#linux endeavouros

[linuxlife]

Linux Life Episode 89

Hello everyone and welcome to my ongoing journey in the world of Linux. I admit its been pretty quiet on my laptop. However I have been using Hyprland a lot more than normal. I still fall back to KDE Plasma 6.4 X11 occasionally but I admit to be honest I am living on Hyprland and Wayland.

I managed to add a few things to the configuration files. The first thing I added to the config files was I added a way using Super, Shift and Up or down means I can move programs between virtual desktops.

So I can take a split window to its own desktop if one is free or I can bring a separated one down if I want to combine them both on screen. So it seems I am learning some things. All hope is not lost…

I also managed to auto run Crystal Dock. Now apparently this is not a new program rather than a one that disappeared for many years but now version 2.2 works with Wayland which many others don’t.

So once again I now have a dock. Its odd you have to run a program then pin it to the dock. It’s the only way you can get them to work. However many programs although you can run them many won’t allow you to pin them so some I normally have on the dock can not be done.

They still work under Hyprland you just have to launch them using ROFI (set on Super +D) rather than the dock. However quite a lot of the programs can be pinned so that was why I added it to the the autoexec section of the config files.

As I said Crystal Dock is not perfect it’s Auto hide and Intelligent Autohide gets stuck but to be honest hopefully in time that may get fixed but then again I have no idea as Crystal Dock has only just returned so I have no idea if it going to continue to be worked on now it works for Wayland or if it was patched just to get people off their back.

I am going to hope that they have returned and Crystal dock will be fixed to work correctly. I admit if you flick between the two on startup it does get over minor issues of sticking, but it’s annoying that I have to do that.

Obviously in time I hope they address how to add programs and manage to add ways I can add certain emulators and stuff but the fact I even have a dock at all in Wayland I really admit is impressive as I was about to think finding one would be impossible.

I have been over the issues i had with the Cairo Dock version that works with Wayland as it has its own issues. Primarily it sometimes adds duplicates or after a while just resets its own config and buggered its self up but the guys behind Cairo dock admit they have made it basic and don’t intend to go any further until they are forced to do so. Which is entirely their prerogative.

I admit I have returned to using Firefox after quite a while using Brave. I did like Brave as it continued to block ads on YouTube when Firefox had its fail moment for a while. However Brave kept signing me out YouTube every other day and it was getting bloody annoying keep having to 2 step authenticate which requires opening my phone and getting to Gmail just to say yes it’s me.

Firefox is supposedly now keeping data on people and selling it off to the highest bidder which did give me some objection but I figured well if Google who are running my email have not sold my info I guess the remainder can be split up between the various social media and Firefox. If anyone truly believes they have any form of privacy or that your data isn’t been given willy nilly to anyone who is willing to pay then you are deluding yourself beyond belief.

Admittedly under Linux its not as evasive as say Apple or Microsoft but people still ask for telemetry data and people opt in to help.

KDE admitted that 78% of its users are on Wayland now thats from the telemetry opt in people have given them. Audacity has an opt in to give info back to the Muse group who now own it.

Data is worth a lot of money. If you think only the Muse Group or only KDE will see the telemetry you opted into then you need to be much more aware of how the corporate business world works.

Even Free Open Source Software isn’t talking about price… its talking about free as in the freedom to be modified its not proprietary and going to charge you for licensing. Many get this confused and are thrown how Linux companies can charge for service contracts.

As it happens most Distros don’t charge so the free as in monetary does apply but things like RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and SuSE Linux and there is more that charge fees for customer support on a monthly basis. It’s supporting businesses who need someone to phone if the server goes down at 3am.

Can’t imagine Red Hat will help you much if you call up asking how to run Monkey Pants Solitaire 3 on Steam using Proton even if you have paid for RHEL. They might but i don’t think it’s one of their common issues. I could be wrong…

I can’t remember if I opted into or out of the KDE study. I more than likely if given a choice will have opted out but honestly I can’t remember.

To be honest why I still bounce back to KDE is normally when something goes awry. For example I once in a blue moon play Extreme Tux Racer and it’s only one track I play.

For some reason it stopped working with SFML version 2 and the only way to get it working was to build it using a patched one from GitHub that allowed it to use SFML 3 so now it works which it had stopped doing for a while.

This is sometimes where Arch can be pain when programs you don’t use regularly suddenly stop and don’t inform you and then you have to figure how to get around that luckily it doesn’t happen that often.

For all people say Arch breaks things regularly, that’s not true. OK, it breaks the odd time or two. However normally someone fixes it or suggests a fix virtually immediately.

So very rarely are you completely stuck without a program. I’m sure someone is going to give me an example of something in the AUR that no one maintains anymore and has gone completely tits up which I don’t use just to prove a damned point.

I’m sure there is lots of dead ends with various programs in the AUR luckily they just tend not to be the ones I happen to be using.

Anyway that’s enough waffling from me for this episode… So until next time take care...

[linuxlife]

Linux Life Episode 83

Well, here we are again ladies and gentlemen back at the blog stuff regarding my ongoing Linux experience.

Well since we last spoke I am afraid I had to retire my Dell Inspiron M6800 (Mangelwurzel) as the sound card finally decided to give up. So that meant the touchpad, the sound card and the top pair of memory sockets had stopped working so it had to go.

I have recovered the two 480GB SSDs that it had so I can reuse them in another project should the time come for it. However when one machine exits stage right to the farm. Luck would have it I managed to get a new laptop.

The machine admittedly is another Dell laptop but this one is new. The machine in question is a Dell Inspiron 3525. It's a 15.6” laptop with a Ryzen 7 5200U with 16GB RAM, an Integrated Radeon Vega 8 graphics card, and a 1TB NVME drive.

Sure enough for the first 2 hours of its new existence, it did have a copy of Windows 11 Home (stop spitting at the back there). However, after a bit of learning how to get around the BIOS, I managed to install Endeavour OS Galileo (the latest version).

As I had an AMD graphics card (even if it’s integrated) I decided to run KDE Plasma (in the past I have ran MATE but I thought I would change it up).

Now for the first few days, I was running just the basic setup but when I installed Steam only a few games would start. Terraria, Stardew Valley, and Starbound worked fine as they, I believe use Open GL. However, when I tried to run a game using Proton there was no dice as Vulkan was not listed.

I had to install the version of MESA with Vulkan from the extras and then I could get Untitled Goose Game to run including picking up my XBOX 360-style gamepad. However Path of Exile and Pacman Championship Edition 2 both threw errors running Linux native versions.

However, I then turned on Proton usage, and using the Windows versions both games worked without error. Strange but I am not going to argue they work and I am not going to question beyond that.

For some reason they work if it’s through DXVK but not through the actual Linux Vulkan driver go figure that. Considering I can now play them both fine I am not going to fight it.

Parkitect 1.9a works fine through Wine as it’s a GOG game version I am using.

I admit while I am not a huge game player it’s nice to see them in action.

I have also installed and tested various emulators the list includes Fuse (ZX Spectrum), VICE (c64), Caprice32 (Amstrad CPC), Atari800 (Atari 8 bit), and DOSBox-X (MSDOS). I will probably test a few more in time but all successful so far.

I even did my usual build of GDASH and it works fine. So I can play various incarnations of Boulder Dash should I ever feel so.

Set up OBS Studio, KDEnlive, VLC, Audacity, and more so it can be used to create videos or podcasts should the decision take me.

Also, Cairo-Dock is my choice of on-screen dock as it has been for many years. It’s pretty reliable and I can set it up pretty quickly now.

I have also installed some productivity apps in the form of LibreOffice, RedNotebook, Obsidian, and Focuswriter. I also installed InMyDiary via Wine as the Windows version is the most up-to-date one (I like Lotus Organiser and it looks/works the same).

So it has been running for over a week and I admit I am impressed with its capabilities.

However, it does seem the world of Linux is looking to dump X11 in favour of the Wayland compositor. Now on Mangelwurzel, I could not use Wayland as Nouveau could not run it.

But this new Dell (currently named Parsnip but could be subject to change) has a better graphics card and I have installed the version of KDE Plasma Wayland also.

So I can log out of X11 and switch to Wayland if necessary. It works and I admit speed-wise, it's slightly faster at program opening than X11, but Cairo Dock doesn’t support Wayland just yet.

However, I did manage to get a dock in the form of Latte Dock and it does work fine.

However Steam doesn’t like Wayland it works but man is slow and problematic so at this time I still have the system boot into X11 and change up to Wayland should I need it.

So where do I go with this new Dell laptop so far it has performed more than adequately. Also, EndeavourOS once again proves to be my preferred Linux flavour and I won’t be going back to a stable (Debian, Mint, Ubuntu) environment anytime soon unless forced.

Well, that’s a wrap for the moment… In turn, I will probably install MAME and maybe play with QEMU but that’s for the next episode should I get around to it.

Until next time… Take care.

[linuxlife]

Linux Life Episode 82

Hello ladies and gentlemen. Yes the return of the Linux blog written by me. don’t know whether that’s a good thing but here we are.

I admit its been a long time since my last episode that’s because I went an absolute age without Linux in any machines for quite a while. In the last episode I admitted I had just installed EndeavourOS Cassini Nova R2 (Arch-based) in my Dell i7 laptop (Mangelwurzel)

Now I have been running it for several months and I admit continues to work well. I admit i am not trying to play Windows games on it as the Quadro K3100 is not supported buy the current Nvidia drivers. However running just the nouveau drivers allows me to do anything else providing you don’t need Vulkan.

Which I only use Vulkan when I was using Lutris to play games such as Path of Exile. That can’t be done with the nouveau driver. Apparently there is a version of the Nouveau setup called NVK coming which will allow Vulkan to work but as of yet its in very early beta stages and my card is not even on the list for support just yet.

Mind you considering the guy who maintained Nouveau for the last 10 years has just left the Linux industry I don’t know when any new updates to the nouveau project will even be. I assume its a team of people I doubt one man alone is writing such.

However I have been using EndeavourOS as my daily driver and it has been no problems whatsoever. Even the internet which used to keep dropping out they seem to be using a broadcom wl driver that works fine and is updated and moved every time the kernel gets updated.

So to be honest it can web browse, I can do email, word process, emulate stuff, even video edit and more if I felt like it so to be honest at the moment I can’t complain regarding how well it is working.

As for playing modern Windows games well I don’t really do that any more so not going to lose much sleep there. To be honest when I had my i7 desktop with the Nvidia 1030 I only did it to prove it worked. Sadly that machine is long gone.

So as Mangelwurzel is working well and I have no major complaints what else have I be doing in the meantime.

Well I had been using an Apple iBook G4 to start writing a book as it was a lot less distracting of a machine. However the guy who attempted repair it before I rescued it made a right hash and removed most of the screws in the machine.

So the hard drive would move on a regular basis if you moved it across the desk. Sometimes it wouldn’t start until you reconnected the pins which had moved a fraction of a millimetre.

So I had to lift the keyboard panel regularly. All was fine until one day the keyboard came undone then I had to put it back in. It was a fiddle. Then the power connector on the board came out of its socket.

I managed to get everything back in or so I thought. But moving the keyboard had now unseated the wireless card. I struggled to get that back in but when I put it back together the power connector came out but this time it took the actual socket connector with it from the board.

Guess what now the machine won’t power up. So I took out the hard drive and the iBook G4 is now dead as the connector is tiny and will require soldering I know I am not capable of.

Obviously I was not amused by this but I did happen to have a USB 2.0 to IDE adaptor which has a side for 2.5” drives.

So I connected the drive up to Mangelwurzel and using qemu-img which is one of the tools of QEMU. I set about copying the image to my i7 hard drive. I had enough space as it was only an 80Gb HDD (Yes my Hard drive was called Braeburn it’s an Apple) and I had 150GB space on the SSD.

When I did it I really didn’t think it would work. It sat there doing nothing at the command line. No percentage meter no nothing but when I looked at the file in caja it was going up slowly so I left it to get on with it.

Four and a half hours later the files had copied to the hard drive and it was done.

OK so now I had this copy of this hard drive but no Mac OS X to run it on. So using QEMU (a Level 1 VM hypervisor) basically it can create a virtual G4 machine and run Mac OS X 10.4.11 which was on the old hard drive.

It took a few attempts at getting the right QEMU commands but sure enough I managed to get QEMU running Mac OS X using the image of the hard drive i had made. It can connect to the internet and run everything i had installed including the Mac OS 9 Classic stuff on there.

I was impressed and because it was a direct conversion I didn’t have to change passwords or anything as it was the ones from the hard drive.

Amazing stuff I had saved the drive and its contents and it was usable. However QEMU unless you use it a certain way doesn’t supply sound for G4 emulation in the basic version.

Nope for that you need the Screamer version luckily there is a QEMU Screamer build in the AUR but it’s not as recent as QEMU standard.

So after a bit of fighting with QEMU commands as sound is a bit odd the way they do it. So I now have two boot scripts one without sound and one with.

Sound sort of works it crackles and slows things down a little but it does work. Its not perfect but considering its an i7 on Linux running Mac OS X 10.4.11 as a G4 using my hard drive image.

That in itself is quite amazing I can’t complain.

Having just completed that I was given a Raspberry Pi 4B (2 GB model) to play with. Now I have played with Pi machines before.

Last time I was messing around with a Pi 3B and a Pi 4B (4GB Model) and I remember playing with thongs like Twister OS, RiscOS, and having to build a micro SD a certain way to get EndeavourOS to work.

However I had to give them back to their owner so it has been a while since I have played with a Raspberry Pi.

So now I have the current 2GB model which obviously is a not got as much memory since the last Pi 4B I used.

Well I knew who owned it last so I had to set up a new download of the OS. If anyone is aware that the Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced to new Pi 5 which is twice as fast as the 4B apparently.

As I don’t have one for testing I can’t say and the likelihood of me getting one any time soon is probably none existent.

However they have updated the Raspbian OS to the latest Debian (Bookworm) which does work with the Pi 4B

I got it down and wrote it to the Micro SD all nice and ready.

Now comes the fun bit. i don’t own a monitor or TV with a HDMI port so now i had to figure how to connect it to the only monitor I still have which an old Belinea 22” monitor (which works fine considering its age).

The previous time i was using a Dell 19” monitor but it had a DVI connection so I had this HDMI to DVI lead which I knew worked as I had used it when I last used the Pi I used previously. Unfortunately the Belinea is VGA connection only… problem.

Also the connection lead I used last time to link the two HDMI leads I had to return so I had to buy a coupling link to connect the two leads together. So as I was buying leads I decided to buy a connector lead which now had a Female DVI to Male VGA creating on hell of a stupid Frankenstein type lead

So the lead is now Micro HDMI to HDMI - Coupling link - HDMI to DVI Male - DVI Female to Male VGA. Strangely enough this stupid lead didn’t work.

After a lot of failing I ordered a Female HDMI to Male VGA adapter making the cable be much shorter and it actually works. Tada… however don’t ask me to remove the adapter from the monitor as it was a bitch to screw in and I am not taking it off in any hurry.

OK now I have a working screen connection lets test some software.

New RaspianOS being a recent version of Debian (Bookworm) it is using Wayland as a compositor rather than the old X11 setup. which I am sure on the Pi 5 works wonderfully or an 8GB Pi 4B. On the 2Gb model it works but runs like treacle.

So slow it was painful to watch. After about a hour of faffing I gave up and reinserted the MicroSD to my i7 and installed EndeavourOS which strangely enough is based on the same Cassini Nova R2 build as the i7 but ARM.

I set it to run and it kept dropping out due to not being able to find a mirror. Quick edit to use the London mirror which was hashed out once put back in the installer worked.

Now lets be straight here it was not fast and jumped in stages so many a time I thought it had given up for it to suddenly jump to the next stage. It took about 3 attempts but now I have a working edition of EndeavourOS working on the Pi4.

It still uses X11 instead of Wayland but it seems to work fine. It is never going to win Olympic medals as the 2GB model is the inferior one. However I was able to watch YouTube admittedly at 360p and 480p respectively but it works fine.

The ironic factor is the Micro SD is 16Gb then i found an unused 32Gb one but I am damned if I am going through that again in a hurry. Basically when it installs it extends to ensure the full space is used meaning I would have more space for installing programs etc.. Oh well I may get around to it but not for a little while.

So far I have installed Libre Office and Focuswriter. I installed a few emulators after all isn’t that what the Pi is famous for…

Well lets say Dosbox I ran MAME 0.37b5 with full romset as I have them and running Mr Do. not an immensely taxing ROM it achieved 3.57 frames per second and was rather choppy

At that point I tried installing a few things only to discover they were not available for the aarch64 version such as Hedgewars or TuxRacer.

I didn’t try TwisterOS as it looks like it hasn’t updated since I last looked at it neither has RiscOS.

So EndeavourOS is now working on both my i7 and the Pi 4B. It seems Debian just doesn’t like me.

Off to find an arcade image to stick on that 32GB Micro SD but I will report on that next time as I think this has gone on long enough.

Until next time when ever that may be… Take care.

[linuxlife]

Linux Life Episode 81

Hello and welcome to my continued adventures into the world of Linux. As I said in the previous episode I have just installed Endeavour OS Cassini Nova on my Dell Precision M6800 i7 laptop (Mangelwurzel).

Now previously the Dell had caused issues with internet and Nouveau could not work with the Quadro K3100 graphics card but these issues seem to be resolved. Not unusual for something based on Arch Linux fixing issues giving the constant updating, but equally this can cause issues.

It seems I have an intermittent sound card that stops and starts when it feels like. If it was a driver issue it would fix quickly. However I admit that the sound card has stopped being recognised under Windows 10 too (yes I am running dual boot as the Dell has two SSDs in it. So the drives are on separate controller points).

I believe the op-amp on card is dying and occasionally has moments of working and then after an indifferent length of time (sometimes it works for hours, other times minutes) just stops.

So sometimes I have sound other times I don’t. I may have to see if I can get an external USB sound card.

I have installed a few emulators such as Fuse (ZX Spectrum emulator), VICE (C64 emulator), Caprice 32 (Amstrad emulator and MAME (Multi Arcade Machine emulator) so far they all work without any issues.

I did install Audacity, OBS Studio and KDEnlive but now the sound card has failed these items may be a bit of a dead end.

To be honest i don’t know where to go with this installation do I use it as a test platform to install things. I thought about this but there is no point trying to install Steam or various games as Nouveau can’t access Vulkan so I would not have access DXVK limiting access to OpenGL.

So probably limiting it to Shaders 2.0 even though the K3100 has access to Shaders 3.0+

To be honest Mangelwurzel is slowly fading. The DVD drive has failed, The Mousepad has failed, now the sound card is becoming intermitted and failing. The Quadro K3100 is not supported by the official Nvidia Linux driver as it is considered too old.

Unfortunately there is no chance I am going to be able to replace it with anything new any time soon so I continue to use the machine until it falls. Time to start backing up stuff I think.

Do I continue to play with Linux, to be honest I don’t know what to look into given the limitations and issues of the ailing beast. I wish I had a backup plan on this machine but now my i7 desktop is deceased I don’t even have a fallback that isn’t an Apple machine.

And that is a Xeon based Mac Pro 1,1 (ghosting as 2,1 as it has been CPU upgraded). Due to its 32 bit EFI I would have to run a boot modified version of Linux if I wanted to run it and the Nvidia card in the Mac Pro is even older than the K3100 or a similar age as its a Nvidia 5300 video card I think I can’t remember exactly.

But once again it would not be fully Nvidia supported and Mac OS X El Capitan is stopped being supported by Steam on 1 Sept 2023. So it would be limited if it would even work at all.

I need to start making contingency plans for the potential failure of Mangelwurzel. I will continue to run it as long as I can but will have to compensate for another failure. Hopefully it is just minor issues and I can keep it going until I can sort a replacement.

OK well I think that’s enough for now… until next time take care.

[linuxlife]

Linux Life - Episode 80

Welcome back to my eternal play around within the Linux Sphere. So after a very long time I have managed to install EndeavourOS Cassini Nova R2 and it is actually working with my Dell Precision M6800 i7 laptop (Mangelwurzel).

I have tried many others before now and many failed including all of the Fedora modern spins, Ubuntu and much more.

after a long time apparently it is working currently and my internet is not dropping out every five seconds and the nouveau driver works and installed everything correctly (almost).

The only thing which threw me for a while is the sound card didn’t work for a bit but installing a lot of the ALSA-OSS tools and things like Apulse finally got the sound working.

The only problem now is I have not played with Linux for probably about 24 months and I admit my skills are very rusty.

I do remember however to use yay in the terminal as it seems Pamac not a regular thing any more. It did use to be a bit glitchy.

I have installed Cairo-dock.

However has anything new and amazing been made for Linux. I installed Musescore 4.0 which is a program for writing music even though I have absolutely no skill in it what so ever.

I have really lost sight of what Linux has had done in the last 2 years I know Fedora is using Wayland and that’s the way eventually they are all planning to go but I am still using standard X and nouveau.

Obviously now due to the Steam Deck … Steam has many more games via Proton but nouveau doesn’t support Vulkan so it doesn’t matter.

Do I keep it on the i7 until it breaks. No harm in doing so. Linux Life has a potential return but only if there is anything worth reporting on.

Obviously I don’t have a Linux desktop with Linux because I don’t have a working desktop full stop. I can’t even test if my Nvidia GeForce 1030 is working as I don’t have a working PC tower of any form at this time.

Oh well this may be interesting or it may equally be short-lived we wait and see. Until next time … Take care

[linuxlife]

Linux Life Episode 70

Waffle Time 3

Hello ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to my world of Linux Life.  The on going saga of my usage of Linux as a previous Windows user.  Now I know it’s been an awful long time since I wrote and entry here because to be honest I feel I had got rather burned out with Linux.

I had to take some time away and I have spent that time playing with Mac stuff I will not deny.  It has been interesting however it did not cease to amaze me how many things I downloaded for the machine that was from the FOSS library.

Linux of course is one of the major advocates of the Free Open Source Software ecosystem but many a time I found myself installing things like LibreOfffice, OpenShot, Scribus and more which I would never have even thought about using had I not spent so long playing with the various flavours of Linux which encouraged me to try such programs.

Now I admit since I have installed EndeavourOS which is based on Arch I now would struggle to return to such systems as Debian/Ubuntu/Mint and Fedora as their systems seem so archaic by Arch standards.

Now don’t get me wrong if I was ever to run some form of headless server then these would probably be my first port of call as they are designed to be stable and when you are running a server that is what you want.

However as a desktop user I have become very much an advocate of Arch.  OK I still have issues running Shutter direct from the AUR but I have managed to get it running as a Snap using snapd so I can still use the package even if it is in container form.

That’s what I like about Arch, it sometimes puts things out by being on the cutting edge of the latest and greatest versions of such, but normally it’s not a huge inconvenience if the occasional program goes slightly south as they tend to fix it reasonably quick, or if they don’t there is normally some other way of getting the application running.

I’m sure I could use other programs to capture my screenshots such as FlameShot, Greenshot and more but Shutter has managed to capture things that some of these other programs have not managed to capture such as games, so I return to Shutter as it does what I want it to do.

Eventually someone will update the AUR version so it will work with the latest version of Perl (5.30) but until then I will just use the snap.

Sure many see snaps as a walled garden approach but to be honest if I can continue to use the program I want to use I am willing to sacrifice a small amount of my time and a little data if necessary.

The fact that I can use snaps as well as having the option to use the programs from the AUR gives a flexibility that most of the other versions of Linux don’t have.

Things like Linux Mint have even tried blocking the use of snaps because of a disagreement with Canonical.  You can still install snaps on Linux Mint 20 but to do so you have to remove certain files from the code in order to do so.

Would I recommend EndeavourOS as a starter for Linux.  Well I used to think no but to be honest it’s not much more difficult to set up than your average Mint/Ubuntu distribution so why not start with it.

Very rarely have I had to use the pacman commands at terminal level and even when you do it’s not exceptionally difficult to learn.

If you can figure how apt-get works then pacman is nothing by comparison to learn.

Unlike apt-get you don’t have to add fifteen different locations to the list of PPAs etc.  The AUR is a central file repository system that updates itself so you don’t need to remember fifteen sub locations to get the latest program.  The Arch system does that for you automatically.

Now I am sure people are going to say Arch breaks things, well lets just say in the almost eighteen months I have been running Arch based Linux.  It has broken very little and those it has knocked out, normally get updated quickly.

If I have changed Arch systems its normally because I have installed something I should not have and caused my own problem.  Not because of Arch but more likely I tried to install an old version of something which in turn breaks something else.

So most of the time I bring the issue onto myself.  Most of the time if you just go through the standard updates and don’t install fifty two million additional things like I was doing.  The system normally runs without a hitch.

Unfortunately I like to try and get things like games running under Lutris and having to play with certain drivers and Vulkan tricks, so I have had things come and bite me.  However that is not something people do everyday.

I had issues with graphics cards which I struggled to get working under Linux and have screwed up various drivers in the kernel.  But that was not a regular thing I was trying to get an optimised driver working which was experimental and strangely enough I broke my system.

If you fight the main setup expect gremlins, but nine times out of ten most people don’t need to do what I was doing.

Most Arch distributions setup up the system a certain way and it will be sufficient for most users.  I just like to get machines to do things it isn’t necessarily designed for such as run Windows games under Linux and the system sometimes fights back.

However no matter how many times Arch systems have broken on me, most of the time it’s not Arch that was the issue, but me putting in strange scripts where they should not be.

Now many would argue the fact that I have Shutter running using a Snap that the likes of Ubuntu (Canonical) have their use.  Which I honestly can’t deny.  All  I am saying is that due to the flexibility of Arch I can take advantage of most of the available systems including snaps so I don’t need a separate Ubuntu installation to do so.

To be honest I have always said find what appeals to you and use it be that Debian, Mint, Ubuntu, Arch, Gentoo, FreeBSD, Windows, MacOS or any other OS out there that floats your boat.  If you feel it meets your needs happily and you have very few complaints.  Then more power to you.

No OS is perfect if they were the options would not be so numerous as we would have something that worked for everyone.  Until that day we can enjoy the diversifications out there.  There is no right answer to which is the best.  As for one may do something I want but you could not care if it does that and vice versa.

Well I think that’s enough waffle for this episode... so until next time.  Take care.  

[linuxlife]

Linux Life Episode 68

Hello ladies and gentlemen and welcome to Linux Life, my ongoing quest regarding my many foibles in the world of Linux.  Well since last episode I have had a major issue with the i7 desktop.  Very much of my own doing nothing to do with Linux itself.

I was trying to install Cawbird which is a Twitter client basically its an updated version of Corebird.  Now it installed fine however when you were reading through the tweets the emojis were missing.  So I decided to play with the various emoji fonts.

First I installed the Twitter-color-svginot font but rather than the emojis being colour as it states Cawbird seemed to show them in black and white.  So I uninstalled that and installed the twemoji font.  Sure enough the emojis showed in colour but were absolutely huge.  So I installed the fontconfig-emoji package hoping to find a way to make the emojis smaller but to be honest, even though I changed the options in the conf file it seemed not to make any difference.

I was probably putting it in the wrong conf file but it seemed no matter what I changed the emojis were still massive.  Tried setting font size, setting them to scalable but nothing seemed to work.  Uninstalled twemoji font and installed the noto-fonts-emoji font.  once again the emojis were there but massive.

Getting frustrated I saw that this noto-font-emoji set was listed as version 1.1 but there was a version 1.2 on GitHub.  So I downloaded that to run it you had to run install.sh from terminal.  That’s when things went very wrong.

The screen font was suddenly missing numbers and various characters and no matter what I did trying to rebuild the font cache including forcing it and making sure the fonts directory link was pointing to the right directory.  It seemed no matter what I did I could not get the screen fonts back to the way it should be.

In the control centre of Mate all the system fonts were just seen as blocks so my screen was very unreadable.  I tried deleting all the font caches to see if they would rebuild but upon restart I still had a very scrambled screen font setup.

So I had to totally reinstall Linux so now the i7 desktop has changed from Archman Mate up to EndeavourOS Mate.  The only problem was I had to totally format my /home directory as the .config files would probably mess up the system as I knew it’s font caches were incorrectly set.

Luckily I back up regularly so I have not lost anything but a couple of minor zip files which I had not backed and can get again.  Bit annoying, but not the end of the world.  So now both the i7 desktop and the i7 potato are running EndeavourOS.  I must admit I like the new Calamares online installer just make sure you have the latest version before you run it, which i forgot to do the first time and it froze at 29% as i think the arch-keyring had updated so it was throwing it off.

Second time around I noticed the welcome script had an update installer button which once I ran that I had no problems installing EndeavourOS.  I do like that EndeavourOS does give you an option to do an online or offline installation.  Not every version of Linux does that especially when installing Arch.

Still got a few things to install to get everything back in order but it is definitely running fine with EndeavourOS. I’m sure I probably could have saved the Archman Linux setup but every time I tried to adjusted a setting I just seemed to be making it worse rather than better.

So we live and learn.  The ironic factor is I don’t really use Twitter that much and was only installing it so I could see how well / or lack thereof a Twitter client was on Linux.  I guess I should have left well alone.

Well I am going to quit this episode there today.  There is shed loads of Linux distros been released lately such as the 20.04 LTS Ubuntu range, Fedora 32 and probably lots more but it seems that when I write about that sort of stuff very few people are actually interested in it.

I will leave the news to the likes of This Week In Linux and others who are much better at explaining the new features than I ever will.

So until next time ... Take care.

[linuxlife]

Linux Life Episode 55

Hey ladies and gentlemen and welcome back to Linux Life.  My ongoing adventures in the sphere of the Linux world.  There is no fixed schedule for these episode releases due to I don’t always have time to make one every month say consistently.

Anyway since episode I am still playing about with the Xeon.  I managed to add the repo-ck to the listed repos checks.  So now it doesn’t have to rebuild the kernel taking 4 hours it just pulls the latest version from the repo meaning it is a lot faster to update.  Which is good considering it has had two updates since the last episode.

Pamac is still unable to connect to the internet very well so in the end I actually uninstalled it using Yay and have been using that to keep the Xeon up to date.  Yeah I know it’s a terminal thing but I will just have to live with it.

The hope with Arch is using the terminal as little as possible, but if it means I can keep the software up to date its a small price to pay.  In time I hope to upgrade the memory on the Xeon.  Don’t get me wrong 12MB of RAM will ruin most things but its just nice to have that bit of overhead should you need it.

The HP Z400 workstation that it is can apparently be upgraded to 24MB of RAM according to them, but I have seen reports that if you get the right type of 16MB ECC memory it can actually have 48MB of RAM installed.  However that is a long way off as at the moment i have a few things I need to sort before I even think about adding memory to this machine, but it is a future update plan.

I once put more memory in a Mac (can’t remember which one) it worked but was a bit temperamental with the extra ram so I may just settle at 24MB which is enough for most things.

Something I am intending to look at between this episode and next is a program called Scrcpy which allows you to connect your Android phone to Linux and display it on your desktop and control it.  Why you would want to do that I am yet to know, but hey it will be fun to try out.

I was testing the Xeon with emulators.  Now previously when using Amstrad stuff I was using Arnold.  However most do say the best one is Caprice32.  Now Caprice32-git is in the AUR but when you try and build it you get issues with the free-type libraries.  SO I had never managed to get it to run properly from the AUR.

It seems the one in the AUR has not been updated for a long time and I am not even sure if anyone is ever going to update it as it doesn’t seem to have a maintainer keeping it in check.

So I just wanted to see if it was worth all the hype involved.  So I downloaded the source and tried to build it that way.  It also hit the free type error.  The crazy thing is both Freetype and FreeType 2 libraries are on there so I don’t know why it doesn’t compile apparently some file is missing.

So I installed Snapd (yep I can now use Snaps from Canonical), I honestly was not sure it would work given that Snaps are based in Ubuntu and with the differences between Ubuntu and Arch I had no idea whether it would even work.

Sure enough I downloaded the Caprice32 Snap.  Now I know Snaps are a self contained package which includes all the libraries it needs to run so obviously it’s a bit bigger to download.  However I am happy to say it ram just fine.

Now i will admit I was not an Amstrad owner or user so although I have tested the system using DSK files of programs I kind of know.  I really don’t know which Amstrad games are the best ones to look at to show it off.

I did try the Amstrad version of my favourite Spectrum game Tornado Low Level and man does it play slightly different.  If you remain low the plane turns and moves much slower and the wings only sweep back when you get to max altitude and the screen then has a strange effect and the plane absolutely motors along the map.

It’s bizarre to say the least.  It does however seem a lot of Amstrad games were just straight Spectrum ports and given that Amstrad eventually owned Sinclair this is not a huge surprise.

So has anyone got any Amstrad games to recommend to me to have a look at?   If so feel free to add them in the comments or send me info via the Facebook group etc.

Also I installed Vice and Fuse (Commodore 64 and Spectrum emulators) on the Xeon just for test purpose.  The Xeon seems to have no major problem running these.

As a man who absolutely adores emulation I believe I have looked at most of the possible available emulation options for Linux, but if you are aware of any I have not tried or checked out please feel free to let me know about them.

I keep meaning to start on YouTube videos but to be honest I keep backing up on them because I really don’t have a good enough idea to run as a series.

I did intend to do a thing regarding the history of emulation looking at the likes of MAME version 0-.1 and various DOS emulators but the timelines and history is so all over the place.  It would be a nightmare to sort out the spaghetti.

Also many early emulators did not include dates so knowing when they were released is total guess work.  I mean it is amazing some of the emulators that ran in DOS and how well some of them worked.

Maybe one day I will figure a format that works so for now that remains on the back burner for a little longer.  I have no idea if anyone would be interested in seeing old emulators but I think it could be an interesting subject to look at.

MAME 0.1 for DOS only ran five games (Pacman, MsPacman(bootleg), Pengo, Crush Roller and Ladybug).  Regarding Crush Roller the palette was guessed by Gary Walton as they didn’t have the actual palette information to hand.  So Nicola Salmoria and crew ere really winging it in the first MAME release.

Any way I’m waffling on about nothing Linux related so forgive me.  However if I do decide to take this series on I will no doubt be sorting the videos using Linux.

So it’s back to looking at the Likes of Davinci Resolve, KDEnLive, Natron 2, Flowblade etc.   I notice a lot on YouTube seem to use KDEnlive and I have played with it and it seems reasonably easy to use.

I am open to suggestions regarding which video editor is best...  Anyway that’s enough waffle for this episode so until next time.... Take care.