hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr0914.txt

Episode: 914
Title: HPR0914: Sunday Morning Linux Review: Episode 014
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0914/hpr0914.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 04:53:42

---

Welcome to the Saturday night edition of the Sunday morning when it's
to do with that. Enders, don't you mean us? Mary Tommach. What's today's day? 14th January 14th, 2012.
Third show of the year? Yes, third show of the year. 14th episode. And you know, the
third time's the charm, they say, so. Right. Oh, we survived yesterday Friday the 13th.
Barely my laptop died yesterday. And so. And so it died. It died. Completely or did
some aspect of it. Hardware software. I don't know. It won't boot consistently. And
sometimes the BIOS doesn't even come up. So what happened was I thought I was
plugged into a power source and I wasn't. And I was just using it and using it and using it and using it.
And then all of a sudden. Completely disregarding the little battery indicator. I wasn't paying
attention. And all of a sudden the screen just goes, and I'm no lights. I'm like, oh, F. So then I
plug it back in. And when I first plug it back in, I it wouldn't boot at all. Wouldn't do
anything. I'm like, oh no. So then I let it sit for a while and rest plugged in. And then it booted,
but it froze with only like half the desktop loaded. Like the start would pass this first
start button down on the lower left. It wasn't loaded. And then the mouse and the keyboard stopped
reacting. So then I had to hard boot out of that. And then sometimes the BIOS doesn't come up.
If I turn it on, it just sits there forever. This was you were trying to boot mint, right?
Mint has nothing to do with it. Have you tried pulling the battery out?
I have not. Because it doesn't happen. And it doesn't boot consistently. It's sometimes when it comes
up, the wireless isn't active. And I do an RF, I did an RF deal and RF kill set was fine.
Maybe there's something. I don't know. But really the BIOS doesn't even grow up sometimes.
So I don't know what the deal is. Yeah, but you could pull the battery out and boot it just
strictly from the. But does a laptop still have a CMOS battery in them, don't they?
Yeah. Yeah. So if I pull the battery out, what's good Zikim and do?
If the battery is shorting out, it would cost things to stop working. So you pull the battery out
and just run on power. Oh, you're an effing genius, dude.
We're going to expect a report from you next week. I got it here when the show's over.
I'm not sure I'll stick around with that. It happened on me for two or three laptops I've
worked on. I've done that. Really? Yeah. And they work fine without the battery in them. Oh, yeah.
And then when you plug the battery in, they say, hey, I few. Actually, it just doesn't do anything
when you plug the battery in. This does. Sometimes it does nothing. Sometimes it boots. Sometimes it
half boots. Sometimes the. Maybe just something's loose in there. Sometimes the radio works. Sometimes the
radio doesn't work. But why would I think it's definitely got something to do with the battery?
Because I totally killed it. And if you drain a battery, I don't know about a laptop battery,
but like a car battery. If you drain it too much, you can actually reverse the polarity on the
battery. Yeah. Well, laptop batteries are completely different. Yeah.
Car batteries are really different. No positive negative posts on them. Even laptop batteries from
five years ago, or 10 years ago, to the last couple of years, it comes totally different.
Because the new ones don't you don't have any memory or anything anymore. Right. Because they're all
lion batteries. Right. Where the previous ones, like what this laptop has, you know, that we're
recording on. Right. It's probably has something either similar to what you have, or you have up
to the new version. New kind. Yeah. There's like a six, it's like a six year old HP, I think.
So I think it's most likely as an older style. The new ones, there's no recognition at all. I mean,
if it goes bad, it's bad. You have to throw it away. But on your, you can actually recondition
Yeah, I know. I had an old think pad that I had to do that too once. And it was like, it was
amazing. It was down to like only 20 minutes of use on the battery. And then I did some research on
the web and found out about this reconditioning. And I did it. And then I was getting like an hour
and 40 minutes out of it. I'm like, well, you know, I've got a, I've got, and you probably don't
remember this, but I have that. It's a wind book. And I had it before I got that Dell XPS
before I got my. Yes, I think I do remember that. Well, that laptop is still limping along.
But the battery is completely dead. I mean, if I unplug, if I unplug it from the power source,
it, it dies. Yeah, I had, I had a really old think pad that was that way. Yeah. And I'm thinking
that, well, I don't know if there's something that can be done for that particular battery,
it may be just totally. I think at that point, that point is completely dead. It actually has
shrugged out. It's time for Trump to batteries plus at that point. Okay. The other option is you
can, you can actually replace the cells inside the battery. That's what battery plus does.
They'll rebuild it. Oh, really? Okay. Oh, that's a good point. I'll, I'll try that.
My old compact, the reason I was so hesitant to get rid of it or stop using it is because it had
had a feature right in the BIOS to recondition the battery. That thing, when I first had it, when I
first got it, it had maybe 10 minutes of battery life. I found that in the BIOS and I ran it.
And the next day, it takes about 12 hours to run it. So I had to give it a whole day to run.
And then, and then I tested it next day at four hours of battery life.
Well, because I had the same thing in the think pad. And when, and when I did it, I went from like
20 minutes up to like an hour and 20 minutes. Yeah. But it does, it goes through like four cycles of
completely charging and completely charging and completely charging and discharging four cycles of
that. That only works with the old lead acid stuff. Yeah.
All right. Ready for the kernel news? Oh, I've been sitting on the edge of my seat.
Just anticipation is killing me. Yes. All right.
Matt, what's happening with the kernel? In the kernel news this week, there were no release
candidates. And the mainline 3.2, there was no change. And the stable releases,
Greg Cage announced the release of 2.6.32.54 kernel on 1.12. I got confused there because it's
it was on the 12th and on the year is 12. So it was on 1.12 at 8.13 UCT UTC.
There were 18 file changes, 167 files inserted and 66 files deleted. He also announced on 1.12
that 3.0.17 was also going to be released. There were 52 files changed, 364 files inserted
and 179 files deleted. And then again, he also announced that kernel 3.1.9 was released.
And it had 53 file changes, 367 files inserted and 179 files deleted. And then believe it or not,
there was also a stable update, the 3.2, even though it just became the stable kernel recently.
And there were 63 files changed, 465 files inserted and 200 files deleted.
And my kernel quote of the week is also from Greg Cage, which stands for Crow Hartman, by the way.
Here's the, here's the different active kernel versions that I am maintaining at the moment.
3.2.Y. This will be maintained until 3.3 comes out.
3.1.Y. There will be only one or maybe two more releases of this tree. And then 3.0.Y.
This is the new long-term kernel release. It will be maintained for two years at the minimum
by me. And then there is 2.6.32.Y. This is the previous long-term kernel release.
It is approaching its end of life, and I think I only have another month or so doing releases of this.
After I am finished with it, it might be picked up by someone else, but I'm not going to promise anything.
All other long-term kernels are being maintained in various forms, usually quite sporadically,
if at all, by other people, and I cannot speak for their lifetime at all,
that is up to those individuals. And that was a quote? That was a quote from Greg Crow Hartman.
I was going to say that. That was a pretty lengthy quote.
Hey, no. There was also a bit of a dust up between Tim Gardner of Canicle and Greg Crow Hartman
on the kernel mailing list over the maintenance of the 2.6.32 kernel.
Once Greg gives it up, it appears to have been started by a misunderstanding and a conclusion
jumped by Tim, but it was Greg kind of bitch-slapty minute. It was kind of cool.
I'd like to see those canicle guys get bitch-slap once in a while.
Well, I suppose. Keep some in line, right? There you go. Sure.
Oh, okay. Well, that was pretty good. Thank you, Matt. You're welcome. And that's the state
of the kernel this week. All right. Tony, what's going on with the Linux distributions this week?
We've got some distro releases this week. Starting back on last Sunday the 8th after we recorded,
we had a release of, we're going to go Portius, 1.1. It's a Slackware-based live CD with a choice
of Trinity, a KDE-3 fork, KDE-4 or the LXDE desktops. That KDE-3 fork is that that Trinity project?
Oh, Trinity, yeah, never mind. I'll just be quiet now. Actually, Matt, it's your whole about
everything you're against with KDE-4. I'm surprised you haven't, you're not running Trinity.
I just discovered it like a week ago. Oh, yeah. But I'll tell you what, I'm that new cinnamon
that the mint guys are making. I am digging that dust top. It has some little quirky glitches in it
that made me drop back to run mate for most of the week, but I really liked running cinnamon. It was
really cool. Cool. This is the January 14th update of Matt's over there with cinnamon.
All right. When what other distros is Tony, are you going to tell us about?
On the 10th, we have Fudentu. Fudentu? Fudentu? Yep. Do we skip over Ghost BSD?
Ghost BSD? It was a ghost. We didn't even see it. I just got to stop talking this week.
I am just all over the board. Yeah, it's all right. So we have, it's 2012.1. So they're quarter
release of the updated distribution for Fort from Fedora last year. And that's the one where
they forked Fudora to make it look like Ubuntu. Yes. That's why they called it Fudentu.
I'm like, just get a life, guys. I mean, run Ubuntu, but we love the RPM. You're an idiot.
Well, maybe they could write a, maybe they have written, I don't know much about it myself,
but maybe they've written a script where you can just take alien and behind the scenes do all of that
or something. I don't know. It's possible. Yeah. All right. And then we have asterix for?
Asterix? Asterix. A-S-T-U-R-I-X. As I was going to say, asterix is a voice server.
I know. When I saw that name, I thought it was going to be a voice server, but it's not.
So Ubuntu based desktop distribution with customized desktop environment and many usability
improvements. Another Ubuntu spin off. You know, I think what I'm going to do, maybe for next
week is I'm going to go and I'm going to count how many there are. And I'll be put back during
the summer. It's only a couple that's like blessed by Ubuntu. But then there's a ton that are
spun off that, you know, that don't get the Ubuntu name, like these asterix. And although within
yeah, but within the distro watch website, you can say what it's based on and show me, yeah,
and say show me all of those. Yeah. And then we have a starro security gateway 8.3.
I did not know they were a Linux based distro like that. I thought that the asterro gateway was
Linux based just from what I've seen of it. But I did not know that they had that they released
a distro. I thought they did like a red hat kind of a thing. And just if you wanted it, you had to go
to their website and dig this stuff from wherever and compile. Well, I do know they do the enterprise
level like routing and security stuff. Right. Right. Right. And I had looked into it, but it's
I, uh, it looks pretty complicated when I was looking at it at the time. I'm not sure about
any more. But, um, and like I said, maybe this is a newer thing where they're releasing it.
Because I did look, I looked at quite a few firewalls about four or five years ago. And they
didn't have a download available. Anyway, continuing on, we have web convergence 11. I know they had
released just last month. Yeah, not too long ago. I remember you saying something about them.
Yeah, but it's, uh, it's basically just a web browser on, uh, you know, Ubuntu or, uh, what do I see?
Uh, you know, on Linux desktop and it's four internet kiosks. So there's not much they can do with it.
Anyway, continuing on, yeah, they can do that. That was a web for internet kiosk.
Uh, on the 12th, we have free VSD 9.0 is released. It's the major, uh, new version of
BSD operating system featuring a brand new system installer. Hmm. That sounds good.
Uh, see, there's a couple of development releases, but we also have a BSD or PC BSD 9.0 is released,
which is the one that's, uh, based for like your desktop.
And that's all I see. Did I miss anything, you guys? No, I am done with a bit of all of it.
All right. Yep. And, uh, uh, one thing, uh, one thing I'll mention, uh, and this day, uh, actually this day in history 10 years ago,
I'm going to read the top 10 most popular Linux distributions. Uh, number 10 was Xandros.
Number nine was lindos. Number eight. How many of mine even around anymore? So far, we've got one lindos.
We became Lynn Spire. That's right. That's right. Uh, like chorus, like rose, like rose.
Like rose. No, this was 10 years ago. Are they still around anymore?
I don't think so. They may have morphed into it, uh, or merged into something else.
It's L-Y-C-R-O-I-S. This one will be familiar, though. Yeah. L-Y-C-O-R-I-S. Correct.
This one will be familiar. Slackware. Slackware. That was my favorite. Yes, Susa.
I have never run Slackware. Well, the close-up come as I've run, uh, vector on some things and they're
Slimeware-based. And, uh, okay. Number six was Susa. Number five, Sorcerer.
Sorcerer. Yeah. They're, they're a, uh, they're from scratch type distribution. Are they? Okay.
That was, now I was back in 2002. And number four, Debian. Well-known distribution. Debian rocks.
Debian rocks. Uh, number three was Gentoo. Number two was Red Hot. Red Hot. Red-Ed.
Like chorus. Red Hot. Yeah. Like chorus was last updated on Wednesday, the 27th of July,
2011. So, all right. Okay. And the number one, Linux distribution, 10 years ago today was
Mandrake. Oh, no. Okay. Mandribe. Mandribe. Mandribe. It might be done shortly,
according to the news last week. Wow. Yeah, I can remember some of these. Yeah.
Soccer was my first server. It was just because the guy that I worked with, he's like,
you got to do Slackware. And it was my first, you know, Linux server that was running. And, uh,
it was a file server and actually ran a web server and stuff from it. It was fun.
But then once I found Debian, that's all I've ever had since. That was it. Yeah. Yeah.
Debian on the server, baby. Yeah, I think the only server, uh, software I've installed was,
uh, Ubuntu server. But, uh, I remember, um, uh, the, uh, lindows and slash lindspire and the whole
click and run. Remember that click and run, which I think, uh, was just, well, at that point,
I was pretty new to Linux. I thought it was so cool because you get all this free software and,
wow, it was just, just cool. So anyway, all right. Well, that's, I just wanted to share that
little bit with everybody today. Yeah. Well, let's go to this week, the top five,
uh, number five we have for done to at 1433. Actually, it's tied with Debian in number six.
They put it for some reason at 1433. Open suce is 1440. And it's on the way down. It is.
For doors at number three with 1495. Ubuntu is at number two with 1873 hits. And,
and in the number one spot, we got mint with that, got to love that minty goodness with,
with as many pages as number two and number three combined, more pages than number two and number
three combined. That's because your whole family keeps pressing buttons here at the store. Hey,
I got two kids and a wife and they got a lot of free time.
I wonder if that counts unique hits. I bet it doesn't. No, I'm sure it doesn't because I might
be wasting the time. That's true. That's true. All right. So yeah, I was, I was really
interested in looking at that Trinity, you know, because I mean, I, it's interesting to see it
out there because there's so many people. I thought you were a genome guy all the way. Come on.
Oh, and you know, you guys, remember last week when we were looking at the various
distros of the week, I think we covered pair OS and I believe I made the statement or comment
that I was going to go home and install that and just check it out. Yeah. Well, I got to tell you,
I did, I did, I did install it on a virtual machine and maybe I should have put it on
directly on my laptop, but I have to say it was a little disappointed in it. Some of the dialogue
boxes, the titles were in French, but the text was in English, although I did, was kind of a little
sever off there. So I was, I felt the, you know, able to, able to practice your high school friend,
Sam. That's right. My name is Mary. Yeah, Jim, I feel Mary. But anyway, the only thing I can do in
French is count to five because it's a sentence. Are you ready? Yes. The Undo, Toa, Cat, Sank.
I have never heard of that. Okay, but I never forget how to count the five. But, but it was,
it was fairly easy to install. It had a problem recognizing my, my monitor, my graphics and so it,
it just installed just the standard, the standard one. So, but aside from that, I mean, it was,
it was okay. You know, again, I, maybe I was just thinking it was going to be, you think the
lack of some of that graphic stuff was maybe because it was a virtual machine or was I not paying
attention? You said no, no, no, no, I didn't say that. And it's possible. It's possible that it was.
So maybe I'll try it again. Yeah, just because I've heard that sometimes a virtual machine has a hard
time with some of those effects. Yeah, I did. I noticed that I had to install some guest add-ins.
Now, I'm using virtual box and I had to do that for, because what I was doing virtually, I was
running two screens. And I got it to work and everything. And, and you guys know that I had to
install that other operating system for this one program that I can't run in Linux. And, yeah,
I got it. I got the screens working just fine. Do a monitor and do a monitor in a virtual box,
yeah? So, yeah, I was pretty pleased to just had a tweak it around a little bit and look
pretty good. So you were running that program in wine? Yeah, I did. I tried, I tried running, believe
me, I tried running it in wine. And it just, what it is, is a charting program for financial
instruments, stocks and bonds and commodities and that type of thing. And it, it just, I think some
real time, yeah, or real time, yep, yep. And so, so it's just streaming, you know, streaming data.
And I thought I had it installed and then it wouldn't, the program wouldn't boot or it was
just something I just couldn't get it to go. And so I ended up having to, having to run it in
a Windows virtual environment. Is it a popular program? Is it something that's used by a lot of
people? Well, it's zero charts. I have no idea with that. Yeah. And, you know, it's a charting
package. So if you follow the markets, like I do. But is it popular? Like go a lot of day traders
use it and things like that? Yeah. Well, I wouldn't say a lot do. I mean, I think there's probably,
there's probably a fair number that do. But. Well, did you ever think about contacting the crossover
people? You know, no, I haven't actually. But what I used before I went to this particular one
was think or swim. And their platform, I believe it uses quite a bit of Java. And I am able to run
at Linux. So that was nice. I mean, it has some limitations. But it worked fine. And then I
like to see your charts because it's got much more flexibility. But the downside, of course, is
I can't run it. You have to run it in that Redmond distribution. Yes, that other one.
Haven't you tried seamless mode with virtual box? Seemless mode. What it is, it takes, like,
I must not have if I asked that question. You can run, like you crank up your your windows virtual
machine. And then you hit like control. Oh, I think it is. And it actually drops your back,
your desktop off. But it leaves your individual windows up and puts the start bar at the bottom. So
you're I can go back and forth without you can drag in between windows. And it's, it's awesome.
You know, I think I did and I didn't even realize it because I noticed that I first of all
presented me with some little dialog box. If I wanted to continue doing this thing kind of,
oh, I can I'm moving the same back and forth and kind of go into the virtual box and out.
I think you got that that made yeah, that made me how I got the dual monitor running too.
Yeah, it's blind lock, you know, I do that all the time for dumb luck. You know, I first heard
that heard about that in parallels or whatever replaced parallels. My friend was telling me about
he did on his Mac. And like, I've got to be able to do it in my machine. And I found it. Yeah,
it's really cool. Yeah. And I think it was those I want to say it was those guest add-ins that I
had to install that really helped make that happen. Yeah, it's because of the video driver. Yeah.
But the only downside is I do not get the the 1900 by 16 whatever our result native resolution
that these widescreen monitors that I use have. So it's it's smaller. It's less. But I'll deal with
that. It's not so bad. It looks like a big clown desktop. Is it? No, not quite. I said, yeah,
there was 800 there's an 800 by 600 option that I managed to tweak it up a little higher than that.
I have I have a little story about that. I was at a teacher's desktop. It has to be three weeks ago.
I was doing some work on the machine. And he was standing over my shoulder and I'm like,
Tim, why do you have this set to clown mode? He's like, clown mode. What are you talking about?
I'm like, man, don't you notice that all these icons are so big and everything looks just all clown-ish.
And he goes, you can change that.
I changed it to 1200 by no, like 1600 by 1200 for me. He's like, that's great. That's great.
You probably had the colored up down to like 16 years ago. No, it was on 24. But but
it was just you can change that. And you made his day. I did. All right.
That's a good story. Yeah. Well, it's like that IT guy song. Have you ever heard that IT guy song?
No, I can never remember that. I can only ever remember the one line. Come with music?
It does. But are you going to sing? No, I'm not. Okay. Maybe the one line. But in the one line
that I can remember from it, it's like sometimes he comes to your desk and he's there all day.
Other times he walks up and hits caps lock and walks away.
All right. All right. It's on to the tech news. All right. Okay. In the tech news this week.
First, we have Microsoft now collects extortion on approximately 70% of all US sales
bandroids. LG is the latest victim to pay Microsoft's extortion demands. They are the eleventh
victim in this extortion scheme. A list extortion is my word, by the way. None of the sources I
used to write this use the word extortion. So this is. It's an editorial. Okay. Okay.
They're the eleventh victim of this extortion scheme. A list of the other victims includes
Samsung HTC and Acer. This leaves Motorola mobility as the only major manufacturer not to sign
an extortion agreement with Microsoft. I'd wager that Microsoft does not even approach Motorola
as Google now owns Motorola and those pockets are deep enough to scare the Microsoft patent
trolls. Microsoft now claims that they're collecting royalties on over seven royalties by the way
in air quotes. On over 70% of all Android smartphones sold in the US. The terms of this latest
agreement are unknown as Microsoft makes part of the agreement that the parties cannot make public
the patents covered by the Microsoft claims. In other words, a typically extortion agreement.
Yeah. So that that's just incredible. I don't know how they get away with it.
Did you tell me or did I hear that they make more money from that than they do from the sale?
They make more money on the extortion of Android producers than they do from Windows Phone sales.
Yeah, because they make the same amount as what they were charged to put Windows Phone on it.
So if they have 70% of the market running Android that they're getting money off of and then
5% that they're getting money off, they're making 70% of their money coming in from mobile is because
of these agreements. Evil. They are. They're just makes me glad. Well, I just got a new cell phone
and it's a Motorola Android so running Android I should say and I'm glad about that. So
and any more. Yes. Have a couple more. The MPAA instigates a dust up with ours
technical on one time. I like that site. I do too. On one 10, the MPAA, which stands for the
Motion Picture Association of America, said on its blog, ours technical, a tech blog with a
long history of challenging efforts to curb content theft. This entire claim by the MPAA appears
to be that appears to be based on the fact that ours technical opposes things in the past
like the broadcast flag, which would have allowed remote control of people's home entertainment
recording devices, along with their stand against DRM that prevents owners from ripping legal
backup copies of their DVDs. ours also has publicly opposed the horrendous SOPA legislation
currently in front of Congress. It is obvious that the MPAA's position is the wacky correlation
of fighting for consumers rights is the equivalent of having no enforcement at all.
Not only not that any representative of the MPAA would ever engage in outlandish statements
to further their cause like this quote from Jack Valenti when he appeared before Congress in 1982.
I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston
Strangler is to learn. That's pretty graphic. Does it get any better than that? I mean,
Jack Valenti obviously dead now and no longer. Head of the MPAA, but I think that as I recall,
I don't know if it's really true right now because the economy is a little shaky, but as I recall,
I think movie revenues increased after that. They did. I mean, who wants to see a movie on your
home screen? Well, of course, these days now with a 55-inch TV isn't going to be a little better,
but I still prefer large screens. I like to see that when I'm going to see my TV at home,
I don't watch much. Well, on one of the big screens we do with the Netflix watch some movies,
but the TV is for TV shows. I'm not really watching too many movies on it.
The United States migrates spy drone control panels from Windows to Linux.
Last September, the ground control systems for the Reaper drones, which reside at the
Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, became infected with a virus. When it happened, the Air Force dismissed
this intrusion as a nuisance that posed no real threat. It was, however, taken very seriously.
Still, the discovery of the virus on the Air Force's systems was a huge embarrassment.
This is what they had to say at the time. The malware in question is a credential
stealer, not a key logger, found routinely on computer networks, and is considered more of a
nuisance than an operational threat. It is not designed to transmit data or video,
nor is it designed to corrupt data, files, or programs on the infecting computer.
Our tools and processes detect this type of malware as soon as it appears on the system,
preventing further reach. They also went on to say the ground system is separate from the
flight control system Air Force pilots used to fly the aircraft remotely. The ability of the pilots
to safely fly these aircraft remains secure throughout the incident.
Screenshots of drone control computers posted by security researcher,
Miko Hyponin, and I'm sure I butchered your name and I'm sorry, show that some of the systems
have been migrated from Microsoft Windows to Linux. In a statement, Miko Hyponin said,
if I would need to select between Windows XP and a Linux-based system while building a
military system, I wouldn't doubt a second which one I would take.
So yeah, so they're running XP. They're not publicly going to say, yeah, they were,
because in the other screen, in other screenshots from other times, like pictures of the room and
things, you can see the Windows desktop, that Windows XP, green rolling hills, whatever.
So they're not publicly going to say what they're using ever, because it's the military,
and it's pretty critical stuff. But from his screenshots, you can obviously see that it's
no longer got a Windows. That's on some of these machines. They must be in the process of migrating
them over. Cool. And on my last story, we're back to secure boot, Microsoft locks out other OS
devices using UEFI. Early in December, the software Freedom Law Center warned the copyright
office that some operating system vendors would use UEFI secure boot, anti-competitively,
by colluding with hardware partners to exclude alternative operating systems.
Microsoft did not dilly-dally in revising their Windows hardware certification requirements
to prohibit other operating systems on ARM-based devices that have Windows 8 pre-installed.
The certification requirements define on page 116 a custom secure boot mode that allows for a
user present at the machine to add signatures for other operating systems to the system's
signature database. Except in the case of ARM devices, custom mode is prohibited. And I quote,
on an ARM system, it is forbidden to enable custom mode. Only standard mode may be enabled.
Oh, go ahead, me. Oh, I was just going to say now, ARM devices, they're more of the mobile
of the phone, yeah. And I'll get to that again. I'm going to be quiet. I'll let you keep going.
Also, you will not be allowed to disable secure boot. And again, I quote from the from the from
the specs, disabling secure boot must not be possible on ARM systems. So in other words,
if you purchase a machine with an ARM processor running win 8, it will never be able to boot anything
else. This also brings to light that surprise surprise Microsoft has been lying to us all along.
I personally am shocked that Microsoft would be less than truthful in its statements. Until recently,
this policy would have only affected Windows phone customers. However, Qualcomm announced that
they are going to manufacture Windows 8 tablets and ultrabook style laptops built on top of its
Snapdragon processors that are ARM based. Unless Microsoft has a policy change, these could
well be the first PCs ever that will only be able to run Windows. SFLC, which stands for the
software freedom law center, did predict in their comments to the copyright office. And I quote,
that misuse of UEFI secure boot would bring such restrictions already coming on smartphones
to PCs between Microsoft's new ARM secure boot policy and Qualcomm's announcement.
This worst case scenario is beginning to look inevitable. So yeah, so let's start it. And the
reason they're going to the reason I thought when I first started researching this was they were
doing it because of smartphones. So you could root your Windows smartphone based with an ARM
processor and then run Windows 8 phone and then put Android on it, some sandwich and mod or whatever.
You know what I mean? But it's not because of this Qualcomm thing. So they made this change and
then Qualcomm made the announcement. So there must have been some kind of backdoor deal going on
between Qualcomm and Microsoft. At least that's my opinion anyway. Sure.
Well, and take a look at how Apple has locked software to hardware and maybe what Microsoft's
trying to do is create that same environment themselves. Yeah, they're doing it differently.
Apple did it by by having good product solids off well and building and involved with the
manufacturing to get going. It wasn't that you couldn't use that software. It's just that it was
made specifically for Apple and Apple had the drivers and and that's what it was. You know what I mean?
But especially when Apple was back on the PPC. It's not so much anymore now that they're on
Intel stuff. But yeah. Well, you could do a boot back then with there was a separate program to
allow you to do a boot. But that's even that's gone away now. Like you said that's because it's
Intel. Anyway, they're Intel processing. Well, speaking of drivers, because you did say that
about two minutes ago, Matt. I was going to I was going to mention because I thought this was
so cool. In my household, we put a HP color laser jet that's a that will connect to the network
wirelessly, you know, the home network that I run and maintain. Anyway, so what was so beautiful
about it is that the Linux computers in the house, which are the majority of the computers in the
house, were able to easily connect to that printer and print to it. The other operating system
that I'm forced to use for a couple things, I had to go find drivers and I still haven't gotten
I think one of them, I'm just haven't even played too much with it. But I had to get drivers to
get to be able to print it with the other. So, you know, again, it's just I wanted to share that
because I just just makes me appreciate what I'm using Linux. Yeah. So you know, I've never really,
especially said it was an HP, right? Yeah. Well, I love HP anyway. Oh, because they're they're
compatibility with cups. I've never, ever had a had a HP printer that I couldn't run from cups.
Yeah. I agree. Yeah. I have seen similar situation at home where I got a wireless HP printer,
but it's ancient. But I just told my Ubuntu to look on the network. I found it and had the
drivers installed it. I didn't have to download anything. You mean you didn't go to local host
colon 631 and do it that way. They're wireless. Yeah, but no, that's the cups. Do it right now in
your own. Oh, no, no, no. Okay. Yeah. The cup is the cup interface. Yeah. I've gone Aaron. That's
the way I always do it. I never do a printer. Any other one. And then you could do it another way.
I tell you always go local host colon 631. Yeah. Right in, right even in Nome, they have a printer
management system and you can add in printers. And that's all I've been using for years. Maybe
it's in Mint 2. It might be, but I just do local host colon 631. It comes from Debian because I've
got up until I ran just straight Debian even on my laptop and dust tops and for a long time.
So yeah. All right. Well, and that's your news. That's it. That's all. That's all the news.
That's good information. That was good information. And I tell you, and you know, it's actually a great
segue because I think last week I promised that I would, and it'd be the point person to follow
the Barnes and Noble Microsoft lawsuit. And I went out and did some investigating,
subscribed to a couple of feeds. And unfortunately, as far as the lawsuit goes, I really don't have
anything more to report than what I did last week. However, there was an interesting bit of news
that Mr. Matt happened to forward to me because it involves Barnes and Noble. And I thought,
you know, I'm going to take this and share it with everybody. But what it involves is there's
apparently an ongoing kerfluffle. I had to use that word. And in some open source circles about
Barnes and Noble's release of the nook kernel source code, which is something that they're supposed
to do, of course, under the, and they have done. Yes, they have done. That's right. Under the
provisions of the, the GNU general public license, Adam Outler, who was commenting on the XDA
developers forum, XDA developers.com forums noted, it would seem that Barnes and Noble is betraying
the most sacred trust of things in the open source world, the general public license,
as open source programmers, we all use the GPL daily. The GPL is what keeps open source work
like the Linux kernel free, modifiable, and redistributable. I tried to compile the sources
provided by Barnes and Noble, but they are incomplete. They will not compile. I'm not the only one.
Others have tried and failed as well. You actually can compile them, but they won't install.
Yes, and I'm continuing there because then that's the thing I wanted to, I wanted to also mention
because really the issue is not, is not the code itself, but it's the signing key or the signature key.
The fact that Barnes and Noble did not supply that, and without that signing key, it's impossible
actually to compile a replacement kernel with the source code that they provided. Because the
hardware is locked down and won't boot a kernel unless that key is part of the... Exactly.
But it's not that you can't compile it. You can still compile a whole software.
So because of that, they said now the source code is useless, despite the fact it's probably
all there. It is all there except for the key. Just for the key. And so really the crux of the issue
apparently is whether that key is part of the source code. And I believe in the inversion two
of the GPL, which is what the kernel is still under. That's correct. Which is the correct version of
the GPL. Yeah, because Linus Torvalds does not like version three at all. It would because...
Which I think, I believe that they're trying to say at least that key fell under the
script's portion of it. Right. And that version three clarified the whole intent
of that portion of it. But that wasn't version two. And it's because version three, if the
Linus kernel were ever released under version three, it would practically kill the embedded Linus
market. And that's huge. And Linus sees the reality instead of the pie in the sky stuff.
And that's why it's never going to happen. Yeah. And that's actually what he said to
he and other high profile developers who've rejected version three have indicated that the
lockdown systems are permissible use of Linux, the Linux kernel, and are in full compliance with
the V, the version two license. Now, the important thing about that is that, well, at first of all,
carries a lot of weight because when you, if you go to court and you're presenting before a judge
and the author of the content is in favor of that particular position, then anybody who's trying
to go against it is going to have a very tough uphill battle on your hands. So anyway, I thought
that bit of news on the Barnes and Noble front was pretty interesting. I mean, how the Barnes
and Noble fans don't know. Yeah, so I love Barnes and Noble. And one of the reasons I love them
the most is because they're actually taking Microsoft on this. They're not, they're not, they're not
caving into their extortion and I'm good, good on you Barnes and Noble. Yeah, I like that.
And I'm buying, I'm going out to buy a nook. But I'm going because we had a demonstration
at MD log, not last month. Last month. Because this month's meeting was just today. Yeah, December.
Yes. Last month, December. It would be December. And that demonstration was a rooted nook. So
I know that that's, and I really like that. I liked the whole idea of that. And so I'm going to go
out and get one. And following the instructions from ours, Technica very closely and the XDA
developers forum, I'm going to give it a try. So I'll either have a nice brick or.
Well, you can't really totally brick it. Okay. What you've got to do is you've got to back up the
image first. Yeah. So the worst comes to where you can read all this talk image. Yeah. So
it sounds really cool. I want to see it when you get it done because I didn't make it to the
meeting to see the rooted nook. I'd like to see that. Yeah, I thought it was kind of cool.
It was very cool. Yeah. So anyway, but that's that's that's the Barnes and Noble news for this
this session. Oh, you know, I found a article that it was over on medgaget.com. And as it sounds,
it's a medical device. But really? It's a multiple disciplinary. Yeah, no.
Is that how you say no? Multiple disciplinary? No, I don't know. People from different disciplines.
There you go. It's a team of engineers I got together from the University of Washington and
the University of Santa Clara or Santa Cruz. Or I guess that's the University of California
in Santa Cruz. Yeah. They've developed a surgical robot. It's called the Raven 2.
And they're the Raven nevermore. They're going to build quite a few of these and send them out to
the different universities. It's a test. But what's really cool is it uses the open source robot
operating system so that anybody can program for or develop and program for this robot that
they're building for this to do surgery and stuff. It's pretty cool. But Tony, did you tell us
what that robot does? Is it surgical? It does. Yeah, that's it. Is it any particular specialty?
Or is it just a general practice? Well, I think that's what they're developing right now is whether
but what it has tiny little arm, very hands in there that can go in and cut and do whatever.
Okay, for those of you listening because this is a podcast and not a video cast,
Tony's rigging his his index and and middle finger and his thumb together.
All right, so anyway. And so this robot so it's at stand right next to the surgeon or is it
something that kind of comes down? Like is it a remote thing? Is it a picture? It's all in
development right now. There is a picture. And it shows it has it says it has some
med gadget that I don't so I'm not entirely sure what that means. Yeah, it's not go to
or you can go to it. It'll be in the show notes so anybody can go there at this point. Yeah,
I'm trying to go there now. Med Gadget.com and then open source surgery. I don't know what's
on the main page. But it shows it does show a picture of like these little it looks like there's
six hands coming in or actually just looks like little needles coming down that will do surgery on
you. And yeah, it's about halfway down the page. I don't know toward the bottom of the page. It
was posted on January 13th. But it looks like just this table with six, you know, like gigantic
needles coming in. Oh, that looks like some kind of medieval torture device. But I'm sure that
it's a wonderful thing for. Yeah, I thought it was really cool because the head uses the open source
robot. I don't know. I get distracted by all these other articles on the way there and I start
here we are. Open. Wow. Wow. Does not look like it. It does for the inquisition.
Yeah. No, seriously, though, it's pretty impressive. Yeah, but there's going to be so it says there's
seven units of this will be made so that researchers at Harvard, Johns Hopkins, University of Nebraska,
Lincoln, University of California, Berkeley, University of California, Los Angeles,
while remaining the two other systems at University of California, Santa Cruz and University
of Washington. So that looks really good. And then a lot of, there's, you wonder with robots how,
well, that can work. But if you think about it, if you remove the, well, they still, they do a lot
of robot surgery right now, like, and that's for remote situations where, like say you're out somewhere
in Fuji, Fuji, Alaska, and they have a clinic, right, that has one of these remote surgeons in it,
but no surgeon within a thousand miles. Oh yeah. Then the surgeon promotes into the machine and
does performs the surgery with the internet doesn't go down. Yeah, there you go. Where's a satellite
connection in your latency side? That could be a problem too. Actually, robots use a lot more now.
It's like around here, you see commercials for the cyber knife and things like that. And
so it's, it's really cool because you can do a lot more precise and you don't get the surgeon's
hands like Jake a little bit or whatever. So that's a good thing. Yeah, that would have
you a good thing. Right. Cut the wrong thing. I have a couple points of just general interest.
General interest. Yeah. Right. We're generally interested. January the 20th on Friday. That's
Penguin Awareness Day. It is. It is. Penguin Awareness Day. Yeah. While the actual like
National Penguin Day is in like April sometime, I think April 20th, but they thought
January would be a good time to have Penguin Awareness Day. Well, it's in the middle of winter
and penguins are. I think anybody should wear a tux on their low pin tux pin. Oh yeah. I am
not wearing a tuxedo. You have got the beans. Yeah. And you remind me also the raspberry pie that we
talked about a couple episodes ago. It's gone into production. It has, but did you see the betas?
They sold the betas out really fast to the, to developers. They were the only ones that were
allowed to buy them. And then did you see what they did with the last two? They put on eBay, didn't they?
They did. Yes. Yes. Well, Mary, you checked on the price. Yeah, what was?
I think it was as high as $2,700. Yeah, crazy. For a $35 or $25.
Devices. It's insane. Just for the cash. I'm saying, oh, I got the last beta.
But I think, I think one thing that was really good about that is beside the fact that the folks
at the Raspberry Pi Foundation got this money is that they took it. And I believe some of it went
to a charity or it went to a charity or something. I have no, or maybe they aren't charity.
But certainly some good work. And I'm looking forward to getting my hands on one of those
or several of them actually. For development. It's really good for them for development. They
get a little extra cash so they can make better products. Sure. Yeah, that's for sure.
And you know, CES is coming this week. It's already open. It's over now, I think. It's done.
I think that was just, I thought it was all week long. Yeah, probably. Yeah. And you know what,
released 30 years ago at CES? A Commodore. Commodore turns 30. That's right. You know what
released at the CES? What's that? A Buntu TV. I did see that. Oh, you know, I didn't see that.
It's a television that runs a Buntu. It looks really cool. You know, they have, right now in Unity,
how there's the different lenses or different things you can... When he says Unity, he means
the desktop that sucks. But it's like that for channels. You can just scroll through channels.
And I saw a video of how it works. It looks really cool. Just a little bit of an aside, though,
on that Unity thing. And I remember how I said that I did have it on a netbook. And so for the
amount of time I was using it on the netbook, it was okay. Well, my laptop did die. So I was using
that netbook fairly a lot this week, actually, just in the last couple of days. And the Unity interface
was so annoying that I actually installed LSD and switched over to LSD on that little netbook.
I just couldn't take it.
You know, I've seen it. I don't run it. But I've seen it. And it doesn't seem that bad to me.
I don't know why everyone just jumped on that band way. I hate it. Because you know why I hate it?
Because... Because everybody else does. No, because I'm old. And I like change. Yes.
And I like things to work the way they've always worked. And if it... My philosophy is if it works
and it's not broke, don't fix it. Don't make it Unity. Exactly. And I don't know. Maybe in the long run,
Ubuntu is doing the right thing and distinguishing themselves the way. Because when you look at Unity,
you know Ubuntu canicle. Just like when you see that Mac style. That's a Mac.
You know. But I thought that. And when I saw it, and again, this was a few months ago,
when it came out, they had... I don't know if they had some kind of acceleration with it or some 3D,
some aspect to it that I thought really made it look kind of flashy. Now again, it's from somebody
who doesn't run that footprint desktop. No, I'm just kidding. Just kidding. But anyway, I thought it...
I thought it looked not bad. I don't know. I am really, really liking Cinnamon. Though I gotta say
that those mint guys just... There's a couple of little niggling bugs in it that are kind of
annoying to me. Like in the taskbar at the bottom, one, you can't right-click the taskbar and tell
us to make any changes to it. I have yet to figure out how to customize that taskbar. But that's a
little annoying. Another thing is sometimes the menus that you get to pop up, like I use Remina a lot
for what I do, which is an RDP client for Linux. It lets me RDP into Windows machines. And that's
Remina. It's Remina, R-E-M-M-I-N-A. It's the absolute kick-ass best RDP client I have found for...
I'll have to check that out. So if you need to remote desktop into Windows clients,
it's rock solid. It works great. I use it every day. Anyway. But when you start Remina, it continues
to run even when you've closed it. It's got a little icon that stays down there in the system
tray. Sometimes I want to free up those resources so I want to close it. So I would right-click on it
and then the menu that pops up is behind the taskbar. And the closed buttons at the bottom.
But there is a little bit of sliver of it at the top that I could click on to close it.
So I actually did switch back to mate until my laptop died. But I really like that sentiment.
They just have a couple of little bugs to work out. So that's cool.
Well, now I know sometimes you've got the ability to change a setting or something or shift something.
That just doesn't exist to allow you to do that.
Well, it's brand new. It's probably as a bug then.
Yeah, what the mint guys have done is they took Genome 3 and they replaced
put some cinnamon on it. Yeah, they did. They replaced the desktop shell part of Genome 3
with one that they custom wrote. That works in acts like Genome 2, 3, 2.
I like it a lot. Like I said, it was the first desktop environment that I ever had installed on
a machine where I could just by default hit the Windows key and start typing an application and
have it pop up. It's a super key. Yeah, and I almost became a Genome or a Genome person.
Yeah, I have no idea. Sometimes I say no, I'm just going to say no.
Well, I tell you what, it was a Genome 1.4 and I can remember I thought, oh, this is such a
cool looking desktop, but it kept crashing, I guess, way back. Maybe that was an
obviously an earlier version. And so I ended up going with KDE.
Well, way back in the day, I always liked KDE myself too, just because I liked it.
Well, your cursor doesn't have to go fly all over the screen for stuff. You stay down near the
bottom. Yeah. And I think the reason I liked it way back then too is because it,
and we're talking probably 10 years ago, it was much more, I hate to say, but Windows like,
because I'd come from a Windows environment when I first started running Linux.
And it was very Windows-like and very easy to learn how to do things in it because it worked
almost the same as the Windows environment I had been used to. But then when they went to that
KDE for, they just torqued me off and I have not been back since. You know, I think that's why
like, no, it's because it was so much away from Windows. I'm not against Windows, but
I need a separation so that I don't get confused between things. You know, it's like,
when things are so close to it, I'll always hit the same spot, but then I'm the wrong operating
system. So that's why I think why I wanted to go to GNOME because it had the menus at the top.
So I know that I'm not going to accidentally click on this and then hit the wrong thing, you know.
Well, I'll tell you, I occasionally will work on a Mac and I still,
that right-click, not having it. You do know if you use control click, if you use a right-click
mouse or something, right-click does work in the Mac operating system. No, it just used the touchpad.
Okay. But if you look up your wireless mouse to the Mac, it'll work. Actually, on the touchpad,
if you hold down two fingers and click, that's right-click. It'll bring up the menu for the right-click
menu. Oh, thank you very much. Wow, I learned something about a Mac. That's our Mac tip of the
of the year of the series. Oh, well, I'll try that out. Yeah. Well, I wanted to announce that
the MD-Lug meeting today, we had elections for officers and in the show right now, all three of us
are in the office. New officers. Yeah. Actually, Tony's not new. Tony was the secretary last year
and he was a secretary. Are esteemed secretary. Well, actually, we've all been on the officers at
one point. Correct. That's true. Mary's been the secretary in the past and I've been the secretary
in the past. And Mary's also a treasure in the past. Mary is returned to the treasure. And I have
taken on an unto for head role of president, so. All right. So should we change this to the
MD-Lug? I'll present your view. No. MD-Lug stands for Metro Detroit Linux users group, by the way.
Yeah. And you know, one other thing I was listening this week, I was keeping on listening to that
Haggar Public Radio New Year's broadcast. Yeah. And they finally really saw eight parts.
And in that last part, it was the after show. So it was apparently after New Year's.
And probably. They stopped the official recording, but one guy started recording his own from the
from the same stream. And his name's 5150. So he kept on, he went through his talking and then
Ken Fallon, he's the guy that pretty much runs HPR right now. And he had gone to sleep and he got
back up and then he got back on the show and they were still recording and running. And he gets on
in 5150. He's like, you know, Ken, I gotta tell you I got a problem with something here. You guys
released so much good stuff. I can't listen to it all. He's like, there's some of these good
new good podcasts out there that they're really good. Now I want to listen to them, but I don't have
time to listen to them all, but but one of them was those sunny morning guys. I'm like, yes,
they're talking about us. That's that's the plug for sunny morning
the Linux review of the year. Nobody else is ever going to mention us. It was cool.
That is nice. That is nice. Well, let's see what else we've got. What else has been happening in
the land of Linux? Linux and open source. That's the end of my stuff. And I got nothing else.
What about you, Mary? I don't have anything else right at the moment, but I'm
you know, actually, though, in Katie, there's a there's a little feature called activities.
And you know, it's part of that plasma desktop. It sounds really cool, but I don't know how
I would use it just because I'm not a power user like that. I saw I saw an article about that and I
started reading it because it's the title was misleading. And it was I thought it was activities
about Katie getting involved in these activities. What this is what I thought it was and I stopped
reading it. Tell us about it. Well, I'm not going to tell you much about it because I don't know
much about it, but all I wanted to say is that I'm going to do a little investigating of it because
I know that a couple of versions ago, I mean point versions ago, I don't think that was really
part of the landscape. At least I wasn't aware of it. So no, I've installed it and I've got these
larger icon or activity icons at the bottom. And you should check out. I can't remember whether
wash luck posted the notes for me, but there was a KDE presentation a couple months ago. And
he went over activities because they actually had a KDE dev. Yeah, I think that's who it was.
And he did a really good job. And activities looks really cool. It's similar to having multiple
desktops that you can scroll between, but each of those desktops are dedicated to a specific activity.
But I don't want to say more than that because I don't want to take away from your research and
and that's okay. That means I don't have to do as much research. Just kidding. Yeah, I mean,
they've got photos, photos activity. Right. So that's sort of like your editor and your viewer
all together. And I don't know. Well, it just sounds retarded to me. Well, the way he explained it
is that you have like your web surfing activity. And then you have your development activities.
And then you have your desktop publishing activities. See anything that would be helpful to me.
Oh, no, not for me, don't because I got my because I sort of think literally. Yeah,
when I am, because I'm like, when I'm preparing for the show, I have my web browser open,
I have, I have G edit open, and I have LibreOffice open. And I'm switching back between the three
and cutting and pasting and, and rewriting stuff. And then that's that's your editing activity.
But if you were, if you were doing something else, feel like Facebooking and Twittering and
yeah, all that. And I am, you know, that could be all on a separate activity.
Then from your research and you're, you're doing the show stuff.
And so what you'd have to do is rather than, rather than cycling through all those windows on
that desktop, you could have all that. Like, like, like, like, like, I don't want to say all tab is
such a hardship. Yeah. Because you're doing three or four open at the same time. Yeah, you have
three for your editing. And then you have three for your web browsing. Yeah, but they're not. And
you know what? Hey, I don't, that's a great idea, Tony. I open tabs. And then I, I can never
remember that the keyboard shirt got to do the tabs. But if I open them in different windows,
then I could just alt tab through all of it. Yeah. Oh, he's the same on a real genius,
not like your genius. Thank you. So anyway, but yeah, I thought those KDE activities and
that even make a good, well, I was thinking it'd make a good mini presentation. But since it's
already been done, a mini for the log. No, that was the last month. Yeah, if you want to,
that was wash log. I did it. And so we don't have that many people that come out to our meetings.
So you can do it today. The short presentation next month is from me. Oh, is it on SSHFS?
That should be good. But that's all I have for this week. Sweet. So I have.
You've been listening to the Sunday morning Linux review. This has been episode 14 for the week
of January 15, 2012. Featured music of the week. We have some, my outro music I found. That's it.
What is it? It's actually his name's Matthew Morris. And how do you know this guy, Tony?
He's my wife's cousin. I didn't check on his age. I should. But he's something like
19 or 20. He's pretty young. It is really good. I mean, I think it's his first,
his first original that he's written and recorded. But it's really cool. So take a listen.
I met a girl who came across my way. Her eyes were shiny as a bright sunny day.
She had a smile that made you want to keep her awhile. Oh yeah. We taught together just the two of us.
We'd rather walk instead of pay for the bus. We walked together. The stealing just keeps getting
so much better. Oh yeah.
She is running straight through my mind. I'm going to take my sweet time.
I'm pretty sure that it's great to see. I'll be so happy if you stay with me, love.
Baby, baby. I really hope that things will stay the same. I really hope that this will never change.
I really hope that this will never change.
Like I said, I'm going to stop right there, but it's a good bring around something for me then.
That's a nice way to do this.
And she is running straight through my mind
For her I'm gonna take my sweet time
Pretty sure that it's plain to see
I'll be so happy if you stay with me
Baby baby, I really hope that there's where we're still the same
I really hope that this will never change
I really hope that this will never change
I'm really glad you came across my way
I'm really glad you made me come across my home
I'm really glad you made me come across my home
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio
where Hacker Public Radio does our
We are a community podcast network
that releases shows every weekday on death week Friday
Today's show, like all our shows,
was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself
If you ever considered recording a podcast
then visit our website to find out how easy it really is
Hacker Public Radio was founded by the digital dark pound
and the economical and computer cloud
HPR is funded by the binary revolution
at binref.com
All binref projects are crowd-responsive by linear pages
From shared hosting to custom private clouds
go to lunarpages.com for all your hosting needs
Unless otherwise stasis
Today's show is released under a creative comments
Attribution, share a lot, videos or license