Category: Linux

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My Pi 400 Travel Desktop

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow8472, and today I am trying out my Raspberry Pi 400 as a lightweight daily driver. Let’s get started.

rPi 400

The Pi 400 is a special edition of Raspberry Pi – essentially a Pi 4 built into a keyboard. It’s missing a USB 2.0 port (made up for by the keyboard) and the 3.5mm audio jack. In theory, the miniature keyboard computer is perfect for travel – assuming you have a screen at your destination that is.

Choosing a Distro

My first thought was to try installing Arch. A brief search found an Arch on ARM project as vanilla Arch only supports x86 architecture. The instructions involved formatting a drive on the terminal. I bought a 256 GB SD card and did so on the first convenient rPi install I had – Kali linux.

It took a few failed attempts to install Arch. The pure open source method that reportedly works on the regular Pi 4 didn’t on my Pi 400, and the standard method wasn’t cooperative when installing a login manager and any of a few desktop environments. Running on a time crunch before leaving on a trip, I switched to DietPi, another lightweight distro I’ve worked with before for, but for a much different project. As with Arch, MATE was uncooperative, so I settled with XFCE. Special thanks to Balena Etcher for a special warning when formatting large drives.

Packing For a Trip

To shortcut setup, I copied my browser and LibreOffice data from my main desktop. LibreOffice worked for me, but didn’t carry the full dark mode – a problem I’ve encountered before, but ultimately decided to live with.

Firefox ESR –as installed from DietPi’s hedged garden– refused to accept my profile. Regular Firefox –installed from the apt repositories– was up to date and started as expected. Notably, it included my extensions – especially Bitwarden, my password vault.

A screen was not procured at my destination, so I packed one from home. The missing audio jack was also problematic, so I packed my Blue Yeti with plans to disable voice monitoring. For redundancy, I packed an HDMI monitor, but busted the ​​styrofoam while stuffing it into the slightly wrong box. As of writing, I have done nothing with sound.

Deployment

We left on our trip. Upon arriving, I found my over-packed tech bag lacked a long enough HDMI cable. I borrowed a longer one. The monitor signal kept flickering. For a while, I assumed I was overloading the Pi with a couple hundred browser tabs, but after a power blink and several reboots, it came out that the HDMI was bad. We bought a replacement, and it’s been working properly since.

Ejected Challenges

Arch wasn’t the only thing I had to back off from. I brought a couple additional Pi 4’s to have myself a nice, little network with Pi-Hole ad blocking, but Wi-Fi strength and configuration challenges meant those were both a no-go.

Another challenge I want to pull off is playing Stardew Valley. I copied the files over back home, but haven’t had time to try the conversion I found yet.

Takeaway

Finishing a project as a rule is better than stalling an overly ambitious one. I have an on-the-go workstation, even though it still lacks polish.

Of special interest, this week marks the 6th anniversary of my Robotics Lab. And some months ago, I decided I wanted to do a Sabbath year cycle. I’ve proven that I can be consistent at posting, even if I feel my quality slips some weeks. The facts of the matters is that weekly posts are getting a bit repetitive for me, so for the next year, I’m only going to post when I finish a major project, such as when I have the full software suite I have in mind for my homelab. After that, perhaps I’ll stick to monthly. We’ll see in a year’s time.

Final Question

Setting up a travel computer on the quick was a bit of a trick. What must-haves would you include in a similar package?

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

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My Best Computer Comeback Ever

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472 and today I have the story about how I almost lost my main computer. Let’s get started.

The Fall

Thankfully, I rarely need my reset button. Most of the time it gets hit by accident. EndeavourOS has been a good daily driver, but my system recently bombed hard – a crash I have never seen before and hope to never see again. Resetting wasn’t enough.

My main workstation uses systemd-boot, GRUB’s little cousin among boot loaders. Its job is to load an operating system when called, and it wasn’t responding. I poked around. My old, unupdated installation of Manjaro managed to load, but it wasn’t consistent. For some reason, EndeavourOS only appeared bootable in Legacy BIOS mode – even though it would hang at systemd-boot because it is UEFI only. I eventually ran out of combinations to try and loaded an alternate BIOS ROM. You know it’s a bad day when BIOS beeps thrice over a minute and hangs.

Clearing CMOS

At this point, I was outside my repair experience, but when I asked my father for help, he recalled a trick an IT guy pulled at his work to clear an unapproved BIOS lockout password. The motherboard has a jumper for clearing CMOS. Think of it like a factory reset. We found the user’s manual and followed its instructions, restoring the original ROM.

Failed boots eat a ton of time, but at one point I loaded Windows when Manjaro’s GRUB installation apparently failed completely. I searched for my GRUB disk and had to make a new one. When I did, it could only boot Manjaro in any configuration. I tried swapping SATA cables around, but that only made Windows vanish. Last I looked, its drive was zero bits in size.

Repairing my Boot Loaders

Even a jank boot method is better than nothing. Trouble is that Manjaro was horribly out of date, and needed a manual intervention. I installed EndeavourOS to avoid this very mess. A number of package names had changed, and there were a couple sets of mutually dependent packages. I think I had to mark around five to seven for removal before it went through. The longest part was sitting through package verification every time. GRUB was then a standard and easy re-install.

I found a line-by-line systemd-boot reinstall tutorial for my EndeavourOS drive. I sadly don’t have a link because I wasn’t yet planning on this being my topic for the week and I was kind of in panic mode. What I do remember is that I expected to need chroot, but I looked at the documentation (man page / <program> -h / <program> –help) and the command was flexible enough to point it at my broken installation. It was also a pain to find because so many search results were either about GRUB and/or Windows.

The Importance of Cable Management

While I had my computer apart diagnosing SATA cables, I took the opportunity to mount my third solid state drive. Previously, I only had access to cables with L shaped connectors on one end, but I have a package with a bunch of double-straight ones now. I had two free motherboard connections, and the straight ends let me stack my Linux drives in my compatible bracket while my [defunct?] Windows drive now gets a single-SSD bracket.

Alarmingly, my computer started making a bit of noise once I had it all back together in its place and I had started up a game. Turns out a ribbon cable going between the motherboard and front panel was pushed into the fan blades on my GPU, which was simple to fix.

Takeaway

Surprise topics are rarely fun. But solving these problems as they come up is how you learn Linux.

Final Question

What I could not find an answer to was if systemd-boot systems can be booted from a GRUB disk at all. I’m guessing no because systemd-boot is more integral to Linux than GRUB. Do you know how close or far I am? I look forward to hearing from you in the comments below or on my Socials!

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Joystick Server Reinstall

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow8472, and today I am rebuilding Joystick, Button Mash’s twin Rocky Linux server. Let’s get started!

Project Goals

This is a revival of my photo scanning project, first and foremost. I need to get it working, and while I will afford myself some time to experiment with doing it right, it’s more important I get it done. Once I have it working better than Button Mash, I can move my production flag over to Joystick and remodel Button Mash “properly.”

And by “properly,” I mean rootless Podman access to a network attached storage. I have explored NFS (Network File System) extensively, but Podman does things with userspace that NFS doesn’t support. I may need to be open to an alternative or using root. SSHFS lays a file system over SSH, but

Installation

I did my usual stuff when installing Linux. I remembered ahead of time that Joystick doesn’t work with Ventoy, so I flashed a USB (Balena Etcher) large enough for the full 10 GB image I downloaded. I did a clean install over its previous Rocky Linux installation. I also adjusted Joystick’s boot order so Rocky 9.4 loads by default. The system is dual booted with Linux Mint, where I did an apt update/upgrade.

Booted to Rocky, I enabled Cockpit web interface for remote management, a feature I selected for installation with the system. I created a limited user for running Podman, enabled lingering on it, got Cockpit logged into it as a “remote host,” and disabled normal password interactions. I pulled Podman containers for Caddy, Nextcloud, MariaDB, Redis, BusyBox, and Vaultwarden, and gave each a directory with a start.sh and a mountpoint. I excluded Pi-Hole and Unbound from my planned lineup because those functions are now handled by our router and would have required messing with special ports.

Troubleshooting

NFS fought me hard though. It didn’t help that Cockpit’s terminal kept glitching out on me. I noticed this behavior on ButtonMash’s Cockpit as well. Rebooting and refreshing didn’t do anything, but I found a control by navigating my browser away and back. I eventually got to thinking about what other parts it might be, and I came up with a bad version of Firefox, or Wayland. I ran Firefox over SSH on a machine still running Xorg server; it was Wayland.

And at this point, my workstation had a record bad meltdown, which ate my remaining blog time. Be sure to read about it next week!

Takeaway

Projects get interrupted. Something comes up and grand plans wait in the background. I’m tired of server doing just that, but it’s happened again.

Final Question

My longest enemy remains: Rootless Podman vs. Network Storage. How do I do it? I look forward to hearing from you in the comments below or on my Socials!

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KDE Wayland: My Second Impressions

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

Riding the bleeding edge with EndeavourOS, my upgrade from KDE 5 to 6 when the default implementation was moved from Xorg to Wayland. The deal breaker for me was Discord not displaying messages properly as I type. I retreated to KDE 6 Xorg.

That was almost a couple months ago. Xorg has worked since then, but it was a little love starved having to share developer time with KDE Wayland. But I understand; there are only so many developers, and their main focus is getting Wayland working. On an update/reboot cycle, I decided to check out their progress. I have to say it’s not bad. The bug from earlier is resolved, at least.

Not all my settings transferred over. In particular, my mouse pointer got stuck when crossing a boundary on my multi-screen display. This setting was found in System Settings/Mouse & Touchpad/Screen Edges/Edge barrier. I set it to 0 pixels, disabling the feature.


OBS (Open Broadcast Software) had trouble seeing the screen due to windows in Wayland not being able to see outside themselves. It now needs some kind of screen caster that shows up in my system tray.

The obvious difference I can’t help is spotty performance from my taskbar window previews. Oftentimes, they don’t even load when I mouseover them. Other than that, there are new interface sounds I’ve already been living with, but haven’t found the way to turn them off.

Takeaway

Technology marches on. Legacy software becomes obsolete. There are bumps along the way, but the KDE Wayland’s are smoothed enough that I can jump over now. In another couple months, I expect the experience will be virtually unnoticeable.

Final Question

Have you ever rode the bleeding edge and had to come back later? I look forward to hearing from you in the comments below or on my Socials!

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Can Linux See a GameCube Controller?

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 Nintendo GameCube controller on my desk ever since I got a USB adapter some months ago. I poke at it every so often, trying to confirm it working in Linux, but in late June of this year, things came together.

Computer: Derpy Chips
Distribution: PopOS 22.04
Desktop Environment: KDE Plasma 5.24.7 (Qt 5.15.3)
Product: DragonRise Inc. Controller Adapter

In my research, I read about this product working with Dolphin Emulator on Linux, if not elsewhere. Dolphin sounded like a good first stop, and one day I sat down with enough patience to compile it. It needed a few tries before I read a guide on Dolphin’s GitHub explaining how the project has dropped qt5 support [1]. However, my qt version can use backports.

I installed my compiled Dolphin package. Now for a ROM. Commercial games are illegal to download, but I can either dump my own games (not in my skill set yet) or find a homebrew game. GameCube only has one such title I found worth mentioning: Toy Wars. It’s not even an exclusive – probably because it’s basically a baby Wii/Wii U on the inside.

Long story short: Toy Wars gave me a black screen. I happen to know the Wii has tons of Homebrew, so I found another guide [2] that walked me through performing a system update, netting me the Wii menu, the Homebrew channel, and then a content browser layered on top of that. While significantly hampered navigating this browser using the emulated Wii remote, I found and downloaded a free homebrew game about dogging space junk.

And still nothing from the GameCube controller. It showed up with the command “lsusb,” but Dolphin’s configuration options said it didn’t have permission. There was the missing link. By default, Linux is a lot more locked down to strange USB peripherals than Windows. I had to make a file under “/etc/udev/rules.d” describing my controller adapter and granting these missing permissions.

$ cat /etc/udev/rules.d/51-gcadapter.rules
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ENV{DEVTYPE}=="usb_device", ATTRS{idVendor}=="057e", ATTRS{idProduct}=="0337", MODE="0666"

The 51 in the name has to do with what order this and similar rules overwrite each other. There are a ton of possible parameters for the file contents, but idVender and idProduct can be found with the “lsusb” command where it says ID vvvv:pppp. Mode is the same as file permissions ([user, group, everybody]x[read*4+write*2+execute*1]).

Takeaway

From further observation, I concluded these changes let Dolphin reach out to find the state of my controller[s]; no events are triggered in Xorg, as happen for the mouse and keyboard. Long term, I have a gag goal of writing a custom driver so I can use my GameCube controller however I like, but I didn’t get that this go-around. Oh well.

Final Question

I couldn’t find out what the leading 0 is supposed to represent. If you know, I look forward to hearing from you in the comments below or on my Socials!

Works Cited

[1] Dolphin Emulator, “Building for Linux,” github.com, May 31, 2024. [Online]. Available: https://github.com/dolphin-emu/dolphin/wiki/Building-for-Linux. [Accessed: June 25, 2024].

[2] Nintendo Homebrew, “Installing Homebrew Channel on Dolphin Emulator,” 2024. [Online] Available: https://wii.hacks.guide/homebrew-dolphin.html. [Accessed: June 25, 2024].

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Linux Phone Milestone: Moving In

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472 and today I am moving into my PinePhone. Let’s get started!

Previously

After around four years of ownership, my PinePhone UBports Edition has PostmarketOS/Phosh and is working on a network. Now that the big solar storm is over, it actually gets signal.

Password Adjustment

Before I properly move into my phone, I have a couple more topics to explore first. One: I need a relatively short user password to unlock from sleep. At the same time, I also want to require a longer password for admin functions. Two: I set up Full Disk Encryption (FDE) while installing PostmarketOS, with testing in mind. I need something a bit less guessable.

The root password can be required in a number of ways from a special admin account to not having sudo. I tried the later, and dependencies insisted it stay. Online search results were frequently more into removing admin privileges entirely, but I did pick up on the history and intended context of sudo as being programmed to easily revoke root access when no longer needed – as well as log commands used so IT knows who did what and hopefully how to fix it. One detail of note was the wheel group (as in a car’s steering wheel). Early Unix required wheel to su (Substitute User) into root, but it’s not a universal standard.

Or I can configure sudo by editing /etc/sudoers. Using visudo is recommended to check syntax, but it dropped me into vi/vim, which I’m having none of. I installed nano, then tried/failed to set it as system default text editor. Otherwise, I might have tried a configuration where sudo just asks for the root password. Instead, I commented out the line giving users with the wheel group sudo privileges. (NOTE: While finalizing this post, I found this may break app stores. Next post about PinePhone, I will try requiring the root password instead.)

With sudo hobbled, I learned more about FDE. As it just so happens, PostmarketOS was built for it. I got the name LUKS (Linux Unified Key Setup) and a hint that the boot partition might need to be left unencrypted by the time a community member on the Pine64 community gave me the exact command to change my key:

$ sudo cryptsetup luksChangeKey /dev/mmcblk2p2 -S 0

In my case, I double checked the partition name before performing it with su instead of sudo.

Update on August 8, 2024: I disabled SSH password login, requiring key login instead.

Moving In

Confident I had secured it to my skill level, I did some more “normal” new phone/computer behaviors, such as finding the dark theme, using AM/PM, and adjusting automatic sleep times. My background image had to be moved over with scp (Secure CoPy) and it took a reboot before it showed up. I also moved my ringtone and notification sound over from my previous phone in the same way, installed them, and rebooted again. While it would have made things a little easier, I’m forgoing on NFS access until my homelab servers are moved away from common LAN subnet addresses.

Moving my old contacts list wasn’t too hard either, though I did get help from an automaton app on the Android side to export to .vcf format (Variant Call File). I then used an SD card to move them over. Phosh’s default contacts app by The GNOME Project accepted it no problem. The longest part was weeding out stale contacts going back to high school.

The luck ended with WayDroid. One goal for this phone is demoing Android apps in on Linux. Waydroid looks like the best option. I installed it no problem, but initialization took a few attempts when the 2 minute sleep kept corrupting a large download. From there, I tried installing an F-Droid client, but I got an error in-terminal about the WayDroid session stopping.

Takeaway

My Linux phone is not completely stable by any stretch of the imagination. It keeps crashing, the battery feels like a joke – and overall, the thing feels slow no matter what I do. But remember that I have an early prototype aimed at developers and enthusiasts. Pine64 has production models released, and they aren’t the only ones making phones to run Linux. I am just thankful they didn’t make the screen so big they had to mutilate it to accommodate the camera.

Final Question

Blunder! I just noticed the local app store hangs when trying to install… maybe? Probably because of my sudo configuration, but I will need more time with it as I build up a to-do list for another follow-up post. What all should that to-do list contain?

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Milestone: First Linux Phone Call

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472 and today I am messing around with my prototype PinePhone to see if I can’t get it on the cell network for good. Let’s get started!

My Carrier History

Around four years ago, my family had to switch away from a cellular company that let its coverage degrade. We’d been with them since I was small, but for whatever reason, they opted to wait for new technology before replacing a destroyed tower. They lost us as customers over it. I had just gotten my PinePhone at the time. I had made one short call on it.

I made an honest effort to research network compatibility and thought I had made a match, but our then-new carrier turned out to be very closed-minded about allowed 3rd party devices. I poked at it for a while, learning a little bit each time, but progress was very slow.

In recent months, the family’s phones have been succumbing to planned obsolescence. I found a carrier for my area on the PinePhone’s compatibility chart, and we made the switch.

Linux Phone Basics

Unlike phones in the Apple/Android ecosystems, Linux phones run Linux. It won’t argue if you install –say– the full version of Firefox instead of one optimized for a mobile desktop environment. While using an app store is an option, the command line is available for those who wish for a challenge on a touch screen.

I am the proud owner of a PinePhone Ubports Edition, the second prototype phone produced by Pine64. It originally came with Ubuntu Touch installed, but the experience was kind of slow. This led me to look into lightweight options, and I flashed PostmarketOS/Plasma Mobile to an SD card to explore.

Recent Developments

I finally committed. While working on another project within the past month, I installed PostmarkedOS internally. My first mistake was trying to approach this installation as a normal Linux installer. Nope. It had me configure everything from the command line. My second mistake was installing a desktop grade version XFCE. While I still had access to a terminal, the sub-compact on-screen keyboard was a crutch at best, but I used it to 1. connect to Wi-Fi, 2. update and install Plasma Mobile, and 3. remove XFCE – all while trying to get it ready to test at the new carrier’s store the next day.

The next day came, and things worked out so I could be at the store. Good thing too, because I had previously disabled my modem by a dip switch under the back cover. I also noticed a bunch of apps missing from my minimal Plasma Mobile installation, and I kept mistaking some sort of configuration app for a browser. I made the connection later.

Ultimately Plasma Mobile kept crashing, so when I went back to my SD card, I did some more research and chose Phosh (Phone Shell), an even lighter weight desktop environment developed my Purism for their Librem 5 phones. So far, no memorable crashes, but I’ve not stress tested it yet.

Access Point Name

So, I put my new SIM card into my PinePhone running PostmarketOS/Phosh, and I got intermittent signal thanks in part to a combination of only using on 4G technology and solar activity strong enough to decorate night skies across the US in aurora borealis. The catch was an error manifesting as an orange square with a black exclamation mark.

While waiting for an afternoon to help out at the church office for the afternoon, I reached out to the Pine64 community on a whim. Shortly after, a helpful user there walked me through setting up the correct Access Point Name based on my carrier. Minutes later, I received an important incoming call, and the connection held up for minutes, unlike the seconds I would get out of Plasma Mobile (Thank you, Jesus for that timing!).

Takeaway

I am thankful to have a working phone again. I still have challenges ahead, like filching apps from the Play Store using Waydroid (or a similar compatibility layer) and having a simple unlock password while using a longer password for disk encryption and administrative tasks.

Final Question

Did you get a chance to see the northern lights this time around? I look forward to hearing from you in the comments below or on my Socials!

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Roadmapping Switching to Linux Phones

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472 and today I am dusting off my studies of Android in response to happenings around the family. Let’s get started.

Phones and Privacy

This round started with my father’s phone screen burning out. He got it repaired, but my sister’s phone screen was cracked, and I ended up giving her my otherwise unused one of the same model.

Consumer privacy has been an increasingly important question as computers integrate more tightly with our everyday lives. We now live in a time and place where most everyone old enough to read is coerced by convenience into loading themselves down with every tracker known to Man unless restrained by applicable law. And this issue will only continue to grow as technologies such as consumer VR and clinically installable neural interfaces mature and facilitate the collection of ever more intimate personal data. Legislation isn’t keeping up, but a minority of people unsatisfied with this status quo are developing open source alternatives that either let end-users mitigate abuse of technology by obfuscating their data or preventing its collection entirely.

My goal is to one day have the family on Linux phones. OK, what are the main obstacles? From previous research, cell network compatibility has been big, but support from our current carrier is nil the moment I read off my prototype PinePhone’s IMEI number (an individual cell modem identifier). Additional general knowledge research turned up that banking apps have a tendency to really hate working on Android devices without Google’s seal of approval.

Phone Carriers

Most major cell companies will prefer you buy a phone on credit that’s been locked to their network for a couple years. Per contract, you don’t get admin privileges until it’s paid off and unlocked – assuming you still have a unit at the end. Even if a service has a bring-your-own-phone program, it may be limited to a short list of models, even if your unapproved unit is compatible with the wireless technology[ies] their network is built on (which I believe was the case last time we switched carriers). Even then, a phone may only be compatible between any combination of calls, texting, data, or other wireless functionalities.

Complicating the matter for me specifically, I cannot even comfortably look at pictures where a part of the screen has been sacrificed for a camera “island” per the modern trend. I need a phone with like goodies in the bezel where they belong. After doing some research, I narrowed my choices down to the Librem 5 and the PinePhone Pro. General research on each for this week turned up year-old criticism about the American made Librem 5 refunds to weigh against the PinePhone being assembled in China like most other personal devices. I looked up each and found a compatibility chart for each and made a better informed recommendation to my parents for when we switch carriers.

Android On Linux

One high priority feature my parents are after in their phones is mobile deposit. That’s not happening on a week’s notice, even if I had a phone already to try it on. From a software point of view though, a Linux desktop is essentially identical to a Linux phone minus a cellular modem, SIM card, and miscellaneous other peripherals.

Many tools exist specifically to run Android apps on desktop. This week, I explored running BlissOS custom ROM on QEMU/KVM. QEMU and KVM took a while to straighten out, so I might be mistaken here, but QEMU is an emulator/hypervisor and KVM is a Linux kernel module for virtualization QEMU can optionally use for direct access to hardware for improved performance. Along the way, I was recommended in the direction of using an AMD graphics card instead of Nvidia. That meant using Derpy Chips, a computer from before Intel came up with the special circuitry needed for this kind of virtualization…

…Well, it looks like I’ve been carrying some bad info around, because this virtualization circuitry has been around for a lot longer than I thought! I navigated Derpy’s BIOS (Yeah, I know I’ve made a stink about them being UEFI and not BIOS, but they’re labeled BIOS despite being UEFI.) to turn on virtualization and and I got a proof of concept going. I tried using its command line installer, but couldn’t figure out how to work anything related to the hard drive. I could consistently get to –I assume– a live session run directly off the disk image. I successfully accessed the Internet from within the VM, but installing apps or even trying to make an entry on the file system remains an unsolved issue. Nevertheless: this is major progress.

Takeaway

Android at its core was made open source by Google to catch up to the iPhone. Now that it’s ahead, they’ve had seasons of moving as much of the definitive experience out of the public eye, but that’s not kept people from making custom ROM’s. While my next major goal in this project is to install an app, the another blockade on my developing road map is SafetyNet. When I get there, I’ll want to look up Magisk and Shamiko, two names I came across pertaining to the Android custom ROM community.

I’ll also note that I still have additional options to try, like something based on containerization. While writing this up, I took a second look at WayDroid, which I dismissed assuming it wouldn’t work in an X11 environment, and it just might.

Final Question

Do you have any experience with Linux phones? I would be most interested in hearing from you in the comments below or on my Socials!

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How I Would Relearn Linux #7: Wandering

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today I am back with another Linux-learning tip. Let’s get started.

This edition of How I would Relearn Linux will be a bit heavier on the story side, but I’ll try to make it as interesting as possible. If I totaly lose you, feel free to skip to the Takeaway before making your way back to where you left off.

DerpyChips, one of my two daily drivers, has had a longstanding problem with running Discord where the proper installation crashes after updating (if applicable). I have it installed as a Snap installation, which got it working, but costs me my KDE themed mouse pointer, which I’m quite fond of. I thought to fix it as a side project. For the record, none of these hammers work: restarting the program, rebooting, reinstalling.

When in doubt, launch a failing program from the command line. I caught an error and looked it up, which landed me on Reddit where one user had fixed the exact same problem by finding a better driver. Derpy has an AMD card, so I looked through AMD’s site for the proper proprietary driver. It took an hour or so, but I found a list of 32 and 64 bit drivers for my exact card – they were just seven years old! The card is about twice that.

Now, I faced a dilemma. AMD’s driver might be the most compatible, but will it work with KDE 6, which I expect Derpy may be running within a year barring any major hardware upgrades? I have doubts. Besides, I didn’t feel like cleaning up a driver bricking my installation anymore. I’ll probably seek out an open source driver at a future date once I gathered a bit more background knowledge.

Along the way, I noticed a couple abbreviations tied to the graphics system: EGL and GLX. A search brought me to a Hackaday post about Firefox 94 and above switching from GLX to EGL as window management transitions away from the legacy X11 window management system in favor of Wayland for lower overhead, better security, and closer access to the hardware [1]. The top comment lamented this transition finishing with, “Sadly the kids don’t want a fun OS that does cool things like let you run your program on one machine but display it on a second. I guess they just want an OSX that they didn’t have to pay for.” My surprise died down when I read the screen name: XForever. The comments in reply were a frenzy of reports claiming X11 remote display either “never did [work]” [X], “worked perfectly fine 20 years ago and still does” [Traumflug], “only ‘worked’ because network security was a joke 20 years ago” [Pat], and that slow network could make or break the experience [Guest]. One user [raster] went back to refute XForever’s complaint with a link to a Git for Waypipe.

While the conversation brought up other methods of graphical computing from another device, like VNC (Virtual Network Client) and RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol), SSH caught my attention [Redhatter (VK4MSL)].

ssh -CY user@remotehost x11client

The unfamiliar flags turn out to mean compressing the datastream and trusting something to do with X11. I had to try for myself.

Logging in to my father’s computer, I brought up FreeTube over SSH no problem. I then tried MultiMC’s start script, and something errored out and it came up on his screen. I thought that was it without making a custom script or at least an export command, but I tried running bash as my x11client. It came up without prompts or access to command history, but when I called up the script, I got a window. The game itself was a bit slow to play given how choppy the video was, but it was good enough to navigate to an AFK point – until I turned up the graphics with extra shaders, then it dropped to 1fps.

Takeaway

Allow yourself to wander. Poke at annoying, non-critical problems every so often. Even if you don’t get to where you intended, you can still end up learning something objectively cool. I can see this tool will be very useful

Final Question

What cool stuff have you found by allowing yourself to wander?

Work cited

[1] M. Carlson, “Firefox Brings the Fire: Shifting from GLX to EGL,” hackaday.com,Nov. 23, 2021. Available: https://hackaday.com/2021/11/23/firefox-brings-the-fire-shifting-from-glx-to-egl/ [Accessed Mar. 25, 2024].

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How I Would Relearn Linux #6: Bleeding Edge vs. Stable vs. Enterprise

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472 and today I have another installment in how I would relearn Linux. Let’s get started!

The Linux ecosystem has a lot of moving parts within easy view of the end user. Various distributions curate these often redundant parts in line with their respective goals. For example: how new do you like/want/need your software?

If “Cutting Edge” is the latest and greatest, then developers and enthusiasts willing to volunteer time and effort reporting bugs and provide feedback for new features belong on the “Bleeding Edge” – typically using a some sort of rolling release or compile-it-yourself based package manager.

On the hand, if the system’s goal is to not need sudo every few days, a stable system like Ubuntu or one of its many downstreams may be a better choice, but know that distros aimed at an Enterprise audience may leave you spending excessive amounts of time dumpster diving through backports for missing dependencies trying to compile source code when a two-year-old feature comes up missing (ask-me-how-I-know).

My pick is that I maintain a bit of everything. I have two computers I use as daily drivers. One runs EndeavourOS and another PopOS. EndeavourOS is Arch-based and on a rolling release while PopOS is Ubuntu-based with releases every few months. This way, if major changes break something with software I use across both devices don’t hit me all at once. Just this past week, I re-booted into KDE 6 on EndeavourOS and Discord immediately started having problems displaying messages as I draft them and occasionally the whole window would black out until interacted with. Turns out KDE 6 defaults to using Wayland instead of the old graphics display system, X (also called xorg, X11, x.org, etc). These are/this is [a] bug[s] that need[s] attention before X is retired from mainstream use. I now know to look out for it/them when KDE 6 comes to PopOS – probably sometime later this year. For now, X is still around in case a fallback is needed.

Takeaway

While my alert system to changing conditions is adequate for me at this time, another approach to consider is staying current on news regarding projects you use. I didn’t note his name, but I did come across someone saying he read about the KDE 6 Wayland. Time will prove the choice pioneering or foolish.

Final Question

Where do you balance on the innovation vs. stability scale?

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