Linux is everywhere. It’s loved and relied on by many, and this technology shapes our world each and every day. The majority of the world’s top websites trust it to provide content to their users, and Enterprise IT wouldn’t be the same without it. The secret of what makes Linux so powerful, flexible, and scalable comes down to three things – open-source, passion, and community. And Red Hat is undermining all of those important aspects of what makes Linux the powerful, stable and scalable solution that it is – while also throwing their very own loyal customer-base under the proverbial bus.
In this article, I’m going to bring up several examples of how Red Hat has made misleading (or flat-out untrue) claims and promises, and also threw their own customer-base under the proverbial bus. But even with Red Hat poisoning their own water supply, the once-loved Linux company is only the symptom of a much larger problem. Company-backed Linux just can’t be trusted. Let’s take a look at why that is, but first we’ll summarize what’s happened recently.
When it comes to Linux Distros, each are either managed by their community or by a company. With recent news, it becomes clearer than ever that those managed by a company should be avoided. With a recent history of being untrustworthy, Red Hat is on the list to steer clear of – but they’re not the only example. With histories of misleading claims (with some being downright lies) it’s time to leave corporate-owned Linux distributions behind. Here’s why.
Here’s another blog post today, that I’m creating for the same reason as the previous one. It took me a bit longer than I’d like to admit to figure this out, and if anyone else out there is wondering why their automated Kubernetes builds on Ubuntu 22.04 started failing on them suddenly for no apparent reason. Specifically, your Kubernetes cluster builds started failing on December 9th. (You literally can’t make this stuff up). So, after troubleshooting for countless hours I finally figured it out. I mentioned it to Jeff Geerling (yes THAT Jeff Geerling) and he mentioned I should write a blog post, in case it may help someone else. I figured that his suggestion was logical 🖖, so here it is.
What’s the problem I’m referring to? If you’re attempting to initialize a Kubernetes cluster on Ubuntu 22.04 and you see error messages that include output such as this:
CRI v1 runtime API is not implemented for endpoint
Or maybe even this:
unknown service runtime.v1.RuntimeService
Continue reading and I’ll let you know what the issue is, and how to fix it. I’ll also sneak in a quantum science reference and it’s going to be a good time.
Normally, I like to make videos for Linux and Container-related things – it’s my favorite way to teach and inform. But some things don’t translate as well to videos, and this is one of them. Recently, I ran into an issue that I’ve been trying to solve for some time, where initializing a Kubernetes cluster on Ubuntu 22.04 seems to fail, specifically on the Raspberry Pi. Although I did ultimately find something while searching the web that led to my resolving this, search results were generally unhelpful, and neither was Stack Overflow. So what I wanted to do, was to create this article just so I could make sure that anyone else Googling for answers does find something.
Here’s the issue I ran into. For some reason, initializing Kubernetes clusters on Ubuntu 22.04 fails on the Raspberry Pi. More specifically, Flannel doesn’t seem to launch, with it stuck on “CrashLoopBackoff” most of the time. And not only that, the coredns pods will tend to stay stuck on “ContainerCreating” for eternity. Another symptom is that you’ll find errors in /var/log/syslog complaining about /run/flannel/subnet.env not being found. Oh, and another symptom. RPC errors will be mentioned in the syslog as well, and also complains about not being unable to create the sandbox.
Blogs and howto’s mention many “fixes” for this issue, but for me I didn’t have any luck there. Some of them will have you create the /run/flannel/subnet.env file manually – but you shouldn’t have to do that, it’s not your job. (That file should be created automatically). I’ve seen at least one blog post mention the order matters regarding when you apply Flannel (nonsense) and not to be outdone, the classic “remove the directory and reboot” trick that also never seemed to work for me.
So, what’s the fix?
Are you ready?
Here you go…
sudo apt install linux-modules-extra-raspi
Yeah, that’s literally it. I’m not kidding. See for yourself. You’re all set. Profit. Enjoy. I know, right?!
Thanks to thiscompletely unrelated bug report that gave me the idea to install this package and ultimately led to my writing this article. It’s my sincere hope that this blog post finds its way into the Google searches of whoever out there needs this.
The LearnLinuxTV studio was recently remodeled! Since you guys asked for an updated studio tour, I figured I’d give you exactly that in this video. You’ll see the entire room, including (but not limited to) the technology half, the retro-gaming half, recording devices, homelab devices, and more!
LibreOffice, an office suite from the Document Foundation contains all the features you’d expect in an office suite, including (but not limited to) the ability to create text, spreadsheet, and presentation documents. So why aren’t more people using it? In this video, Jay discusses some of the unreasonable stigma LibreOffice suffers from. Is LibreOffice inferior to Microsoft Office? Well, Jay wrote an entire book with LibreOffice – and naturally, has some thoughts!
Hello everyone! I wanted to take a moment and create a quick post to see if anyone is interested in helping out the channel. I have a number of you helping out on Patreon, and that’s awesome, I really appreciate it! But there’s also some non-monetary assistance that could help out too, so if you want to give back and you don’t have the budget to justify becoming a Patron, there’s some additional ways that you might consider as well. Read on to find out about some additional ways you can potentially help out.
If you were to tell me in April of 2012 that my YouTube channel would grow to over 133,000 subscribers and gain beyond 13 million lifetime views, I’d assume that “April Fools” would be the next thing out of your mouth. Yet, here we are – the channel has reached exactly the metrics I’ve just mentioned. Now, it’s time to push this channel to the next level. I’m dubbing the upcoming new iteration of the channel “Version 3.0”. This new version will be designed to give you more of of what you love, and re-align the content to what the Linux community wants most. And you can help shape it.
But wait a minute, “version 3.0”? What ever happened to “version 2.0”? Or even “1.0” for that matter? Well, I’ve never been too vocal about the changes behind the scenes, so you’re not missing anything. I intend to be much more public about design changes going forward. But here’s a quick history lesson.
Version 0 The account for the YouTube channel opened around June of 2011, but the first video was uploaded around April 1st of 2012. This is the same year that everyone thought the Mayans predicted would be the end of the world. And considering my first ever video was uploaded around April Fools Day, it seems like I’d be bound for bad luck, doesn’t it? Well, the channel has had tremendous success, and to think it all started with a video where I showed off a custom-built emulator PC (the early videos were really bad in quality). After that, I slowly gravitated into tutorials and Linux distro reviews, even though they were recorded on a $15 microphone plugged into a used Dell Latitude D630 I purchased from a local flea market for $150. Poor video and audio quality aside, this was version 0.
Version 1.0 The low-quality videos continued for six years. And oddly enough, the channel saw some decent views and subscribers. Nothing amazing, but still somewhat impressive. At the end of 2018, I felt as though the channel had amazing potential, and I decided to put some serious work into it, for the first time. That’s not to say that I didn’t work hard on it before, but I wanted to build some structure. I wanted to try to get the audio quality and video quality up to somewhat decent levels. My goal was also to have different camera angles, and to start editing videos to make them more professional. All previous videos were done in a single take! Version 1.0, the first version where I put serious time and attention into the overall quality resulted in some very serious gains in metrics:
In the metrics, you can see immediately the result of the “version 1.0” effort
Version 2.0 The second iteration of the channel was less about metrics, and more about solidifying the branding while also achieving decent (and consistent) audio and video quality. There were some wins (as well as missteps) along the way, but after more than a year my goal was achieved. The audio and video quality are now decent, and branding from an actual graphic designer was introduced. at the end of version 2.0, the audio quality was upgraded again, and the entire channel moved to 4K. Although the branding and quality improvements were welcome, this iteration did not see as massive of a boost in metrics, and that’s okay – it wasn’t intended to. It was intended solely to build a more solid foundation onto which to build the future.
The icon for the “version 2.0” branding
Version 3.0 Now that brings us to Version 3.0. The third iteration of LearnLinux.tv isn’t final yet, but is being built right now. It’s expected to debut in December 2020/January 2021, though the exact timing hasn’t been decided. It will again see new branding, and the format of the videos will change as well. The new branding will be an immediate change, and the remaining changes will happen over the course of 2021. Most of the changes will happen during the first half of 2021, with ongoing refinements. There will be a sizable difference within the first month of launch, you’ll definitely notice it.
So, what should you expect in the newest iteration? I can’t reveal everything yet, since much is still being worked out. But I can reveal some things now, which I’ll do in this post. There’s actually a HUGE change coming, that will be somewhat of a shocker. Probably the biggest improvement and change the channel has ever seen in its entire history. That aspect of version 3.0 will likely happen around Spring, and I’ll reveal more about it when the idea is far enough along. But for now, here’s some changes to expect in the short term:
Greater focus on learning When the channel was re-branded “LearnLinux.tv”, there was a very specific reason for that – I want to help everyone Learn Linux. There’s been a mix of video types beyond tutorials, including (but not limited to) hardware reviews, distribution reviews, opinion videos, how to’s, and more. And while I expect those types of videos will continue (at least for now), the channel will transition more toward education. This means more tutorials and sharing of knowledge. As long as the other video types continue to see strong views, I’ll consider keeping them around. But the focus will be on teaching you the skills you need to be a productive member of the Linux community, whether you are a hobbyist using a distribution on your laptop, or a member of a DevOps team that uses Linux professionally.
Consistent Video Format For each type of video I do, the goal of version 3.0 is to have a consistent layout. If you’re watching tutorials, they’ll all be structured the same or will at least follow some rules about how the content will be structured. All tutorials up until now were done completely ad-hoc, but the goal now is to have more structure. That’s not to say that a structure will be forced on videos even when it doesn’t make sense, but there are some definite rules that should be followed in each. For example, tutorials will show you how to install a tool on Linux, Windows, and macOS – to ensure you can get started learning regardless of which operating system you’re coming from. The first video in a tutorial series will go over the outline for the entire series, so you’ll know what’s coming before it arrives. Time codes in each video (where applicable) to get you to the section that pertains to where you want to start learning, so you can get right to the section you want quickly.
Complete channel branding The entire channel is going to be re-branded, new logo, intro, assets, you name it. It will all be refined. This will give each video a more professional look than ever before. Although the logo below is most likely not the final branding that will be used, it will give you an idea what direction the branding is going. The brand will attempt to capture the “education” aspect of the channel, that was not represented before.
Possible new branding idea for LearnLinux.tv (not final)
Additional focus on Enterprise Linux Although non-enterprise Linux will still be covered and won’t go away, I plan on covering the enterprise side more than before. That way, regardless of whether you’re a home user or work at a big company, there will be content for you. The enterprise Linux side of the industry hasn’t been covered as well, and I hope to change that with the new version.
More Content Types Expect interviews, fun (and sometimes surprising) content ideas, and exciting topics to try to keep you entertained. Viewer feedback will help determine the direction this takes, but I have a lot of great ideas and I can’t wait until you see some of the things that are coming.
More to come! There will be more updates coming, as plans are finalized. This is very much a work in progress, and the input of viewers will shape what’s to come. In fact, I have a survey available that you can fill out, which will give me an idea of the types of changes you’d like to see. After all, the success of this channel is due to my viewers, and your input is valuable as I navigate the process of reinventing LearnLinux.tv. I can’t wait to read your feedback, and to share with you more news when the final outline is decided.
I just wanted to let everyone know that a site redesign is in progress. It’s not going to look extremely different, and some may not notice any difference at all. I’m just adding small improvements and changes, so nothing Earth-shattering. The biggest change is that there is a different menu structure, that makes it easy to get back to the content. More smaller and incremental changes are incoming, so pardon any dust.
I ran into a problem recently where virtual machines I created from a template were fighting over the same IP address. Each of them would be assigned the same IP address from my DHCP server, despite the fact that each VM created from my standard template had a unique Mac address. I had a hard time finding the culprit, so I figured I would write a post about it. In my case, I am using Proxmox, though the root-cause is not specific to any virtualization package. My virtual machines were all running Ubuntu 18.04, though this can impact other distributions too. The root cause ended up being due to something called a “machine-id”. Read on to find out how I solved this.
