them all in this awesome e-tent.
Wes: Well, I love that idea.
Chris: Yeah, the community can always play a role in that.
Brent: Agree completely. Yeah. Wes and I did convert a rather aged gentleman who was
Brent: very interested in learning about Linux back at LinuxFest Northwest.
Wes: So that was a great conversation it.
Brent: Really was and also i have to say this week just watching all the bsd challenge
Brent: conversation happening in our matrix room was very fun very.
Wes: Entertaining i probably.
Brent: Should have did less of that and more on my challenge but here we are.
Wes: Yeah the brent vicarious challenge well uh
Wes: wh 2025 comes in with
Wes: 5 000 sets here is
Wes: a plus one to ai segments i'd like to see some comparisons on
Wes: all the new stuff coming out like say open claw versus hermes
Wes: and etc this is also a time traveler boost going all the way back to 2015 kind
Wes: of funny to hear chris remark that he finds the raspberry pi interesting but
Wes: had no idea he would use one along with bopey saying by episode 600 we'd have
Wes: a bunch of phones everywhere 2015 was an optimistic time oh.
Chris: Yeah interesting yeah the.
Wes: Show's in the back catalog shows a bit of a time.
Chris: Capsule that way it is indeed. Thank you, WH. Appreciate you.
Brent: We've got Bearded Zero here with 6,999 cents.
Brent: They say last episode should have been titled Control-C, Control-F.
Brent: Thanks for all the AI talk and everything else on the show.
Chris: Well, Control-F would be find, right?
Wes: Usually, right?
Brent: Well, copy, fail.
Chris: You know what I say? Oh, I see. I say never paste.
Chris: Just fill that copy, that paste, that pinboard up. Fill it up,
Chris: fill it up, whatever. Fill it up, never paste.
Brent: I have a observation about how copy pasting is failing for me recently.
Brent: I don't know if you guys have experienced this.
Brent: I've been using open code quite a bit in my workflows and it just like copies
Brent: anything you highlight.
Brent: And so I turned that on in all my terminals cause like I'm not an animal,
Brent: but now if I use any other program, it's just broken.
Brent: I can't copy paste for the love of it.
Chris: Wes knows.
Wes: Yep.
Chris: Wes knows that I'd be sitting here at the station here in the studio and I'm
Chris: sitting there trying to cop and I highlight stuff and it's not copying.
Chris: I'm like, what is going on? There's gotta be a section.
Brent: Right? We gotta find some kind of.
Chris: I mean, I mean, be a gentleman and turn on copy with highlight. For goodness sake.
Chris: Plug for the kitty terminal. Adversary 17 is here with 8,192 sayads.
Chris: Adversaries like the beginning of last week's member bootleg feed,
Chris: and he says, one day, one day, I'll make it to LinuxFest Northwest. We sure hope so.
Wes: We do.
Chris: That would be great.
Wes: Ronnie comes in with 6,666.
Wes: Thanks for all the work. Number of the beast is here.
Chris: Hey, for us, it's a good look.
Wes: And I don't know if this was intentional or not, but they also happened to be
Wes: at six seconds into the podcast.
Chris: Whoa, come on.
Chris: do you think they knew we knew that yes.
Wes: No but bonus points.
Chris: Magnolia mayhem came in with 5 000 sats maximum points and he sent us the link
Chris: to his write-up long story short
Chris: i got it running in my car and achieved everything but a virtual machine.
Brent: Crushing it as usual,
Brent: biggest mac has boosted in with a devil boost 666 satoshi's,
Brent: Oh, hey, it's Brian from Boise. For this challenge, I used a Rescue HP Elite
Brent: Desk and went with FreeBSD 14.4.
Brent: I did most of the work over SSH, set up XFCE for my GUI, even got the sound working in Firefox.
Wes: Nice.
Brent: I grabbed a couple screenshots and a screen record with XFCE for screen shooter.
Brent: Then I got Bastille set up and decided to try to get Pinchflat working.
Brent: Took some manual edits to the Elixir source code to get the SQL playing nice,
Brent: but it's running incredibly well now.
Chris: Whoa, they got it.
Wes: Awesome.
Chris: Interesting that they got it. And another Pinchflat user out there. Pinchflat users unite.
Brent: They continue here.
Wes: Hey, they met Erlang virtual machine crushing it.
Chris: Yeah, I guess so.
Brent: Pinchflat is now serving the Linux Unplugged channel via mini DLNA.
Brent: The best part? It's arrived to reboot.
Chris: Yeah, really.
Brent: After everything was stable, I jumped to 15.0 at 1 a.m. this morning.
Brent: Everything, jails and all, came back up. I didn't expect to build a snappy YouTube
Brent: box for the house when I started. but here we are not.
Chris: Included in.
Brent: My story i created a small zfs status shell script and i did mount a usb drive
Brent: with all that i think i can say i got around 30 points for this challenge.
Chris: Yeah i.
Brent: Think so as free bsd likes to say oh it's cut off i'm so sorry it just says
Brent: does this loo well yes it does loo you did very.
Chris: I think it loo's well i think it loo's very well i think that's easily you
Chris: 30 points big well very impressive huh
Chris: well well well some
Chris: people really crushed it i'm very impressed i'm glad it's sticking
Chris: for some of you too and i hope you enjoy it very much there's some of the audience
Chris: and users right there thank you everybody who supported the show with a boost
Chris: we had 17 of you stream them sats collectively you sat streamers you stacked
Chris: 20,340 sats for this episode when you combine that with our boosters we squeaked
Chris: out 128,318,000 satoshis,
Chris: We really do appreciate it very much. In fact, when you boost,
Chris: a little bit goes to B, a little bit goes to Wes, a little bit goes to editor
Chris: Drew and Brent and the podcast developer of the app, all of that.
Chris: So it spreads around a little bit, and it's a great way to support us directly.
Chris: Or, of course, you can just become a member, and we appreciate that, too.
Chris: Well, we have too many picks.
Wes: How did that happen?
Chris: How does that happen? Let's do the AI-related one first, and then the rest will
Chris: all click into place. So, of course, one of the problems when using AI services
Chris: like OpenAI or Anthropic is you might be worried about your sensitive data going
Chris: to these cloud-based services.
Chris: In fact, I know some people avoid cloud AI in general just because they don't
Chris: want to send their data to it.
Chris: But, Wes, you have been experimenting with various proxy layers that can be
Chris: used to, I guess, I don't know, sensor, isolate, remove private data?
Wes: Yeah, exactly. Because, you know, in a lot of situations, right,
Wes: maybe the LLM needs to know that there is like an API key there or something
Wes: like that. If it's really crucial for like a templating thing or a placeholder,
Wes: you know, you should already have solved that.
Wes: But if you didn't, and there is a mistake, you still don't want that key ending
Wes: up in, you know, being cached, used for training, all that stuff.
Wes: And so enter, well, I mean, there's a lot of stuff I've been playing with some
Wes: of my own projects, but there's a more than a couple out there,
Wes: sort of a composable ad hoc just kind of do that piece.
Wes: and one of them is Kiji Proxy, an intelligent privacy layer for AI APIs.
Wes: It automatically detects and masks personal identifiable information in request
Wes: to AI services, ensuring your sensitive data never leaves your control.
Wes: And yeah, I think this one also, it has, so I've, and the ones I've used so
Wes: far have mostly been sort of like entropy detection or sort of more standard
Wes: programming techniques to look for things like PII or API keys or that kind of stuff.
Wes: But this one has the ability to use like a small model on its own to try to
Wes: classify that stuff automatically.
Chris: Interesting. So you put this between you and the upstream cloud provider.
Chris: You configure your local client to talk to this and it proxies the request up
Chris: to say OpenAI or Anthropic.
Chris: and during that time it's looking for personal identifiable information like
Chris: email address social security number credit cards etc exactly,
Chris: API keys there's also it offers a Chrome extension so if you're using ChatGPT
Chris: Cloud or Gemini in the web it can also kick in for that as well.
Wes: There's also a desktop app for the Mac I think comes with a systemd service
Wes: you can run it in Docker if you want it's got pretty nice logging it's all local
Wes: they use a Distilbert transformer model using the Onyx front time to sort of
Wes: do that local ML for the classification side.
Wes: So, yeah, one way to, you know, try and ameliorate some of the downsides and
Wes: risks of using some of these services.
Chris: Yeah, and like you said, there are several of these. This one's mostly Python
Chris: and Go, and it's licensed under the Apache 2.0 license.
Wes: Yeah, give it a try. Maybe you have a use and let us know how it goes.
Chris: Next up, Portbook, which is a local Rust web dashboard.
Chris: that auto-discovers and labels your HTTP services running on local host ports.
Chris: It does live updates, project root detection, live error, and dead classification.
Chris: So why spend the time setting up the dashboard when you can have the dashboard,
Chris: auto-discover everything running on your machine, label, setify,
Chris: classify, blah, blah, blah. Do it all for you.
Wes: And, you know, maybe you've got a couple of dev environments running,
Wes: you've got a few services, you don't quite remember what's running on that thing.
Wes: And, you know, sure, SS or Nesda can do some of that.
Chris: It would have been useful this morning when we were trying to hunt down our rogue DHCP server.
Wes: Yes, it would. So get yourself PortBook.
Chris: Yeah. PortBook. And it is MIT license.
Brent: This feels like one of those tools I didn't realize I needed.
Chris: Yeah.
Brent: Now I do.
Chris: Yeah. It's only like a five megabyte single binary.
Wes: It does look like it might be pretty new. I think it wasn't created too long
Wes: ago. So early days. But give it a try. Maybe you can help shape it.
Chris: Also, great support for JSON output. All that kind of stuff as well.
Chris: So if you just want something that reports on the back end, doesn't stand up
Chris: a web UI, you can create like a JSON report. All right, and then our last...
Chris: is sleeve which is what i was hoping to
Chris: get to which is what i was building towards uh so i could talk about a little
Chris: bit a little bit because it looks pretty neat you could think of it as like
Chris: proxmox for beehive it's a management plane for beehive a lightweight open source
Chris: management plane that sits on top of free bsd jails and beehive and zfs storage
Chris: in a modern web interface,
Chris: designed to give you a streamlined ui with um you know all the stuff you would
Chris: kind of hope and want, at least they're striving for.
Wes: Yeah, and they've got some cool sort of example deployments in some of their
Wes: guides, like a Technidium DNS server in a jail, Jellyfin in a jail,
Wes: Rocky Linux jail, if you want to use that Linux compatibility mode,
Wes: and then you get sort of this cool management layer on top.
Chris: Yeah, and it is a nice UI with resources, you know, overviews, dashboards.
Wes: Yeah, modern, svelte JavaScript stuff.
Chris: Nice, easy, EI, EI, geez, I'm getting sleepy, UI to create virtual machines,
Chris: and what I think is really great about it is that it's sitting on top of FreeBSD,
Chris: right? It's not like its own weird, although I think they do offer an ISO,
Chris: but like it just runs on top.
Wes: Right on top. Yeah.
Brent: You know, Chris, I probably would have got a couple extra points had you linked
Brent: us Sylvie earlier in the week, so no thanks.
Chris: You think it's Sylvie? I like Sleeve because it's like it's a sleeve for your VM.
Wes: You need to write to him.
Brent: Sylvie has been nice to me, so.
Chris: Okay, all right. And it is BSD2 licensed.
Wes: Appropriate.
Chris: Yeah, as you might expect. As you might expect. We'll have links to all of that
Chris: in the show notes. Our show notes are over at linuxunplugged.com slash 666.
Chris: Or, of course, you can go to jupiterbroadcasting.com where you'll find this
Chris: show. and all the great shows over at jupiterbroadcasting.com.
Chris: If you want more around the show, we do have some really great metadata in multiple ways, Wes Payne.
Wes: Yeah, that's right. How about cloud chapters and how about VTT diarized transcripts?
Wes: Is that good enough for you?
Chris: I mean, from that, you can do quite a bit. Those are all in our feed as well
Chris: as a video version, all in there as part of the podcasting 2.0 namespace.
Chris: Multiple clients support that. But even if your client doesn't,
Chris: if you know how to pull up an RSS feed in your browser, you can find the URLs
Chris: to stuff. You know, it's right there.
Chris: And of course, we are also live on Sundays. Make it a Linux Tuesday on a Sunday.
Chris: That's right. Join us over at jblive.tv or jblive.fm. And of course,
Chris: that mumble room with our virtual lug is going every single episode.
Chris: And they just give it that live vibe along with our chat room.
Chris: Shout out to our members who make every single episode this year possible.
Chris: And don't forget the website, linuxunplugged.com. also has our Mumble info,
Chris: our Matrix info, and a whole lot more.
Chris: If you can't join us next Sunday, we will see you Tuesday on a Sunday when we
Chris: release, usually in the evening, on Sunday, to make it a Tuesday.
Chris: Right? It's easy. What don't you understand?
Chris: You can find our live times at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar.
Chris: Thank you so much for joining us on this week's episode of Your Unplugged Program.
Chris: And we'll see you right back here next Sunday.