#linux bluestar

[linuxlife]

Linux Life Episode 60

Hello people and welcome back to my ongoing series about my time playing with Linux.  Since I originally started this blog it is now been going for 2 years.  That is unreal.  I never thought it would manage to last this long, which makes it my longest ongoing project I think I have even done.  Scary...

Anyway enough waffle onto the task at hand.  Since we last spoke I have once again changed things with the Xeon.  Over the last few months it has been many things.  I have ran EndeavourOS, Namib Linux, Windows 10, Haiku, Hackintosh (Mac OS X High Sierra) and now the latest Linux Project it is now running is BlueStar Linux.

BlueStar Linux is another Arch based Linux from the team in the USA.  It is using KDE for its main Desktop Environment.  Now me and KDE have had a very strange relationship  as it normally has crashed spectacularly on me.  With about a million segmentation faults.

However this one I am using is working no problem.  Maybe it’s because every time I have used KDE it has been with an Nvidia card and this is an AMD Radeon.  It seems to be working fine, the transparency is working and all the programs are running fine without keeling over which was my main complaint.

Another thing I must say is that it seems to running things much faster than it did with Namib or EndeavourOS even though they were both installed on the same 240GB SSD.  So KDE is working quicker than MATE which is something I never thought I would ever see.   I know they have been working on refining it but it seems they have done a damned impressive job.

When it installed it included a dock called Latte which was quite nice but its icons were incredibly small for some reason.  So after a bit of fiddling I in the end just changed across to Cairo Dock which is what I have been using for quite a while.

It initially covered the screen with quite a few widgets but they were quite easily removed.  I don’t like my desktop been full of clutter I know some people like having CPU monitors and other extraneous stuff on screen I just find them annoying.

So I ended up with just a digital clock in the upper right and I can live with that.

Now I normally sit and try and get Vulkan and stuff working which means changing all of the drivers.  To be honest I can’t be bothered as its not as if I play games on this machine given it’s the test bed machine so I have decided just to stick with the base Radeon driver and it is working fine for most things.

It manages to run Hedgewars and Gdash which is fine for me.  I spend far too long trying to get games to work under Lutris and then never play them.

I did not like the original colour scheme of BlueStar Linux it was a Dark Green almost black setup with Yellow text and a very hard to see black cursor.  Don’t get me wrong it looked aesthetically nice but not very practical.  I also changed my cursor to Red Diamond which is still black but it has some nice red inflections and animations making it very visible.

It originally comes with Octopi to install software and update but I quickly changed it to Pamac as that’s what I prefer.  Don’t get me wrong the Synaptic type installer is more than functional but very basic.  

To be honest I really thought I was going to hate BlueStar but to be honest it’s actually quite impressed me.  It runs quite smooth and to be honest hasn’t crashed on me once which is quite a surprise.  SO I have to give credit to the KDE team who have obviously done a damned good job fixing bugs.

Would I say the same if it had a Nvidia card in here.  I honestly can’t say.  Considering when I had tried to install BlueStar Linux in the past on a machine with Nvidia I could not even get to the main desktop to install it would crash out as at the time Nouveau didn’t support the card I had.

One minor caveat I could not get it to install Shutter which is my preferred screen capture program due to not finding half the libraries similar to what i had with Manjaro but I installed Flameshot instead and can live it.

So what version of Linux would you like to see on the Xeon next?  Let me know at [email protected] after all it is the test bed machine so it is designed for distro testing.

On the i7 due it being Christmas I have had very little time to sit in front of the machine.  All it has been is regular system updates which I have had no problems with.  I did play a few Commodore 64 games using VICE but other than that it has been having a quiet holiday.

Well that brings us up to date with everything that has been going on in My Linux Life.  So thank you for reading and until next time, take care....

PS : I never thought I would manage to blog for 6 months, never mind 2 years and beyond...

[linuxlife]

Linux Life Episode 50

Hello and welcome back to the world of Linux Life.  Sorry for the delay between episodes but I’m afraid family life has been pretty hectic and I have not really had time to sit down and do much.  I was intending doing something special like a podcast or a Youtube video but I never got time.

When I have had free time I have had I have been pushing through playing Path of Exile but I finally got to a point I can’t progress without totally rehashing my character as I didn’t go for a particular build.  So I’m screwed.  Proving that as much as I like Path of Exile it’s skill tree system is broken.

So lets get something out there straight away Antergos Linux has been closed.  The forums and updates will continue for the next three months but the project is now declared as over.

So not happy as it was the Linux I have reliably used for a long time.  Sure the community claims they will continue it in the form of the Endeavour project.  However that’s going to take a long time to put together and get organised so Antergos is off the cards.

So I went on a spree of trying to find a version of Arch Linux that was comparative and worked with no issues.  Hence I had a three day search which lead me even at one point to install Linux Mint 19 (I was getting desperate OK).

First I tried installing CondresOS which installed the main system and dependencies fine, but refused to start if I used the Nvidia drivers.  It would only work with Nouveau which meant I could not use Lutris to play Path of Exile as I needed DXVK to get the game to work.

If you even installed the Nvidia driver it refused to start up and would not let me get back into GRUB to get into text console mode.

OK so next I moved on to Manjaro MATE version.  Now it installed fine but for all it would load the Nvidia drivers.  For some reason would not allow my GTX 1030 to use Vulkan so once again DXVK was not possible for some reason even after installing the Vulkan libraries and tools.

So another distro down I next took on Netrunner Rolling 1905.2 which was just released OK now it did use KDE but once again upon installation would only use Nouveau and refused to work with the NVIDIA driver.  Regardless of how I installed it using Octopi, Pamac, Pacman or Yaourt using the text terminal from GRUB.

OK onto now my fifth distribution of Arch in the form of Archman Linux this went all the way through the installer then upon restart refused to do anything as graphics would corrupt on start.  I even tried going via text mode and regardless of what I did it would not get beyond the initial kernel and file check.  At this point I was totally fed up and was running out of Arch distros to try.

I tried BlueStar Linux and once again installs fine but refuses to run if using the Nvidia driver.  I am sure many can get by using just Nouveau but I am not one of them.  It was at this point I was about to give up for the day so I went for a system I knew would install and downloaded Linux Mint 19.2 MATE edition.

Sure enough it worked and I gave up for the night feeling rather annoyed but I knew I had a working Linux system.

So I attempted to use Mint first I could not find the PPA for Nvidia which took 3 attempts to find the right one.  Reason I needed the latest PPA because the one listed in Driver Manager wont work with DXVK. However it did find it eventually.  OK it works now for Lutris you equally need Wine guess what the one in Mint is too old so I have to find a PPA.  I  could go on but to be honest I got so sick of searching for PPAs in the end I went back to Distrowatch and back to the Arch Linux section.

So BlackArch and MorpheousArch are backup/security penetration versions of Arch so not designed to be used as a daily driver as that is not their purpose.

So that left me a small list many use Openbox or XFCE which are more than capable but not my thing.  Finally I came to Namib Linux which is a Canadian distro I had never heard of but I was at a point where I would try it as it was one of the few that allowed MATE to run from install.

Trust me I have installed a different Display Environment (KDE) then tried to install MATE before and the issues it causes is unreal.  So if i can get an installer that can run MATE from the start all good.

Well Namib Linux uses MATE as it standard desktop so all good.  Installed it and first boot I get a graphical corruption and I am thinking oh not this again, but I restart it and this time it works fine.  I manage to install the Nvidia drivers and it works fine.

In fact everything works fine so I have now for the last few days been running Namib Linux and everything is back to the way it was before I changed from Antergos.  I am now happy and everything I was using I have managed to reinstall and because the data was in my home directory which is on a separate partition, no data was lost.

Also to add insult to injury during this time my 3TB external hard drive had issues and the SATA to USB bridge failed.  I had to move it internal and after 18 hours of running TestDisk it found the partition that had gone AWOL but then refused to boot it. Then when I managed to restore the boot header the file table was corrupted.

So I lost over a terabyte of backup files.  Also it corrupted one third of the drive as now it only lists as a 2TB drive not 3 so either it can’t see the rest or it’s damaged beyond use.

The drive is back working, but is no longer external or 3TB in capacity.

Although I have not been doing much in the way of apps in Linux.  I still have been spending a lot of time messing about trying to get Linux to work.

Anyway this is already too long and if you managed to get this far.  Thanks for putting up with me this far.  I appreciate those who have read this nonsense no matter whether you came in at Episode 1 or this very episode.  

So until next time ... Take care.