Episode: 583
Title: HPR0583: An interview with Alan Hicks
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0583/hpr0583.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 23:31:22

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Hi everyone, this is Klaatu and I'm outside and chilling with Alan Hicks of the Slackbook
project still, I guess, and a Slackware community in general.
So how are you doing?
Alan, I spoke to you last year.
I'm doing good.
It was good to be back here this year.
So what do you think of the festival this year?
Alan, it's been a great blast, I am tired, oh boy.
It has been a busy, just a whirlwind, fun thing.
The one criticism is that it's so daggum big, you can't do everything you want to do.
It's like Disney World, you have to go for a week if you want to ride every ride.
But overall, this has been fantastic again.
Really had a great time, a lot of the talks have been great.
They've done everything from a lot of improvements, the table layout has been a whole lot better
this year, I think everybody could tell you that and probably tripled the number of
talks.
Alan, that has been crazy because there's no way you're going to get to see all the,
I mean, there's just not, there's no way.
Yeah, I mean, I think they have six rooms that they have talks going on simultaneously.
So you're talking something somewhere along the lines of 30 talks today, plus more tomorrow.
How can you possibly work that in?
That's a huge accomplishment.
We're talking a big, a really big, fast on just its second year.
One of the really big things, or one of the really impressive things just about the
scope is that they had to turn speakers away this year.
They had too many wanting to speak and we've got, you know, 30 talks going on today at
least.
And we've probably got a 15 or 16 tomorrow, two hour talks at that.
So, you know, you're talking about a lot of information shot up together and it's just
overall improvements.
I mean, you can tell that it has really matured in just a year's time.
They put in a lot of great hard work.
They've got, you know, even better people here this year for some of the speakers and not
to trash talk anyone from last year, but, you know, it seemed like after you got that
first year under the belt, people wanted to come talk, you know, people wanted to be
a part of it on just the second year.
And that's amazing.
You're talking, I didn't get to hear it all because there was a camera emergency in another
room, so I got to leave for that.
But you're talking today with on ciphers, correct?
Yes, sir.
Ciphers, we did everything from the ancient old school monofibetic ciphers up through, you
know, DES, RSA, complete with some of the mathematics involved for things like RSA.
It was really good talk and we had, you know, a good crowd who asked good technical questions
as well.
So, how important is that sort of thing to security and Linux?
I mean, because it's kind of a common knowledge, common expectation, I guess, is that it's
going to get cracked eventually anyway.
Well, yeah, I mean, RSA is probably the strongest form of encryption we have right now, short
of, you know, some massive, massive synchronous cipher.
But, you know, when you start to get, if we ever discover any sort of way to quickly factor
huge prime numbers, not just for Linux, but for our very way of life, you know, RSA
cures everything you do online when you, when you're talking SSL, you do e-commerce,
you buy something online, you are using RSA, you want to connect to a VPN a lot of times
you'll be using RSA to first establish that connection and do a key exchange.
Just the ability to have a secure line of communication to someone else without having
to physically meet them and exchange keys in order to guarantee security.
Without that, the entire security of the internet falls apart, you know.
We're talking billion dollar corporations that can no longer do business on the internet
because credit card information isn't secure anymore.
So it's really a big deal and I think it's important that people, you know, understand
what's involved and so that it's not, you know, just some black art that people, you
know, I understand it works and that's all I need to know.
And I feel like a lot of people are hungry to know more about sort of the dirty plumbing
part of not just, you know, Linux but the internet that most people don't, you know, want
to think about, they want to sort of take for granted.
And, you know, also those typical things tend to be a lot more technically oriented and
I think, you know, it helps to have a balance of talks from things like what I do, which
can be highly technical to other sort of talks, which can be very personal.
Like John Maddox talk was excellent today, his grade, you know, talk about a personal
history with freedom and how intimately he was involved with Linux in the early years.
And, you know, then you have sort of your middle ground, distro talks and stuff, so having
the blend really helps attract a lot of other people or diverse group of people because
while geeks have a lot in common, we also have a lot of differences to it.
And here at the South East Linux Fest, there's things for, you know, even from the beginning
user who might have only been exposed to things like Ubuntu and Fedora and cares mostly
about getting it installed and having a web browser and having their wireless work to
real coders, real developers who might be working on some internals or might be working
on user space products.
You've got commercial vendors here and a good bit of them.
They've all been very, very friendly, very big on open source, a lot of them incorporate,
you know, open source in their own project.
And then you've got, you know, talks that while not necessarily geared towards coding can
also attract, you know, the type of geek who wants to really get down and understand how
things work, sort of the essence of the hacker, I guess you might say.
Let's switch gears, I guess, to talk a little bit about Slackware since there was a big
release quite recently.
Any big improvements to 13-1 that you would, you can think of?
Okay, there's a lot of big improvements here and a lot of big changes.
The old LibATA has gone from the kernel.
Oh, so now, yeah, so now all your IDE devices show up as guzzy devices.
That's a big problem if you're upgrading and you're not paying attention,
because, you know, your F-step file has to be rewritten,
the LLO has to be rewritten, so HDA become SDA and things have moved around.
Policy kits have been added in, that was almost, you know, almost like an 11,
11 o'clock hour sort of addition, that helps, you know, with some hardware,
KDE 4.4, which just very recently came out.
And in fact, I walked by the KDE booth here and they had a Slackware laptop there to show off KDE 4.4.
It's actually Vincent Bats' laptop, because none of the other distros had it just yet.
At least not in the stock, you know, it's off.
Yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah.
So, you know, there's a lot of new things to be excited about.
We're not running the absolute latest stable kernel.
We're running a 2.6 point, either 3.3 or 3.4, I forget which one.
I think it's 3.6, 3.4 came out, you know, just maybe a week or so before a Slackware was released,
and unless there's a really, really compelling reason to change kernels that late in the release,
we won't do it, because it's usually a case of exchanging bugs you know about, for bugs you
don't know about. But, you know, we always grab the latest, I guess you would call them the
sub-stables, you know, the patches for stable 2.6 kernels, we always try and grab the latest one of those.
We've also, in the kernel, KMS and stuff, so video works better, switching between console and
X is almost instantaneous, the graphics and console are better too.
You know, previously, when you had, say, a widescreen laptop or a widescreen monitor,
you ran frame buffer, you know, your text could get stretched a little bit,
it's much better looking now because it uses the kernel KMS settings, so, you know, the text
and frame buffer is almost like the text and the X-Term under X, so you don't have, you know,
the stretching, the wide font, so just overall improvements.
That's very nice, so are you running it?
I guess I mean, you must be, but I can't do it in real life.
Yes, yes, it's actually on my laptop, I have an old MacBook that I'm running, you know,
and little funny, it doesn't quite run right on the MacBook, something with the LibATA to,
the Scuzzy Switch over, doesn't want to work right with the MacBook, so I had to compile a custom
kernel and go back to LibATA, so I'm not exactly 13 point right.
And, you know, I've got some issues with the kernel I compiled that have caused some video
corruption issues at times, but, you know, that's just fine turning on some really odd ball hardware,
yeah, yeah, not a whole lot of people use.
Right, yeah, additionally, yeah.
She'd fake you out, dude.
Sorry about that, I was trying to open the door for a lady, but no.
Anyhow, there's been a lot of improvements, you know, there's some places that can still be
improved, but you said the same thing about any distribution, any program.
In my case, the few troubles that I've run into, if you look around, they're just not reported
anywhere else. It deals with some of the custom junk that I've done to get it to work on that
hardware, right? And I'd be a little doubtful that, you know, all the other districts ran clean
out of the box on it, but, you know, with some of the additions, things like brightness keys
and volume keys on a Mac worked out of the box.
It's crazy.
Yeah, and with everything else, regardless of distribution, you would have to download and compile
these weird libraries and compile some software called PalmD to get, you know, those buttons to
work right. And I actually used to maintain the Slack build for it, and now I just don't,
because there's no more requirement for it.
Do you, were you the maintainer of, I think it was PB buttons D on Slack build?
Yeah, I believe so.
Okay, I was wondering if that's even necessary anymore, because now that you mentioned it,
that might not even be it.
Yeah, I'm familiar with it, and it may be necessary to get like the jack, keep working.
But it is, yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's something like that, but, you know, I haven't actually played with it.
I haven't even put in, you know, a CD since installing, so, you know, if it doesn't work,
I'll type EJ, you know, so what is your talk on tomorrow?
Uh, be the 80211 Mac, this is the Media Access Control, the data link layer.
A lot of people are sort of kind of familiar with the way Ethernet works.
802.3.
You know, you plug up a cable, you have a source MAC address, you have a destination MAC address,
you have a checksum, and that's pretty much it.
You know, people understand that, you don't have to think about it, it just works.
But 80211 is very different for a lot of reasons, and I'm not going to go into all of them, but,
I mean, the boundaries of an 80211 network by necessity, or just by the laws of physics,
they're kind of fuzzy, you know, not all nodes can reach all other nodes, and you have 80211,
the Media Access Control takes a lot of pains to, you know, make it as Ethernet-like as possible,
and does all this stuff in the background, usually without the, without the user really having
any knowledge of it, any idea what it's doing, why it's doing it, and so I'm trying to,
you know, bring some of that out of the black magic realm and end of the line of day,
and, you know, I think it can be interesting to a lot of people, simply because it's interesting to
me. Yeah, well, plus, I mean, who doesn't use wireless via this? Yeah, I mean, everyone,
you know, 80211, you almost can't buy a laptop without an 80211 card today, half the desktops,
at least come with an option for, you know, usually some sort of PCI card, and also,
you know, some of the stuff in my talk might clear up why your wireless connection is great at home,
but then when you come to a conference like this, when there are 600, 700 other people,
why it's so slow, you know, you've got plenty of bandwidth, but nobody's getting through, why,
you know, and, you know, we're just trying to bring some of that out into the light, explain it,
and help people get a better grasp of the tools they're using. Nice, sounds really cool,
I'm going to try to make that one, except I think you're talking at the same time that I am,
so probably won't make it. Yeah, I believe that's the case as well. That's sort of the problem,
when you have, you know, five big tracks going at the same time, you just can't see this stuff,
you won't see it. That's a good problem to have, obviously. So, well, thanks for talking to me,
and I guess we'll probably see you next year. Absolutely. Cool, see ya.