Podcast Season 1 Episode 1
Title: All ends with beginnings
In this episode: A famous Linux magazine has some staffing issues. GNU celebrates its 30th anniversary and Valve has announced a nifty controller for SteamOS. There’s also some things we found out in a week, a section where people ask us to do other things, and the not quite internet famous (yet) Voice of the Masses.
What’s in the show:
- News:
All three members of the editorial team on the world’s best selling Linux magazine, Linux Format, quit. Congratulations to GNU for the 30th anniversary of Richard Stallman’s announcement on the net.unix-wizards and net.usoft newsgroups. Valve has announced a controller for its SteamOS.
- Things we found out in a week:
- Ben:
- Explore your filesystem with Eagle Mode.
- Jon:
- MTR, a continuously running traceroute replacement for monitoring dropped packets in realtime.
- Mike:
- Gnome 3.12 may remove the ability to middle-click paste from your mouse.
- Ben:
- The Part Where People Ask Us To Do Things:
- Voice of the Masses: A Flash-free life?
-
This being the first episode, we discuss what challenge to set ourselves for the next episode.
Presenters: Ben Everard, Jonathan Roberts and Mike Saunders.
Download as high-quality Ogg Vorbis (31MB)
Download as low-quality MP3 (39MB)
Download the smaller yet high-quality Opus file (15MB – thanks Rowan!)
Duration: 34:23
Subscribe to the Linux Lifestyle Podcast. Choose between Ogg Vorbis, MP3 and Opus.
Theme Music by Brad Sucks.
“The Ride of the Valkyries” from Richard Wagner’s 1870 opera Die Walküre. Taken from a 1921 recording in the public domain.
Background effects, “Gun Battle Sound Sound” (CC BY 3.0) recorded by ReamProductions and “On The Farm Sound” (Public Domain) recorded by stephen.
Related Posts
About The Author
Ben Everard
Ben Everard is the co-author of Learning Python with the Raspberry Pi and hacks hardware projects held together with a big dollop of Linux and Free Software glue. He's @ben_everard on Twitter.
So glad you haven't changed anything. Keep up the excellent work, lads.
Mike:
> install gentoo
For everyone else, arch! 😀
How about trying a *BSD, or even Debian with the FreeBSD kernel?
With the new podcast are you guys going to set up a related IRC channel and/or live streams/hangouts? Would be great to chat and watch as the podcast is recorded.
Distro challenge:
Ben – Sabayon G (G for GNOME)
Jonathan – ROSA (A fresh look on what could be done with KDE)
Mike – Antergos Cinnamon (modern desktop with a traditional metaphor)
Glad that the tux torch is being passed rather than dropped like a hot spud.
Distros –
Mike: Debain
Ben: Arch with GNOME
Jon: Scientific Linux
Distro Challenge:
Since Barry Kauler has retired from Puppy Linux I suggest in his honor that you put Puppy Linux Precise(which was Barry's distro) on a stick or sd card and show us your favorite things about this portable distro that runs completely in RAM(no need to install and no need for a hard drive at all). thanks and woof woof!
p.s. thank you for your great work at the previous place and I know you will all end up doing greater things with GNU/Linux!
#! Crunchbang. i tried this distro out after hearing that NASA was using Debian. I very much love the small lightweight distros that make my old tech seem like new so I installed #!. It was super zippy and I love the dark colors that won't burn your eyes out or your display. I may try again with xfce. Thanks!
Here is more of a random question and maybe a show suggestion. I have been looking at getting a new chromebook which will have a haswell chip. Maybe you guys could give some great insight on how using this low cost speedy device with battery life to spare could be the ultimate linux device with crouton(xubuntu switcher).
p.s. Can you tell I am very excited that this podcast is still around. sorry for all the posts but i love you guys and linux. wish businesses in the states would start using linux more so i could use linux at work.
I'd like to hear your thoughts on the UberStudent distro and how it holds up to its mission statement, but since presumably none of you are students anymore, it might be difficult for you to test that. Still, that's the one distro I'd be most interested to hear about.
Great that episode 1 of the new podcast is out! A challenge would be to jump into mail encrypting so we listener could pick up and start learning internet security. We need to spread secure ways of communicating on the internet. Tip for all: Read the story about the founder of Lavabit and his fight to protect the users against the NSA. Great story of a fight for the good!
pear linux anyone?? 😉
Great podcast 🙂
Distro suggestion – Elementary OS
So glad you guys decided to continue in the vain of some other podcast. You scared the hell out of me when driving home in my car listening to the latest podcast of some other series, when I heard those guys had to stop with the podcast. Glad that I found this one then for my fix of linux news!!!! CHeers!
Everybody died? Which one of you is Avon? All of you are Avon!
Remove middle click paste? That is one of the cool things I show non-linux users, another is right-click on the desktop to get an applications menu. It works that way out of the box on XFCE, I had forgotten all about it until a couple of years ago. I rediscovered it while poking around in KDE.
Possibly another challenge, set up and old 1990s distro. I recently set up up Debian Hamm on a 486. I've been on cleaning/recycling kick. It was an adventure of the kind that brings back both fond memories and nightmares. I don't know if all old distros would run in Virtualbox, you might need some old hardware to do this. Linux has evolved so much, it's unreal.
Great podcast and I'm looking forward to the next.
It's great to see Tuxradar continuing – best of luck for the future! 🙂
Disappointed to hear about dropping middle-mouse support in Gnome 3, but then I only seem to use it when viewing PDFs anyway so perhaps not the biggest loss to the Linux ecosystem! lol
Glad you guys are back TR was one of the first podcasts I ever listened to.
Glad you guys are carrying on the good work. Any idea why Pocket Casts won't recognise any of your files on my Galaxy Note II?
Congratulations on getting this out so quick. I can't wait to hear it. The section "a Linux magazine has some staffing issues" may have a bearing on whether I carry on my subscription or not.
Mike inspired me to get on Google for all others: http://psdoom.sourceforge.net/
I wish middle mouse button worked everywhere…it so useful.
challenge…. don't get breathing sound into the mic…. or better challege ..script software to eliminate breathing sound….
second challege….. get some women or a ten minute interview with female geek on the show (sometime)
third challege…. okay thats it for now…
good to see the best podcast not dying out. keep going strong ciao… (will comment more later probably)
RE: MTR
A very useful tool, used it for years.
However, mtr packets can be detected and certain routers will deprioritise the packets, especially when under stress.
So real packets may not being dropped, but it will possibly show where traffic is getting heavy.
Great podcast! Glad to see you’re continuing the good work done by Tux Radar.
You should introduce a beer of the month section.
Real ale and Linux….free as in beer… mmmmm beer….
Welcome back guys, its especially nice to hear from Jonathan.
Ben, thanks for the introduction to eaglemode, I find it to be really incredible. I think using it as your file manager for two weeks would be an excellent "challenge" for you all. 2 weeks would allow you to get over the initial learning curve and perhaps even become productive with it!
Keep up the great work.
Also, linux lifestyle IRC channel?
Linux Distro ideas
Ben: Zeroshell
Mike: Damn Vulnerable Linux
Jon: Ubuntu Satanic Edition
Can we start every episode of linux lifestyle with wagner?
Yaaaay! Welcome back chaps! Fantastic first episode – was there every any doubt?! I'm looking forward to the second already!
I can't believe I managed to badger you into supporting Opus 🙂 The guys in #opus on Freenode are quite pleased!
One small thing though, the correct mimetype to use in HTML5 is "audio/ogg; codecs=opus", browsers won't know what "audio/opus" is because it's in an OGG container.
Just curious, did you end up using Auphonic? Because the podcast sounds unusually good 🙂
Seconding Elementary OS, that shit looks good.
Thanks Rowan — we've fixed the HTML5 code now!
Just glad to see you guys are not lost to us totally. Good to see Mike and Jon back. Maybe Graham and Andrew might get involved when it's possible as well. Meanwhile what the Hell's going on at Future?
As great as it is to have Mike and Jon back, it would be even better if we could have Jon and Mike and Ben AND Graham and Andrew and Effy! That said, this is a great podcast and something I will be looking forward to every fortnight.
As far as the challenge goes, I suggest you guys try a non-Linux but free, open source OS. Maybe a BSD, maybe Haiku, or maybe one of the descendants of OpenSolaris.
Really glad that the spirit TuxRadar lives on! Also, very glad to hear Mike Saunders back "On The Air"!
I have a very productive challenge/request that may help others.
Dual boot using btrfs with all roots on the same partition as a subvolume. Added complexity, encrypt the btrfs partition first.
Added suffering, using LVM to support a single password unlock to support an encrypted swap that supports hibernation.
I have been running btrfs on my system for a while now. However, i find that none of the distros I have tried really support it all that well during install. And oddly the distros that make it the easiest to install and boot a btrfs partition are the ones that don't get in your way (E.G. Slackware and Arch Linux)
So my set up:
BIOS motherboard booting a GPT partitioned harddrive (w/ BIOS boot partion)
ext4 /boot
LUKs encrypted partion (unlocks to btrfs with multiple subvolume roots)
LUKs encrypted partion (unlocks to ext4 /home)
I actually dual boot Arch and Linux on the encrypted btrfs partition using subvolumes. E.G. arch-run, slackware-run
Fedora 16-19 have been no help in this realm (having my partition layout already set-up). Using the GUI install was impossible to do anything with this setup.
The hint to setting all this up is making sure that you either have the correct "default subvolume" set or using the correct settings to pass "subvolid=" as a mount parameter.
^ rather the challenge would be to do this with more popular distros. Not Arch or Slackware.
My distro votes go to:-
Ben = Linux Lite
Mike = PeppermintOS
Jon = Manjaro
So cool to hear about the resurrection/rejuvenation/reinvention. Do you see a prospect of a Videocast? Or how about an eMagazine on Google Play/iTunes?
Excellent first show.
Distros to try…well how about giving up your hard drive altogether and running exclusively on PuppyLinux and take your PC-in-a-USB-stick every where. A fitting good bye to Barry Kauler mentioned in the last TuxRadar podcast. And something like Chromium OS. Most distros are much of a muchness in the way they affect your day to day work…these two are at least significantly different from the usual combatants of distro wars
Congratulations on Linux Lifestyle, great start to the podcast, though I am slightly disappointed that you didn't finish the podcast off by leading us listeners in a rousing rendition of The Free Software song in celebration of GNUs 30 years of letting people know they mean free as in freedom, not free as in beer.
Just dropping by to say I had a great time catching up and recording the podcast, and reading all the comments has been really fun too 🙂 I'm downloading Elementary OS now and look likely to give FreeBSD a go at work soon, so that's two down for the challenge…
Ditto: it was really good to hear you all together again.
I have one question and a challenge idea.
I'm impressed by how quickly you got a website up and running. I know this is supposedly easy now, but it would be good to hear the story of how you went from Ben's unused domain to a fully-functioning website.
And a challenge: with Jon geographically separated from the rest of the team, I'm assuming he won't be able to make every episode. Can you use completely open source system/tools to allow Jon to join in the podcast remotely?
Thanks Bascule, glad you liked it. Yes, getting us all together in one place will be tricky, but we'll figure out a way. If one of us needs to join in via the internet, we'll definitely try some open source audio conferencing tools!
Great first podcast under the new banner, keep 'em up, makes walking the dog much more enjoyable!
And in stereo too! It was just like being in the room with you guys.
How about trying to build a distro from scratch like Ikey is doing with SolusOS 2?
It's not obscure but you should try Manjaro.
Just wanted to drop a mention of the fact that the presence of an Opus feed is why I immediately subscribed (I haven’t even listened to the episode yet, though I promise I will!)
I've been meaning to do an episode of Hacker Public Radio on thsubject of Opus, I really need to make time to get back to work on that…
Great first episode! I'm actually a new listener, I never listened to Tux Radar. I just noticed some talk about this new show on StatusNet or pump.io and I started listening 🙂 I am a subscriber of Linux Format, though, and I'm sad to hear things are going badly there.
Just a minor point: considering not everyone is an old Tux Radar listener: would you please spend a bit more time introducing yourselves with names and all 🙂
Glad you liked it! We'll introduce ourselves better in the next one…
Will the new podcast be on the iTunes Store at some point?
Yes, I know I can download it and load it onto my iPod manually, but it's inconvenient. (It turns up under "Music" instead of "Podcasts" and so on.)
Not a bad show guys but as a new listener it was bit disorientating. You keep referring back to your old podcast (probably more than you realise) which had me feeling a bit left out. I expect to be playing catch up if I'd jumped in mid season but S01E01?
I'm looking forward to the next one.
Yes, sorry, I imagine it was confusing if you didn't listen to TuxRadar! In the next podcast we'll do a bit more to introduce ourselves 🙂
Episode #2: “What keeps the planet spinning?”
I've got another idea for a challenge:
Try to get the AppData files of the applications you use the most merged upstream.
Gnome's new software center uses them to feature apps with nice descriptions, links and screenshots and hopefully other Linux-based app stores will adopt them as well.
Here are a few community-written ones: https://github.com/hughsie/fedora-appstream/tree/master/appdata-extra/desktop
An example screenshot: https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-bdmxFDjnpuA/UlG5WbGVsEI/AAAAAAAAAzY/LYLcKR5zfrg/w991-h653-no/Screenshot+from+2013-10-06+20%253A24%253A56.png
Really enjoyed the podcast and appreciate the TuxRadar fork – thanks. Hope Graham can join you chaps in December.
On the distro-trial front, if Mike likes Xubuntu, why not try a different xfce distro that he might realisticaly use long-term, such as SolydX. For Ben (wants KDE), why not try SolydK. Sorry Jon, I don't know what to suggest for you…
I'm very excited by the re-emergence of Mike and Jonathan! Is there an RSS feed link for the podcast? I've got the link for the main site, but not the podcast. Am I being stupid?
You can find the RSS feeds just below the download links on the post above 🙂
Oh I see! I was fruitlessly clicking on the RSS icon! Stupid me!
naming suggestion for "The Part Where People Ask Us To Do Things":
sudo
Just a followup – I finally got a chance to listen, and the .opus episode sounds FAN-FRIGGIN'-TASTIC, despite being half the size of the good Ogg Vorbis or the crappy-old-mp3! The only complaint I have is a borderline-OCD observation that there's really not any metadata (title/album/geo_location/'album art'/etc.) in the .opus file. I'm not sure how many people besides me care about that, though.
If you wanted to, I suspect you could drop the size even further (40-48kbps, say) and still not really noticeably sacrifice much quality, or at least my experiments with opus so far suggest that to me.
Here's a suggestion for a distribution: <a href="http://nixos.org/nixos/">NixOS</a> has an interesting concept – it'd be interesting to hear how it works.
Well, if the biggest gripe I have is that you don't have ID3 tags on the mp3 version of the podcast, you must be doing all right.
Would use ogg but the media player on my Nokia phone is monolingual.
Keep up the great work. Makes walking the dog more enjoyable.
Is there anything you CAN tell us about LXF? Are they going digi only?
Good show guys! Glad you're back on the air!
Glad the show goes on, however, I cannot download or listen to the entire podcast…. after about 4 minutes the site player quits, and when I attempt to download, I get either a very small file or (in gpodder) and error saying the server doesn't have the data…. am I the only on having this proble,?
No probs from Telstra in Sydney; downloaded just fine and played in audacity.
hm… okay – I'll have to see if it my ISP
Can't tell you how pleased I am that you've decided to continue your podcasts here – I've really been enjoying them up to now and was (temporarily) disheartened to hear that they were stopping at the, er, other place (ahem).
Great to have Mike and Jon back with Ben; hopefully Graham and Andrew can join you all once this creative commons nonsense has released its vice-like grip of evil!
Genius.
Hello, World. Again. 🙂
Looking forard to hearing all the news and positivity from the crew. I especially like the pinkish hue to the website! Welcome back, fellas.
Mike
Good to hear you guys back, I was genuinely surprised & sadenned at the news about you guys and Linux Format.
Been a long term Tux Radar listener and a longer term Linux Format reader.
Anyhow welcome back and my recommended distro is Korora.
This is basically a Fedora remix that includes all those less-free bits that many of us end up installing on a new Fedora install, codecs, Flash, RPMFusion repos, VirtualBox repos, VLC etc.
Nice distro and less frustrating to get into for a Fedora noob.
Laterz..
I couldn't get it to add to my android phone on which I use pocketcasts but had the idea of turning the rss feed into a 2d bar code. Scanned it and straight in http://www.barcodesinc.com/generator/qr/?chl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.linuxvoice.com%2Fpodcast_ogg.rss&chs=400×400&cht=qr&chld=H|0
The ppa:ehoover/compholio
silverlight/firefox hack only works with netflix not lovefilm (there is a lovefilm version in the repo but it hasn't worked for months)
the best video rental service for linux is google play but requires flash DRM like 4od and demand 5. This is getting trickier to set up e.g. ubuntu have deleted the hal packages in 13.10
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2144347&p=12811464#post12811464
If you have the html5 youtube preview turned on some google play movies will play in html5 using webM for DRM if you are using chrome
Thank you for keeping this podcast around! It's the best one in the free/open source podcasting sphere:)
Sad to see you guys leave Linux Format, while I expect you had good reason to. I now have a LXF subscription (which I kept alive to support the podcast) for 2 more years WITHOUT you.
But change can be good. Good luck to all of you and keep up the podcasting!
re: subscription to Linux Format
I also subscribed to Linux Format to support the guys, and I'm shocked at the recent turnnof event. But after a quick Google, it looks like we can still cancel our sub if we want to:
http://www.myfavouritemagazines.co.uk/help-returns-and-refunds/
I'm going to wait and see what happens.
Thanks for keeping the podcast going!
Tom
Great new podcast. While you are at it why not start up a new magazine. You could call it something like gnlxf (Graham's not LXF). Publish it on Google Magazines, or Amazon. With your track records (or indeed in spite of them:), I am sure you would manage to attract some advertisers to help fund it.
So glad to see you guys are back and haven't missed a beat. Linux Format really lost out. I'm sure the magazine will never be the same. I have no idea what happened there, but for the sake of good news and open source I hope they are able to hold it together back at the magazine. For now I will keep my subscription, keep my fingers crossed, and listen to some good podcasting on linuxlifestyle.
Glad to hear that Tux Radar is continuing in spirit!
Great first podcast, hope to hear many, many more!
Hi guys another distro worth trying is a slax offshoot called Porteous.
Can now be installed to the hard drive.
Great first podcast, I was very pleasantly surprised, given all that has transpired. You guys haven't missed a beat, quite a feat given that I suspect there are many new challenges to face with less resources.
Will you be attempting geographically dispersed podcasts? If so, I for one would be interested in hearing about the challenges and triumphs.
Awesome episode guys, keep it up! Tuxradar forever… *ahem* I mean LinuxLifestyle! ;D