Series 2 Episode 8 – This fortnight we have a special guest interview with Alex from the Steam based Open Source Community, using Ubuntu in the office, Librem 5, more MATE tips, Command Line Linux tools and another epic Irish saying, have a listen.
00:24 Wayne introduces Series 2 Episode 8 of the most Action Packed Binary Times so far from a murky Bristol while Mark regails us with tales of hurricanes and bad weather that has been and on the way. Fairly Action Packed so far!
02:46 Mark tells us he’s been doing bits and pieces with Ubuntu MATE and is quite excited about a discovery of his from yesterday, called KolibriOS, an OS written entirely in Assembler/FASM which he intends to install on an old pentium 3 machine he has lying around to play some old strategy games on. Minimum specs are just 8MB RAM and a couple MBs storage. Wow!
06:20 Wayne and Mark mention the interview they conducted with Alex / Squid that is to follow later in the show. Alex runs a community group on steam called Open-Source Community in which he promotes open source technologies and the guys talk to him about his method of doing so on a proprietary platform among other things.
07:00 Wayne tells us some more things about Ubuntu MATE and gives us all a tip to get rid of the broken battery message which is to run dconf-editor using synapse, go to org->mate->power-manager, uncheck notify-low-capacity. Annoying message gone and forgotten about, hurray!
09:19 Wayne describes how he installed Ubuntu MATE with Remmina, realmd, krb5-user and kerberos, software-properties-common, python-software-properties and packagekit. His main concerns were his email, access to networked storage drives and printing. He’s pleased to say the whole thing has been quite successful and not a terrible idea at all.
16:18 Wayne has purchased some maker books from a previous Humble Bundle and has this tip for us from the Linux for Makers book, which is this: when using sudo apt upgrade you don’t need to type y or Y, just hit the enter key and you’re done. It’s the small things that make the difference!
18:47 After Mark warns of potential dog barking, he tells us that the Librem 5 phone from Purism has been crowdfunded! This is great news for anyone who cares about their privacy while using a mobile device.
22:08 Wayne apologises for some down time on the binarytimes website. Mark suggests if more people would support on us on patreon then we could afford a high tech company to give us 99.99% uptime instead of self hosting.
23:39 Wayne introduces our interview with Alex / Squid in which we discuss all things open source. Alex mentions a number of cool opensource projects, including Zorin OS (you can find how Zorin OS is being used by the Italian city of Vicenza here), Reactos, an open source replacement for Windows and findx, an open source search engine that respects your privacy. Alex also mentions that another way to follow his open source travails besides his Steam Open-Source Community work is to check out his youtube channel. We hope you enjoy!
41:44 Under the Hood! Mark kicks it off with a discussion around moreutils, a “collection of the unix tools that nobody thought to write long ago when unix was young.” Quite a few interesting tools that are worth checking out.
45:06 Wayne asks Mark about iotop as a lead into his own Under the Hood, which is an epic Under the Hood, and that is sudo iftop, to monitor network traffic. How epic is that! [note: A really good article on iftop can be found in the Linux Journal
49:49 Irish saying of the podcast is Beidh muid ar ais – We will be back!
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