Computing

Linux is now working on my ROG G752VT

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After beating my head against the wall some more I figured out why my NVidia drivers were installing incorrectly. Disabling UEFI in BIOS seemed to do the trick, and hey! Suddenly I could install the latest graphics drivers via driver manager (with the proper PPA added)!. I now have Steam installed, plus Waterfox and some of the basics. Even got the Steam Controller udev rules sorted. Now I’m finally ready to test games on another computer and have a more portable version of Linux.

Now I’ll just need to remember to enable and disable UEFI when booting between Windows and Mint… ugh. :rick:

The way its meant to be installed

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My new NVMe arrived this afternoon! :happy: When I first plugged it into my laptop it ate my boot order for some reason. It was reading my new 970 Pro, and then where my 960 pro should have been there was “SM_NVMeROM” instead. Swapping slots seemed to fix this issue for me.

I underwent my Linux Mint install, and it started off well. Watching it install at super speed was incredible, then once I restarted things began to get tricky… I ran my updates just as you normally would on a new install, and tried to install the latest NVidia graphics driver as the one in the default repo is slightly out of date. I tried running the .run file directly from NVidia’s driver site  and learned that it has to install at the CLI level… the fuck? I tried various tips and tricks from all over the internet but nothing seemed to work, then I saw someone mention installing a PPA and downloading the driver from choice from the driver manager… no dice.

With as easy as it was to setup Mint on my pure AMD desktop I was expecting flying colors on the greener side of the fence; after all I hear people crow all the time about how NVidia has THE BEST Linux drivers evar because they have tons of trained monkeys doing all of the programming!!!!11111… Why in the actual fucking hell do NVidia’s drivers have to be so difficult? It’s 2018… For fucks sake even AMD’s proprietary drivers have a working user interface… What’s NVidia’s excuse? Aren’t they the richer company? I shouldn’t have to search the four corners of the internet for obscure instructions on how to install a fucking graphics driver. As long as problems like these continue to exist on Linux it’ll continue make Windows look more attractive. :zorak:

At this point I can’t help but stare at my linux mint install with an angry glare… I wasted so many hours trying to get this to work, and now I’ll have to shelve it for another time.I’ll come back to it in a few days assuming I can muster up the nerve and set aside more time. Five fucking hours of my time that I could have set aside for a nap, a video, more game testing, gone… :zorak:  I’ll have to start fresh again, fortunately I mainly focused on updates and drivers so no programs or files were copied over. Would suck to do that all over again. I’m going to try and get it up and running as I really want to test Linux on another set of hardware as well as see how the new SteamPlay performs… but if I can’t get this sorted I’ll reformat it and use it for something else.

I hope the open source drivers continue to improve… NVidia can go eat a bag of polyester cockwombles.

Linux Continues To Make Big Headlines

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I know I’ve been talking about Linux lately, with the latest install, Steam’s Proton,, Vulkan among other things, but I’m not alone. Even someone at Forbes has been getting on the bandwagon. This is the second article I’ve seen there, and this time he interviewed the owner of Gaming On Linux, another website that I read quite frequently. They discuss the myths, pros and cons of using Linux vs Windows and its a really interesting read.

So how many games are actually available to play on Linux today? “That’s a little tricky, considering the amount of different stores that actually sell Linux games like Steam, GOG, itch.io, Humble Store and so on,” Dawe says. “Take Steam as an example, specifically looking at just games for Linux it shows me right now there’s 4,800 whereas Windows has 23,882. So on Steam specifically, we have about 20% of the library, which is incredible when a few years ago that was a big fat zero.”

In the last five years I too have seen a multitude of changes. I still remember when I made it into the Steam Linux Beta (I still wear my official TF2 Linux shirts with pride), I remember when there were only a few GoldSource games in my library and not much else, there was no way to really record your gameplay… but it was a starting point. As things progressed we soon found more and more games being ported, game recording programs such as SimpleScreenRecorder came onto the scene and eventually OBS started developing for more than just Windows; known back then as OBS Multi-platform before being known as OBS Studio as it is today, and now we have programs like PlayOnLinux and Lutris for us to play and use our non steam games. Wine has made great improvements over the years, we have DXVK now for running DirectX 11 and 12 via Vulkan, proper audio and video software to showcase our games just as we can under Windows. It isn’t perfect, and they even say that in the article, but Windows wasn’t always the godly OS for gaming. There was once a time when Direct X sucked, and eventually when it did improve they ignored PC users for several years in favor of their precious XBox.

The unofficial Steam Play Compatibility website has been tracking the testing of every Windows game now playable on Steam for Linux. To date, more than 3200 titles have been tested. Of those, nearly 1300 have received “Platinum” status, meaning they not only launch with the simple click of the “Install” button on Steam, but they also have Windows-level performance and framerates.

If you go with a distro like Mint, Ubuntu or a few others they make it really painless for you to get set up compared to how it used to be. This isn’t the case for everything under Linux, after all I did have to research what PPA to download my graphics drivers from, fortunately that information has become easier to find.

I’m seriously considering doing some video tutorials for people who might be interested in playing games on Linux, and Linux videos in general on top of the other videos I crank out. More people need to know that an alternative to Windows might be waiting for them, or at the very least to try dualbooting between Windows and your Linux distro of choice to see how you’ll fare under it. As I’ve stated quite a few times I’ve been staying more in Linux lately, in fact I only went into Windows once this week to do some Photoshop and play a couple games that don’t quite run well under Linux. Am I ready to ditch Windows 10? Not even close, but with the way things are going we may get there someday, or at least scare Microsoft enough to pull their heads out of their asses and make another Operating System that’s on par with WinXP or 7. :trollface:

My portable time machine

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I laid out my virus prank this morning, and had interesting results. He wasn’t afraid of it, in fact it seems he wanted the hard drive to be wiped. He was bummed when I showed him that Windows was still available… and then I loaded Windows 3.11 and that still didn’t really phase him. It wasn’t until I pulled out Norton Commander that I began to hear terror in his voice.

OH THE HORROR!!!

He questioned what the purpose of said program served, and I had a fun time trying to tell him that in the old days this was a good program to do file transfers either between drives and floppies, or networking two computers together. Back in the early days of computing Windows didn’t quite take off yet, so it was either this or manually typing in each command to complete particular tasks. NC was also awesome for making a custom launch menu. I remember using this when I was younger to launch DOS games; it was this and Windows 3.1 (and eventually 3.11) that I switched between whenever I wanted to play something. You know, have to have my Skifree fix. :v:

On another note I also wore a poncho and a sombrero to work today on a dare; same co-worker said if I did so he’d give me a free lunch… I don’t think he remembered. I’ll have to remind him next time we work together. 😛

My Infected Imagination

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During my spare time, when I haven’t been working, playing or anything I’ve been binge watching YouTube videos where people mess with tech support scammers, and more recently been watching old virus porn from the MSDOS to Win95 era. Then it hit me that it would be fun to play a prank on one of my co-workers using a little imagination, and a USB thumb drive with DOSBOX and a neutered virus just to see what his millennial ass will do when he encounters it… I’m a millennial, so I get to say that. 😛

I decided to download one of my favorite viruses from archive.org’s malware museum, a place where you can download and even see the effects of old viruses from a few decades ago. My favorite virus on the site is a fun one armed bandit game; in the old days if you ran this virus it would wipe your hard drive clean and store all of your data in RAM. You have a small chance of saving your data if you win the game, but if you fail you would lose all of your data and have to either rely on your old backups or have to start from scratch. In this current era the virus has been defanged and is completely harmless, all that remains is the threatening message and an addictive game… Oh! and a chance to troll my co-worker. :trollface:

I have it all setup on my thumb drive for tomorrow morning, looking forward to his reaction when he looks at the computer screen tomorrow morning. :trollface:

I also have to say this virus looks quite silly on my Amazon Fire 7 too. Yes, I have malware on my tablet… from the 90’s. :v:

How to revert back to the old Steam Chat UI

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With some people disliking the new Steam Chat Interface and Buddies list I thought I’d share a way to revert the changes.

Windows users:

Go to your shortcut for Steam (or make one)
Right click and select properties
Under target add the two switches at the end of Steam.exe

-nochatui -nofriendsui

Your Target should look like this:

“C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\Steam.exe” -nochatui -nofriendsui

Now, if you’re under Linux:

Right click on your desktop and create a launcher
Name your launcher Steam or whatever you want
Under command type:

./steam.sh -nofriendsui -nochatui

Under working directory type your Steam install location, normally it’s:

/home/yournamehere/.steam

Then you’ll be back to old school chatting in no time. :melon:

CentOS 7 doesn’t like Ryzen

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Naturally when I think about something too much it inevitably causes me to migrate towards whatever I’m thinking about. In this case my Linux install, which has come to a bit of a halt for the time being due to the fact that its kernel is too old for my new chipset. There are a few other options I could try; such as adding another repo and installing a newer kernel via command line. There is also installing another distro entirely, but I wouldn’t be sure what one to go with. I don’t like Ubuntu, Mint left a bad taste in my mouth, and Fedora can go fuck itself with a bag of salted dicks. This is something I’ll have to sit and chew on. :zorak:

Guess it’s back to my shenanigans.. :melon:

Getting my Tux in a row

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I’ve been contemplating a Linux reinstall for quite some time, but wasn’t sure if I wanted to run it in a VM or as a dualboot. I’ve decided on the latter as I want to see how it performs. Linux ran awesomely on my old Xeon setup, crummy AMD GPU drivers aside. But now with Vega and Ryzen, and better drivers under Linux I want to see how things perform from general use to gaming. Most of the software I use under Windows is Open Source or able to run under Linux (how far we’ve come) and this includes my recording and video editing software. 😀 Perhaps I’ll do some side by side comparisons once I get established, and maybe even some videos. I wonder if they have the AMF H.264 codec running under the Linux version of OBS? That would make recording soooooo much nicer, it was one of the reasons why I pretty much did all my work in Windows instead… well there was that and the fact I couldn’t find any video editing software that could compare to Premiere, but with Shotcut I don’t see that as a problem.

So far my transferable list of programs consists of: OBS Studio, Shotcut, Krita, Audacity, VLC, Waterfox, and I recently reinstalled Pidgin (got fed up with Chatzilla). Then of course there’s Steam. :v: It will be great to go between OS’s again. Should be easier now too that I’m using the same audio equipment between both now, my old audio setup had crap Linux support which was why I had to purchase a Digital Analog Converter to get full support for my Shure SM58.

I’m not sure when I’ll start on it, but I’ve already downloaded the latest ISO for CentOS; Now I just need to pick a day to do the deed. :zorak:

Ryzen up to the challenge

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I’m happy to say my new build has passed with flying colors, literally:

I’ve been quite happy with the setup so far. I’m still running at stock at the moment, everything has been running stable with only a couple Windows 10 quirks that doing a couple regedits can easily fix. I’ve already done some benchmarking in 3DMark and a couple Tomb Raider games. Here are my results with both running on the highest settings with Tessellation disabled:

I’ve run 3DMark, but for whatever reason it doesn’t recognize my graphics driver (currently 18.4.1 non beta), will try to run more tests at a later date. I tested Wolfenstein II since it was designed with Ryzen and Radeon in mind, and I can say it runs on Uber settings above 100FPS! :meeseeks: Whereas before it stayed in the 60 FPS range on high, definitely happy with the results. I can’t wait to see how this thing handles large video rendering projects! :happy:

My next goal is to purchase an external Blu-Ray burner, for backing up data (and experimenting with PS3 emulation) but that isn’t a requirement at this time. I’m going to try and take a break from spending lots of money and only save it for the small stuff. As it is I’m coming back up on renewing my webdomain. :rick:

Farewell x58, you were a good chipset

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Well, this is my last night on x58. All in all this setup has served me well for almost a decade with only GPU and CPU changes in between the years. But now it’s time to move onto better, newer and faster things. It’ll be an adventure I’m sure, it’ll be a good thing to look forward to after work, and during my weekend. :melon: