30 years of Debian
This week weāre talking with Jonathan Carter whoās on his fourth term as Debian Project Lead (DPL) and weāre talking about 30 years of Debian!
This week weāre talking with Jonathan Carter whoās on his fourth term as Debian Project Lead (DPL) and weāre talking about 30 years of Debian!
Red Hatās decision to lock down RHEL sources behind a subscription paywall was met with much ire and opened opportunity for Oracle to get a smack in and SUSE to announce a fork with $10 million behind it.
Few RHEL community members have been as publicly irate as Jeff Geerling, so we invited him on the show to discuss.
This week weāre talking to Daniel J. Barrett, author of Efficient Linux at the Command Line as well as many other books. Daniel has a PhD and has been teaching and writing about Linux for more than 30 years (almost 40!). So we invited Dan to join us on the show to talk about efficient ways to use Linux. He teaches us about combining commands, re-running commands, $CDPATH hacks, and more.
Thereās always at least one new thing Iāve never come across in every one of these kind of lists.
Nowadays, Alpine Linux is one of the most popular options for container base images. Many people (maybe including you) use it for anything and everything. Some people use it because of its small size, some because of habit and some, just because they copy-pasted a Dockerfile
from some tutorial. Yet, there are plenty of reasons why you should not use Alpine for your container images, some of which can cause you great amount of griefā¦
While playing with the SQLite vs Filesystem benchmark, I became intrigued by how the cache between the two approaches behaved. That led me to discover a super exciting tool called vmtouch, which allows you to interact with the Operating System page cache and do some performance debugging.
This week weāre doing some Linux mythbusting and talking retro gaming with Jay LaCroix from Learn Linux TV. This is a preview of whatās to come from our trip to All Things Open next week. By the way, make sure you come and check us out at booth 60. Weāll be recording podcasts, shaking hands, giving out t-shirts and stickersā¦and speaking of gaming, you can go head-to-head with us on Mario Kart or Rocket League on the Nintendo Switch. Weāre giving that Switch away to a lucky winner at the conference, but you have to play to win. If youāre there, make sure you come see us because we want to see you.
The GNU Debugger is powerful, but it can also be inscrutable at times. Maybe this GUI will help?
eBPF is a revolutionary kernel technology that has lit the cloud native world on fire. If youāre going to have one person explain the excitement, that person would be Liz Rice. Liz is the COSO at Isovalent, creators of the open source Cilium project and pioneers of eBPF tech.
On this episode Liz tells Jerod all about the power of eBPF, where it came from, what kind of new applications its enabling, and who is building the next generation of networking, security, and observability tools with it.
Whatās this? Basically:
Batch 1 is shipping now, but theyāre taking pre-orders for batch 2, which ships in October. Starts at $159 and goes up from there.
Do you ever send the output of a process to /dev/null
and regret it, but canāt afford to stop and restart the process? catp
is here for you!
chiark is my ācoloā - a server I run, which lives in a data centre in London. It hosts ~200 users with shell accounts, various websites and mailing lists, moderators for a number of USENET newsgroups, and countless other servicesā¦
chiarkās last major OS upgrade was to jessie (Debian 8, released in April 2015). That was in 2016.
A harrowing tale of planning and peril. Surprisingly, it went quite well!
John Goerzen built a computer for his 3yo, installed Debian on it, and set up a GUI for it.
The looks of shock I get from people when I explain, as if itās perfectly natural, that my child has been able to log in by himself to a Linux shell since age 3, are amusing and astounding. Especially considering that it is really not that hard.
Itās not that hard, but it is so foreign to people that theyāre quickly impressed by such things. Still, John decided to introduce his kids to a GUI eventually:
Jacob mastered the basics of xmonad really quickly. Alt-Shift-C to close a window. Alt-Shift-Q to quit back to the ābig black screenā. Alt-Shift-Enter to get a terminal window.
We launched thunar (the XFCE file manager) and plugged in his camera. He had a good deal of fun looking at photos and videos from it. But then I dropped the true highlight of the day for him: I offered to install Tuxpaint for him. Thatās probably his favorite program of all time.
Speaking this morning at The Linux Foundationās Open-Source Summit, Linus Torvalds talked up the possibilities of Rust within the Linux kernel and that it could be landing quite soon ā possibly even for the next kernel cycleā¦
The Linux 5.20 merge window will open following the release of Linux 5.19 stable around the end of July, so at that point weāll see if the Rust PR is submitted and lands for this next kernel version. It wouldnāt be too surprising with how things have been pacing and already having the blessing of Linus.
Lots of positivity about this in the attached comment thread.
Cheeky title, but theyāre talking about cheat
, which is different than man
and info
in that itās entirely example based and community maintained.
The cheat system cuts to the chase. You donāt have to piece together clues about how to use a command. You just follow the examples. Of course, for complex commands, itās not a shortcut for a thorough study of the actual documentation, but for quick reference, itās as fast as it gets.
If youāve ever wondered how the Linux kernel does its thing:
The goal is simple - to share my modest knowledge about the insides of the linux kernel and help people who are interested in linux kernel insides, and other low-level subject matter. Feel free to go through the book Start here
WANT!
Mainboard Terminal is not just any cyberdeck, itās a full-feature PC powered by Frameworkās Mainboard. It has a 5ā (1080x1080) round LCD, a fully 3D printable case, and is compatible with OLKB Preonic mechanical keyboard.
This week weāre joined by Mike Riley and weāre talking about his book Portable Python Projects (Running your home on a Raspberry Pi). We breakdown the details of the latest Raspberry Pi hardware, various automation ideas from the book, why Mike prefers Python for scripting on a Raspberry Pi, and of course why the Raspberry Pi makes sense for home labs concerned about data security.
Use the code PYPROJECTS
to get a 35% discount on the book. That code is valid for approximately 60 days after the episodeās publish date.
A solid rant by Terence Eden, who has to use macOS for work but would rather not:
I know youāre going to be tempted to reply with āyouāre using it wrongā - but Iām not. This is how I like to use my computer. And it is clear that the MacBook isnāt my computer - it is Appleās. (OK, OK! It belongs to my employer!)
Some of his grievances like window snapping and moving/removing UI elements can be alleviated with 3rd-party solutions, but heās not wrong that the operating system doesnāt provide these features.
Though the application overall is stable and usable, it should not be considered safe for critically important work. There are numerous bugs and half working implementations. Pull requests are greatly appreciated.
If this kind of thing is your bag, Iāve also heard Geany is worth a look.
Asahi Linux is a project and community with the goal of porting Linux to Apple Silicon Macs, starting with the 2020 M1 Mac Mini, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro.
Our goal is not just to make Linux run on these machines but to polish it to the point where it can be used as a daily OS. Doing this requires a tremendous amount of work, as Apple Silicon is an entirely undocumented platform. In particular, we will be reverse engineering the Apple GPU architecture and developing an open-source driver for it.
Asahi Linux is developed by a thriving community of free and open source software developers.
Yes, please!
They brand CasaOS as an operating system, but itās really a layer on top of Linux that provides a nice UI and easy app (docker container) installation. Itās early days for the project, but we definitely need some open source options in this space, so hereās hoping they continue to progress!
This is a āLinux Swiss Army Knifeā, offering maximum utility while still being able to fit in your pocket. Is it fast? No. Can it run a GUI? Also no. But it can run scripts, ping a server, toggle a few GPIOs, and interact with a USB device.
Linux users on Tuesday got a major dose of bad newsāa 12-year-old vulnerability in a system tool called Polkit gives attackers unfettered root privileges on machines running any major distribution of the open source operating system.
Previously called PolicyKit, Polkit manages system-wide privileges in Unix-like OSes. It provides a mechanism for nonprivileged processes to safely interact with privileged processes. It also allows users to execute commands with high privileges by using a component called pkexec, followed by the command.
Oh my. It requires local access first, which is the only good news here.
Luis Artola:
I built my own laptop over the holiday break and itās a developerās dream come true. I took a chance and ordered a Framework Laptop DIY Edition. Iām so glad I did. The Framework is an excellent platform to customize and build a very capable and stable Linux machine for development. Hereās what I love about it and things that could be better.