Ask Noah Show Noah J. Chelliah

RedHat is expanding the developer program making it easier than ever to access RHEL! Now individuals can run 16 RHEL servers under this new program. Brian Exelbierd joins us this hour to discuss this new program and how it addresses many of the concerns raised in the transition from CentOS to CentOS Stream.


-- During The Show --

Email 1 - Signal vs Telegram - Eddie


Telegram vs Signal for messaging?

Telegram client is open source and supports Linux

Telegram server is closed source

Signal is more secure but requires a phone number

Phone numbers can reveal your real identity

Moxie Marlinspike (Matthew Rosenfeld) - really particular about 3rd party clients, makes it not very inviting

link

Not so great when your playing with alternative operating systems (SailfishOS PostmarketOS), Signal has to make a client, rather than just supporting an API

Use Element/Matrix

Setup your own server

Sign up for paid hosting EMS

Sign up for free on a community server like Linux Delta



Minutes In 07:50


Run Matrix on CoreOS

https://fedoramagazine.org/deploy-your-own-matrix-server-on-fedora-coreos/


With Fedora CoreOS, you get all the benefits of Fedora (podman, cgroups v2, SELinux) packaged in a minimal automatically updating system thanks to rpm-ostree.


Running a Matrix service requires the following software:


Synapse: a Matrix server
PostgreSQL: a database
Nginx: a web server
Let’s Encrypt: a certificate provider
Element: a Matrix web client


Minutes In 09:30


Email 2 - How to Stream a Live Event without YT - M.X.U.


streamyard

Open Broadcaster Software OBS

Setting up your own CDN is impractical

Setup an RTMP server with Nginx

Community based CDN Scale Engine Instant Trial



Minutes In 15:50


Email 3 - User Responds to James' Question - Landon


Deja Dupe

Only backs up working files not the entire OS

Incremental Backups and Multiple file versions

Similar to Mac TimeMachine



Minutes In 18:40


Email 4 - Please Expand on Self Hosting without Net Neutrality - Will


Owning your own server doesn't fix getting online

Decentralized infrastructure make taking people offline hard



Minutes In 22:10


Email 5 - Which Episode for Parental Control? - Lucas


Life360

Life360 is partnered with Arity (analytic company) link

CA Do not sell

No longer used or recommended

Check out OwnTracks

Uses MQTT, lightweight, and you can self host



Minutes In 25:15


Pick of the Week


MMORPG_Tycoon_2

It's a Single Player MMO / Building an MMO

Independent Game shop https://www.vectorstorm.com.au/

Early Access, expect bugs

Developer is very active in the community and wants feedback

Massively addicting



Minutes In 28:10


Gadget of the Week OSMC Vero 4K


FLIRC IR receiver

OSMC project is a rock solid Kodi platform

OSMC Vero 4K



Minutes In 31:35


RedHat Interview


Guest: Brian Excelbeard

Moving to CentOS Stream brings more transparency and opportunity for involvement

IBM was not even in the room for the discussion

New programs are in the work for cloud workloads beyond today's announcement

RedHat is reducing friction for getting official RHEL by integrating other account systems

Expanding the personal free options, more than just RHEL

Making it easier for enterprise customers to get their employees enrolled in developer accounts

Have a unique use case problem? email Brian directly centos-questions@redhat.com

Official Announcement



-- The Extra Credit Section --

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Self-hosting has always been a good idea but when your platform doesn't want to serve you, we have some self-hosted options that will. A Reddit user has Linux booting on an iPhone 7, a man was quoted $50K to run fiber to his house, so he built his own fiber ISP!


-- During The Show --

00:30 Minutes In


Email 1 - Feedback from EP 212 Bluetooth and Drawing Tablet - David


HSP/HFP designed for phones not computers

Bluetooth support on Linux is difficult due to the way blue-tooth works (uses modem commands on mobile)



Possible Solutions that bypass Linux blue-tooth stack


Links to the 1Mii USB Bluetooth Adapter for PC


This is Creative's version if you are looking for a more popular brand name.



XP-PEN came up and they have a driver for Linux. It is a little bit hokey in the sense that their configuration application needs to be running in order for it to work.

It does not always survive suspend/resume, but it is easy to launch again.

Their non-display models also have good support for left-hand versus right-hand drawing

When used as a display, there is no left-hand mode because it relies on dm to configure the display

We purchased an xp-pen innovator 16 It is a 1080p 15.6 inch matte screen with hardware buttons connected via HDMI and 2 USB ports

XP-PEN seems like a good company

Link to first photo made with the tablet



06:00 Minutes In


Email 2 - VPN Recommendation? - Ira

What is the best VPN company?


private internet access


They have a track history of NOT turning over user data, they get called into court they say we'd love to comply but we don't have the documents.


affiliate link


08:30 Minutes In


Email 3 - Matrix Support Spreading - Charliebrownau


Mind.com is supporting Matrix Protocol


link



[Mind.com](mind.com) is an alternative to Facebook and other big social networks


09:20 Minutes In


Email 4 - Censorship - Rob


What are your thoughts on Mozzila's blog post


11:15 Minutes in


Pick of the Week

MediaCMS



Fully featured open source video and media CMS

Built mostly using the modern stack Django + React and includes a REST API

No federation



14:00 Minutes In


Gadget of the Week

Dell's new thunderbolt dock


Dell WD19TB



Built in thunderbolt cable
Additional rear facing thunderbolt pass-through port
2x Display Ports
1x HDMI
2x Rear USB
1x Front Facing USB


Dell's USB C dock


Dell WD15


17:00 Minutes In


News


Guy by the name of Daniel Rodriguez managed to boot Linux with Gnome on an iPhone 7

YouTube Video

Reddit write up

Phone that was given to him by his grandparents as a junk device, He saved it from the landfill!



Prerequisites



writable directory available over nfs, including dhcp server on local network

Checkra1n 0.10.2-beta

Kernel fork for h9x/A10

Project sandcastle utilities

EITHER arm64 cross compiler or an arm64 native device. I used a rpi4 on 20.04 -- way helpful to be able to chroot and setup, otherwise you'd have to use qemu-user

Bridge setup script/udev rules



21:00 Minutes In


Jared Mauch Built his Own ISP

Jared Mauch didn’t have good broadband—so he built his own fiber ISP


Arstechnica link



AT&T's advertised plans for his neighborhood topped out at a measly 1.5Mbps

Eventually switched to a WISP that delivered about 50Mbps

Comcast told him it would charge $50,000 to extend its cable network to his house

Mauch built his own ISP (buried the fiber for 10,000)

As of early January, Mauch has 30 homes and 10 homes to hookup

Large corporate Business are not afraid of government and government regulations

ISPs are going to learn, do it or get replaced

Starlink is becoming a thing, Amazon satellite internet is coming



27:30 Minutes In


Main Segment De-platforming / Self hosting


Violence is wrong, Full stop

Gate keeping in the broadcast industry changed when the internet became a thing

Groups and People were banned from twitt

New Year New Releases


We're kicking off 2021 with a bang! The KDE team has announced a new focus on Wayland and fingerprint readers. Cawbird 1.3 a native twitter client for Linux has a new release with improved video uploading and replies, and Matrix will power FOSDEM this year!


-- During The Show --

01:45 Minutes In


Email 1 - Comment on SolarWinds from Newnix

04:40 Minutes IN


Caller 1 - Carl


Problem: Intermittent camera and mic problems

Solution 1: unplug other usb devices (bandwidth issues)

Solution 2: Buy a PCIe USB 3 card

Solution 3: Buy a Thinkpad with thunderbolt and a thunderbolt dock

Solution 4: Make sure the camera is plugged into a matching USB port (3.0/2.0)



Logitech C920 webcam
Logitech C930


Feedback on Backups
Bareos backup


Email 2 - LVM vs Raid from Cory


OpenMediaVault

Storage - FreeNAS

Unraid

BTRFS is good for low power devices, less overhead than ZFS
RAID 1 or RAID 10 are better options in most cases, and using RAID 10 + Btrfs compression will give you similar space availability to RAID 6

RAID is not a backup



19:00 Minutes In


Email 3 - Old Smartphones as Cameras from M. X. U.


Geovision Cameras

Axis Cameras

Synology LiveCam



From the Community



Droidcam


23:55 Minutes In


Pick of the Week

KDE Itinerary is a digital travel assistant with a priority on protecting your privacy.



Timeline view of a unified travel itinerary with automatic trip grouping.

Supports train, bus and flight bookings as well as hotel, restaurant, event and rental car reservations.

Automatic booking data extraction from various input formats, performed locally on your device.

Real-time delay and platform change information for trains.

Selection of alternative train connections on unbound tickets or on missed connections.

Local ground transportation navigation between elements of your itinerary.



26:27 Minutes In


Gadget of the Week (03:00) [12:00]

Maingear Vector 2 Gaming Laptop


Pros



Starting at $1349

0.78” thick and 4.16 lbs

i7-1075OH

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060

16GB / 1TB NVME

4 Cell Battery - 4000 mAh

1080p 144hz

Being a gaming laptop



Cons



No Thunderbolt only USB C

Can't be powered over USB C

Degraded power when unplugged



30:00 Minutes In


KDE Roadmap

KDE has plans for 2021 - and they're pretty cool



Fingerprint support throughout the KDE Plasma experience



Login
Lock Screen
KAuth and Polkit.

Focus on Wayland - aiming for serious, concentrated Wayland work continuing through 2021

Devs plan to improve the look and feel of Plasma’s default Breeze theme — expect something “super modern and awesome”

KDE devs will replace the celebrated Kickoff app launcher with a newer, fresher replacement.



32:44 Minutes In


Cawbird 1.3 Released

Cawbird is free, open source software compatible with most modern Linux distros


https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2021/01/cawbird-1-3-released-for-linux-distros



Improved DM Support

Video Uploading

You can now see media shared in direct messages

Links and hashtags sent in messages are ‘clickable’

It’s possible to delete DMs, load older DMs, and send images as DMs in Cawbird

Cawbird 1.3 supports video uploads to tweets (one video per tweet)

Improved upload handling of animated and non-animated GIFs

More accessible approach to loading ‘replied to’ tweets



33:37 Minutes In


FOSDEM Online Via Matrix

EMS - Offical Matrix Hosting


https://matrix.org/blog/2021/01/04/taking-fosdem-online-via-matrix



Started with Matrix over SELF / Wanted the ability to connect with people in a free and open source decentralized client, found Matrix, got sucked in.

2021 - Altispeed officially switched to EMS Matrix instance

Public Roadmap / Can buy feature deveopment / entire sales staff to handle feature requests

Jitsi - Feature we didn't think we'd use and end up using it daily now

Matrix team are in active contact

Greg Kurtzer executive director of Rocky Linux a bug for bug RedHat distribution joins us this hour to tell the story of CentOS and what his vision for Rocky Linux is!


-- During The Show --

Greg Kurtzer - Executive Director of Rocky Linux, a bug for bug red hat compatible distro


Greg's history
Centos history
Rocky Linux now and future
Currently collaborating on Slack, It will be moving to Mattermost
There is a google doc for developers who want to help, please be patient lots of responses to go through
Release will be available Q2 2020
Current state of the project


36:00 minutes in


Walt Caller One

What Protections are in place to protect Rocky Linux from corporate interests


44:00 minutes in


Email 1 Unifi Access Points and NVRs

1) Unifi Access Points



Nano HD i

UAP-AC Pro

UAP-AP-HD



47:00 minutes in
2) What security NVR solution do you recommend?



Use the Synology selector tool

Synology FS6400

Axis Cameras

Geovision cameras

Also take a look at motioneye and motioneyeos


More of a DIY approach but free and flexible



51:00 minutes in


Pick of the Week

Snapdrop: local file sharing in your browser. Inspired by Apple's Airdrop.


Underneath the hood


Vanilla HTML5 / ES6 / CSS3 frontend
WebRTC / WebSockets
NodeJS backend
Progressive Web App


51:45 minutes in


Gadget of the Week Playstation 5 Controller

DualSense™ Wireless PS5 Controller



The DualSense wireless controller for PS5 offers immersive haptic feedback2, dynamic adaptive triggers2 and a built-in microphone, all integrated into an iconic design.

Feel physically responsive feedback to your in-game actions with dual actuators which replace traditional rumble motors. In your hands, these dynamic vibrations can simulate the feeling of everything from environments to the recoil of different weapons

Experience varying levels of force and tension as you interact with your in-game gear and environments. From pulling back an increasingly tight bowstring to hitting the brakes on a speeding car, feel physically connected to your on-screen actions.

Available from Sony for $69.99

Linux driver support



[From Roderick Colenbrander](roderick.colenbrander@sony.com)



Supported in linux
*DualSense in both Bluetooth and USB modes
*LEDs
*Touchpad
*Motion Sensors
*Rumble

Not supported yet
*Adaptive Triggers
*VCM based Haptics



These features require a large amount of data and complex data structures. It is not clear how to
expose these. The current Evdev and FF frameworks are too limiting. We hope
to have a dialog on how to expose these over time in a generic way.



Companies are starting to get it - make a good controller, make the code open so everyone can use it, people will buy your controller.


54:00 minutes in


XFCE 4.16 has been Released!

https://www.xfce.org/about/tour416



The Settings Manager itself received a visual refresh of its filter box
*which can now be hidden permanently
*Search capabilities of the filter box were improved by searching the descriptive 'Comments' part of each dialog's launcher

Default Applications is a new dialog represents a merger between the previously available 'Mime Settings' and the 'Preferred Applications' dialogs.

Added fractional scaling based on the RandR extension of X11

Added more default keyboard shortcuts out of the box (Examples: for window tiling or to open Thunar)

xfce4-panel

The panel received quite a few noteworthy updates
*Animation for autohide and intellihide
*New 'Status Tray' plugin that combines both legacy Systray item support with modern StatusNotifier item support
*Dark mode support
*Launchers showing additional actions on right-click
*Window buttons offering to Launch a new instance

XFCE Power Managment was cleaned up

The settings dialog of the power manager was cleaned up and shows either 'on battery' or 'plugged in' settings as opposed to both in a huge table.



[Dar

Gnome 40 has a major redesign, a new version of Kdenlive is out adding some much desired pro features, Matrix has some exciting announcments and we discuss the Solar Winds backdoor and give you some alternatives. If this is the time of the year you want to tinker with new projects we have a few in store!


-- During The Show --

00:45


Request for feedback

01:55


Email 1 - How to back up BTRFS to the cloud


rsync
BTRFS send/recive
https://blogs.oracle.com/linux/btrfs-sendreceive-helps-you-move-your-data


04:55


Email 2 - Smart devices


cloudfree.shop
https://cloudfree.shop/
homeassistant
https://www.home-assistant.io/
lutron radiora
https://www.lutron.com/en-US/Products/Pages/WholeHomeSystems/RadioRA2/Overview.aspx


12:00


Are Vlans Good enough? (continued from email 2)

14:40


Email 3 - Bitcoin


Don't invest, considered unstable
Mining is fun not pratical

https://www.coinbase.com/
https://www.blockchain.com/explorer

ALternative crypto currencys
https://ethereum.org/en/
https://www.getmonero.org/



23:48


Email 4 - Bluetooth headphones on Linux Mic Not Working


A2DP audio out only (high quality)
HSP audio out and in (low quality)

Check what protocols are supported by your dongle

Easiest way to work around this...


sudo apt-get install blueman

starting from Pulseaudio v. 11.0, it's possible to automatically switch the profile whenever microphone access is requested by the application, but it's disabled by default.


Find load-module module-bluetooth-policy line in /etc/pulse/default.pa
Change it to load-module module-bluetooth-policy auto_switch=2

You need to reload pulseaudio module after this for the changes to take effect:


pulseaudio -k
pulseaudio -D

Now pulseaudio will switch the device profile to HSP whenever microphone access is requested and change it back to A2DP after stream is closed.



27:29


Pick of the Week

Just Perfection!


https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/3843/just-perfection/


This extension allows you to disable:



OSD
Search
Dash
Workspace Switcher
Top Panel
App gesture


28:35


Gadget of the Week

Gaomon S620 $35


https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07R77SNX9/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o07_s01?ie=UTF8&psc=1



Karita
https://krita.org/en/


31:02


Gnome 40 Major Design Revamp

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2020/12/gnome-40-major-design-revamp


GNOME 40 is due for release in March, 2021.


33:45


KdenLive


https://kdenlive.org/en/2020/12/kdenlive-20-12-is-out/

Kdenlive 20.12 serves as a new stable release and a new feature release

New features



same track transitions


subtitling tool



Effects


Another usability improvement is the ability to rename and add/edit the description of custom effects (by new contributor Vivek Yadav.)


New Pillar Echo effect for your vertical videos.


Crop by padding effect can now be keyframed.


New VR 360 and 3D effects for working with 360º and 3D stereoscopic footage.


New Video Equalizer for adjusting image brightness, contrast, saturation and gamma.



usability


Ability to enable/disable normalization of audio thumbnails from track header


Ability to delete multiple tracks at once (by Pushkar Kukde)


When archiving a project an option was added to archive only clips in the timeline as well as the option choose the compression method between TAR and ZIP.


On the backend front the Online Resources tool was ported to qtwebengine (by Andreas Sturmlechner) and downloading wipes, render profiles, titles and wipes defaults to using https.


37:34


Solar Winds

https://www.fireeye.com/blog/threat-research/2020/12/evasive-attacker-leverages-solarwinds-supply-chain-compromises-with-sunburst-backdoor.html


Managed Service Provider (MSP) management software


march 2020 hack
dec 2020 discoverd


47:05


Souk Flatpak App Store for Linux

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2020/12/souk-flatpak-app-store-for-linux


Souk is co-developed

GeekLab Gift Guide


RedHat may have replaced CentOS Linux with CentOS stream but Gregory Kurtzer has launched his own replacement based as CentOS was on the RHEL source code. We help you pick out tech gifts for that geek in your life!


-- During The Show --

Troubleshooting Trackpads
sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev xserver-xorg-input-synaptics


Copying Video from Firewire
https://bergs.biz/blog/2017/01/26/capture-minidv-tapes-via-firewire/


Gift #5 - Stainless Steel Small Openable Pill


Gift #4 - Aventree TC417


Gift #3 - Yubikey


Gift #2 - HiFi Audio Stereo Amplifier


Gift #1 - Briggs and Riley BackPack


-- The Extra Credit Section --

For links to the articles and material referenced in this week's episode check out this week's page from our podcast dashboard!


This Episode's Podcast Dashboard


Phone Systems for Ask Noah provided by Voxtelesys


Join us in our dedicated chatroom #AskNoahShow on Freenode!


-- Stay In Touch --

Find all the resources for this show on the Ask Noah Dashboard



Ask Noah Dashboard



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