Month: May 2023

Posted on

How I Would Relearn Linux #1: Ventoy

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today I am starting a new series where I drop a beginner-level tip whenever I have a project change direction last minute. Let’s get started!

Multiboot USB

The biggest barrier to entry for installing Linux is creating your first installation media and booting to it. These days, it looks like downloading a program like either Rufus or Balena Etcher and burning a USB thumb drive with a 1 to 4 GB .ISO file, almost always turning the rest of your 8 to 64 GB USB drive into dead weight. If you intend to continue exploring Linux, it’s easy to get in the habit, and soon you will have a collection of spent USB drives mucking up your search for the one drive you saved to transfer text files or pictures.

The solution is to get a large USB and multiboot it using a utility like Ventoy or YUMI. My experience was with installing Ventoy from Linux, and it was as simple as creating any other USB-based bootable media. Since then, whenever I am instructed to “burn” a .ISO file to disk, I just copy it to Ventoy and it shows up.

What’s more is while I was researching for this post, I learned that it even comes with a Windows installer. As usual, be sure to offload any files you wish to keep as they will be lost while setting up Ventoy.

Takeaway

I consider my Ventoy USB to be the most useful tool in my possession. I highly recommend it for anyone learning Linux.

Final Question

With the entire array of Linux distributions to try out, which ones do you keep around on your master USB drive?

I look forward hearing your answers in the comments below or on my Socials.

Posted on

Space Nerds In a Tiny Space

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472 and today I am working on one of my smaller dream projects: a bridge simulator. Let’s get started!

Space Nerds In Space (SNIS) is a LAN game for Linux available as source code hosted on GitHub [1,2]. In it, you and several friends take on the roles of a starship bridge crew manning your stations and going on sci-fi adventures in deep space.

LAN: Local Area Network

I have access to an old church office computer with Windows XP installed. I’m gonna try running it on there. The main site [1] recommends against trying anything less powerful than a Raspberry Pi 4B, but I want an idea of how low the game can go. I’ve set my expectation to “This computer has absolutely no business running this game.”

In old or low-end machines, the weight of an operating system often becomes a significant contribution to resource consumption. At the same time, both low-overhead distros I’ve worked with before (Tiny/Micro Core and Puppy) have specialized package managers, and I’m not up to a self-guided crash course on repositories this week.

My first thought was that I’d prefer access to AUR for an “one-click install,” like how I cheesed it into working on Manjaro. I located an 8GB thumb drive, but the old church computer didn’t appear to be a fan of booting Manjaro. Instead, I researched low-overhead distros which could cleanly install packages from apt. I came across DebianDog Linux which sounded perfect until I learned development had stopped and shelved the idea as a backup plan. Puppy –as I learned– already has the means to use .deb files, so I stashed that as another backup plan in my recent experiences with Puppy, it has to be told to connect each boot.

AUR: Arch User Repository

Bodhi Linux

Further research found me Bodhi Linux, an Ubuntu derivative with downloads as light as 747MB and RAM requirements well under a gigabyte. Its native apt support means access to a large selection of standard packages, which will come in handy when compiling software.

I found my way onto the Bodhi Linux Discord server, where I reported the Arch logo of all things showing up in the installer. After I provided a screenshot from a staged second installation, we figured it was a bug with the installer Bodhi borrows from Ubuntu.

My installation was a success. I found the Moksha desktop maintained in-house [4] to be surprisingly polished, but a bit too flashy for my needs. Were I moving into it as a daily driver, I’d be disabling the animated taskbar icons. The terminal visual bell would also have to go, as I about hear sirens whenever I trip it – and I trip it frequently with my liberal use of tab to complete. I did –however– get around to removing Chromium.

Installing Space Nerds

This was neither my first attempt compiling SNIS nor my first time getting a product out the end, but it was my first time successfully doing so manually. I installed git and cloned the SNIS repository. I passed up my previous attempt by using util/install_dependencies as opposed to finding/installing dependencies manually. My first attempt at opening the compiled program I was… met with a solid green window and the computer crashing hard. I never figured out why, but on attempts where that didn’t happen, I had to wait through a 5 minute, 30-40 second loading screen where I realized later how lucky my second attempt was to have not ended in a massive flicker between black and the desktop – and this second attempt ended in a display of erroneously rendered polygons after a few minutes of play.

I inquired as to SNIS’ minimum system requirements on GitHub [2] and smcameron, the game’s creator, kindly helped me get it “working.” You can read the full discussion here: https://github.com/smcameron/space-nerds-in-space/discussions/333, but to summarize: I provided a number of logs documenting various error states and we figured my graphics card was running out of memory, as I didn’t get a light show when using lower resolution planetary textures.

Takeaway

This computer has no business running SNIS, yet it runs – if only barely. My fun this week was in coaxing this game to running on such an outdated system.

Final Question

What is your go-to low-overhead Linux distribution?

I look forward hearing your answers in the comments below or on my Socials.

Works Cited

[1] S. Cameron, “SPACE NERDS IN SPACE,”github.io, [Online]. Available:https://smcameron.github.io/space-nerds-in-space/ [Accessed May 24, 2023].

[2] S. Cameron, “space-nerds-in-space,”github.com, May 21, 2023. [Online]. Available: https://github.com/smcameron/space-nerds-in-space [Accessed May 24, 2023].

[3] Bodhi Linux, “WELCOME,” bodhilinux.com, [Online]. Available: https://www.bodhilinux.com [Accessed May 24, 2023].

[4] J. Hoogland, “Introducing Moksha Desktop,” github.io, March 3, 2014. [Online]. Available: https://mokshadesktop.github.io/Hello-World/ [Accessed May 24, 2023].

Posted on

SimCity 3000 on Linux Using Lutris

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is shadow_8472 and today I am exploring the feasibility of running SimCity on Linux. Let’s get started!

Short Answer

SimCity 3000 Unlimited refused to run for me. I suspect DRM. I tried the earlier SimCity3000 (1999) on PopOS, EndeavourOS, and Linux Mint through Lutris with progressively worse results. Of note: I found it important to enable dgvoodoo2.

DRM: Digital Rights Management

Have fun. Good luck. You’ll need it.

My Attempts at SimCity3000 Unlimited

While digging through Garage Space, I happened across a copy of SimCity3000 Unlimited. This city building game of yesteryear puts you in the role of mayor and city planner of a city. You must balance zoning, manage public streets, power, and water service, clean up after disasters, and more as you fight to keep your budget in the black. The case says it’s for Windows 95/98, but I remember it running at least as recently as XP.

Gaming on Linux has a fascinating history. In short: the userbase will sometimes “cheat” Windows games into running through the WINE compatibility layer, though it doesn’t always work. Lutris is a multi-game launcher that makes WINE a lot more approachable. I figured there would be no harm in popping the CD in a drive and trying it out. Like all my previous attempts to install a game manually in WINE, I had little-to-no luck.

My efforts were soon split multiple directions. DosBox is a DOS virtual machine. I found a fork called DosBox-X, which claims to run Windows programs up through the 3.x era as they’re basically just fancied up DOS applications. Windows 95 made some major additions, but was still built on DOS until XP dropped it as a base. Consequently, if our Windows 95/98 CD’s/product keys were to show up, they could be installed into DosBox-X and we could again play our period games.

Garage Space was not so kind. With help, I located a bucket each of 3.25” floppies and CD’s. A further CD binder turned up full of drivers, but no Windows 9X install disks. In one of these caches, the original SimCity3000 turned up.

My Attempts at SimCity3000

This earlier version of Maxis’ once flagship game installed nicely on Derpy Chips running PopOS, but failed miserably at anything past the main menu until I turned on dgvoodoo2 under Lutris’s “Runner options” under the game’s configuration popup. I found it very playable, but sound effects were only in my left speaker channel and I got a nasty buzzing sound in the right speaker/headphone if I turned off the music the way I preferred to play.

Moving on, I attempted a more advanced installation on my Upstairs Workstation, where I created and mounted a disk image on my hard drive. This configuration had a better response time, while still requiring the actual CD to be mounted. Unfortunately, there was a serious graphical issue that affected the main menu, all textual popup boxes except the No-CD notification, and the in-game sidebar sub-menus. It’s like animation layers render black instead of clear. The main menu and text boxes mostly look strange, but are perfectly usable. On the other hand, the in-game sub-menus render as black bars and only show their buttons when hovered over. This arrangement might work for someone who is desperate.

Additionally, I tested SimCity on my father’s computer running Linux Mint. The game would not even install to the prefix; a usable, but slightly graphically glitched launcher was all I got. No matter what I tried on any system, I could not improve its respective base issue. In a last-ditch effort to get it working for my father’s computer, I attempted to copy over my WINE prefix from Derpy, but when I found its debug and pasted a prominent error into a search, I learned how WINE’s Intel integrated graphics support is incomplete and unlikely to ever see completion.

Takeaway

This is a progress report. At present, I believe my issues have to do with AMD vs. NVIDIA vs. integrated graphics. I don’t know if I will follow up or not. The main conversation online around SimCity3000 and WINE is focused around the edition from GoodOldGames. The Unlimited edition on CD has practically zero heartbeat – probably because its DRM is incompatible with WINE, like many games not on lists maintained by Lutris or PlayOnLinux (another WINE tool I tried out, but didn’t remember while weaving my narrative). I also learned of a Linux port of SimCity3000 [and Unlimited] by Loki Games through a script for getting it to run on “modern” versions of Linux as of a few years ago, but it went bankrupt reportedly due to piracy.

Running Windows games on Linux is a puzzle. Your particular one may come pre-solved or there might be pieces entirely missing. I am very proud of my first-ever successful “manual” install, even if I used a tool and it still isn’t perfect.

Final Question

Do you know of a good place to learn WINE? Have you had any success playing SimCity on a Linux system?

I look forward to hearing from you in the comments below or on my Socials.

Posted on

Room for New Projects

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472 with a side project of the week. Let’s get started!

I live in a typical middle class, American home in suburbia: master suite, a few bedrooms, shared bathrooms, assorted living spaces, front lawn, back yard, driveway, and a garage. The same or similar goes for each of my hundreds to thousands of neighbors living within walking distance. Some houses are larger or smaller. My family’s cars occupy the driveway, and our garage is brimming with storage buckets to sort through.

The State of Our Garage

We already have a workshop in the garage, but it would be a nice place to house some projects. My robotics lab may have and the still-unfinished photo trunk project have admittedly taken over the art room, and I have been invited to help clean out a space where my stuff can be better consolidated for managing things like excess heat, sound, and/or fumes.

This project is one I’ve been particularly unenthusiastic about whenever it’s come up over the years growing up. We have roughly 100 clear, plastic storage buckets per a brief and incomplete inspection, especially if you start counting the odd cardboard box. While many of them are used for things like holding Christmas decorations, games/puzzles, or sentimental treasures, around a third to half of them are the Big, Bad, Clutter Bucket.

I hate the Clutter Bucket just as much as my parents. I’ve had favorite toys slammed into them wholesale when a parent got frustrated with a messy room; it was so loud and painful, my Autism registered it as yelling despite getting reminded that not a word was being said (parents didn’t have Container Analogy or even a good predecessor). Their cleanup has been [unsuccessfully] used as a condition of engaging in preferred activities (read: chores before play). Threats of outright dumping their miscellaneous contents in the garbage still cause triggering echos when I remember them to this day. And the worst part is that whenever I was sent to find stuff to put away, I honestly never knew where most of it belonged!

Cleanup In Progress

The above back and forth played out for years until Clutter Buckets became an uncomfortable fact of life lurking in the background. It wasn’t until I had a good, parental talk a little over a week ago that my worst anxieties were addressed: a lot of the Clutter Buckets are mostly trash: treasured memories were not being planned for disposal.

This assurance paired with a clear, long-term goal in mind has done wonders for my motivation. It’s still mostly not my mess to clean up, so I cannot be the one sorting things for disposal. What I can do is move buckets and boxes around for my parents to identify and carry out their subsequent instructions.

With teamwork, the empty buckets started to pile up. When we ran out of Clutter Buckets along the walkway through the garage, I spent some time sorting out low-priority buckets, and stacking them in a less accessible area while taking care of some easy boxes and cuing buckets for parental sorting.

A great hunt was made to locate the CD bucket in the hopes of finding a piece of software crucial to a surprise project. I paced the garage for a whole day, checking most buckets at least five times, inspecting the difficult to access ones at least twice, and providing our garage cat to give scritchies over twenty times. The VIP bucket was legit the last one available to lay my eyes on – it was by the pathway all along, hiding at the bottom of our stock of toilet paper packages. The software I wanted wasn’t in it.

I spent a significant portion of Sunday pacing the garage again. Odd pieces of laundry, corroded batteries, and stray CD’s/CD cases were all taken care of, but I felt less productive overall. The highlight of the day was working out provisions to home CD and floppy disk buckets where they can more easily be found: in the network closet. The paper soup in the first box they’re replacing got split between the shredder and recycle, with my father setting a few aside to sort later.

Takeaway

This is an ongoing project. During my survey late Sunday night, I included ten empty buckets – most of which were full two weeks ago. And in case there is any doubt, I love my parents and trust that they were doing the best job of raising me they could. Mistakes were made and trauma was had, but lessons were learned and forgiveness was had.

Final Question

I’ve had a Podman project stuck for months just trying to mount a volume hosted on a drive mounted over NFS. Have you ever had success in this apparently niche department?

I look forward to solving this issue with someone either in the comments below or on one of my Socials.

Posted on

A 3DPrinter Only as Good as Its Parts

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472 with a side project for the week. Let’s get started!

I’ve had a hit/miss relationship with my 3D printer. Some of the time, it works great, but when it’s not, I’m having to scavenge a solution to whatever is ailing it.

Fan


One fateful project, I chipped a couple fan blades off in my attempt to service it while in operation; it seemed like a good idea at the time. Don’t repeat this mistake at home. In the case you do, there exist sets of replacement blades. I was able to print one up on my damaged printer, and were it not for clipping right through one of the posts holding the motor in place, it would have worked beautifully. Instead, it would grind loudly whenever I started the printer up. I would always have to tap it a few times until it managed to find its balance.

The only real fix for this problem was a replacement fan. We had to be careful when ordering one when considering its size, voltage, and pin count. We ended up with a close enough match I was able to install it with few questions – there are tear-down tutorials for in-depth instructions. The cord was way longer than it needed to be, so for my installation, wrapped it around the box behind the printhead a couple times before plugging it in.

Bed

And then there is the printer bed. Metal warps with heat cycles – especially when it’s made on the cheap. Aluminum print beds are no exception. Mine has reached the point of unusability having formed itself into somewhat of a slight bowl or saddle. Note that this is after giving it a gnarly scratch right in the middle.

This too took a replacement part. We ordered one for my specific model of printer (Maker Select Plus) and it arrived at the same time as the fan. Judging by follow-up research, borosilicate glass is preferred as a print surface, though cheaper, more thermally sensitive glass like you’d find in windows can also work as long as the operator is careful. My glass plate is affixed with four small binder clips, which I will need to mind as my favorite test print for leveling the bed sends the extruder right through them.

Takeaway

One key element I was not prepared for before printing a Benchy this week was hair spray. Makers love their Aqua Net hair spray. Another common-sense recommendation was not to use the metal spatula that came with the printer as it could damage the new bed.

Final Question

Have you ever 3D printed on glass? I look forward to hearing about your experience in the comments below or on my Socials.

Privacy Policy