There was a LOT of Linux today. I dusted off my old gaming laptop and upgraded it from Manjaro 20 to 24, and spun up the ArchLinux VM for the GMod servers. I should have them up and running tomorrow evening if everything goes according to plan for the servers, and the laptop is pretty much done. Tomorrow I’ll work on the Samba shares and port forwarding, something to do to keep my mind off other things.
Manjaro
The Tablet Lives Again!
Fully up and running on Manjaro 23! Everything is sync’d back up and ready for tomorrow! I did feel kind of naked only taking my Steam Deck to work today. The internet usually sucks at work so I wouldn’t have gotten a lot of reading done anyway. I did get a tiny bit of Whisker Squadron Survivor in during lunch at least. Maybe tomorrow I can resume a bit of animation. 😀
I just need to tweak a few things on my tablet, then I can set it into sleep mode along with myself.
When Life Fucks Your Tablet, Unfuck It
My plans ended up taking a bit of a detour today due to a giant fuck-up on my tablet, which did give me an excuse to put Windows on it to run overdue firmware updates. I just finished installing and updating it to the latest Manjaro! I’ll continue working on it tomorrow after I get off work. I’ll need to install the Surface Kernel, and get it tweaked the rest of the way. I have a perfect canvas awaiting me when I get my free time. Until then I’ll have to rough it on my Steam Deck.
I can’t complain too much, it’s been running for two years without a single reinstall. I’ve been meaning to upgrade it to the latest firmware and Manjaro for awhile now, this was just a real roundabout way to get me off my fat ass to perform an exorcism.
Back at it!
Tonight I rightfully returned to Source Filmmaker under my Manjaro install, with my primary focus being how well does the program run on my new swank GPU. After a few good hours I can say that the results are in, and the answer is awesome! My Vega64 ran SFM alright for the most part, but if you imported too many models or particles into the world it would lag when dragging your cameras, even when splitting clips into smaller ones. So far I haven’t experienced that with the 6800XT, even with the same stage setups I’ve created! If this continues to perform as such I’ll only really need to go into Windows to do the export (and possibly for After Effects work if I can’t get it to work under Wine/Proton), and even then I don’t always have to depending on the scene (lighting sometimes looks better under Windows or vice versa depending on the map and the materials being used).
I mostly spent the entire session doing mouth movements and some animation tweaking. I am shrinking the audio as I go; removing any long gaps in between.I’ll continue on it some more tomorrow after I get off work and do my usual stuff. Who knows, if I get far enough along that I can post something different I might provide an update tomorrow! 😛
Praise The Penguin!
I got Linux back up and running on the desktop! This time I’m up and running on the KDE spin of Manjaro, and so far everything seems to be running fine on a newer kernel and set of Open Source drivers. All of my programs are reinstalled and ready to go! I can finally move my projects back to Linux, and even see how my new graphics card performs on the Linux side of things! I launched AMID EVIL just to see if the drivers were working properly, and it ran with flying colours of blood!
I think that earns me a good passing out! I’ll need more energy before I continue further tweaking. I’ve also done more tweaking to my Manjaro on my Surface Pro; added Shotcut, Audacity, and I already had Krita installed for drawing and photo editing. I’m thinking these programs might come in handy if we go traveling this year; it would be nice to be able to do some small video editing or photo tweaking while traveling in motion, especially during long drives. It would be nice to have a video or photo of something ready to deploy as soon as I’m in range of some semi-decent internetz. My next plan for the tablet is to install some light duty games, and maybe a couple of emulators. It won’t be nearly as good as my gaming systems, but during travel it can help kill a little time. 😛
Blogging From Bed
Just wanted to see how it feels to blog from my Linux Surface, and I have to admit I really like the keyboard for typing. It’s a comfortable size and tucks away nicely when I’m done. It’s kind of weird using a touchscreen to make my selections for tags and stuff, but I think I could get used to it with a bit of practice, might even come in handy on the go! Well, moresso…
My Linux Surface Pro Arrived!
My Surface Pro 6 arrived today! It only took me a couple hours but I have a KDE Plasma spin of Manjaro running on it, with the custom surface kernel even! I did run into a couple of peripheral issues, as the touch screen doesn’t work until you install the surface kernel provided here. Fortunately I still have my old gaming keyboard, and I used my Steam Controller as a mouse. 😛 After getting the custom kernel installed I focused on installing my usual programs and tweaked the overall aesthetics. I’ve been wanting to do something like this for years, and it’s nice to have finally achieved it painlessly.
My next goal will be to take my Kindle HD8 and see if can sideload a different OS on it. I’ve read that it can be done, but if you’re not careful you can do some serious damage to the system. Having a better tablet makes me less fearful of nuking it, that and the HD8 was only a dollar. 😛
The Yakuza Is Linux Friendly?
I can say quite happily that Yakuza Kiwami seems to be passing the Linux test so far, well… kinda. Other than not being able to close the game properly, and having to spam the save button in order for it to generate a save for some reason, it’s pretty much the same performance that I get under Windows, framerate is pretty much the same and I haven’t run across any graphical glitches. I even got a few achievements! They were all centered around Majima but… meh.
Perhaps a few Proton versions from now it’ll work like a native game! One can hope anyway.
My Wacom Works Out Of The Box Under Linux!
I got that creative itch recently to revisit drawing, and I also wanted to see how easy it was to get it running under Manjaro. So today I killed two birds with one stone, and surprisingly it’s quite a lot easier to setup compared to Windows. The drivers were installed by default, and it was practically working right from the get go! The only “difficult” thing I really had to do was configure it to run on one monitor with an easy shell script:
Now I can shitscribble to my hearts content! I played around under Krita for a bit, just doing different doodles and playing with different brush settings. I’m waaaay out of practice, my drawing hand is kinda shaky, and it gets tired after about an hour. I really need to build up my drawing muscles again. 😛 I’ve been meaning to get back into drawing, but the time was never there. That’s the problem with having too many hobbies, but hey! you’re never bored.
Some Penguin Approved Gaming And Chill
I kicked back today with a good breakfast, a little photo work, and lots of Linux gaming. Took a bit of a break from using Proton to play some native Linux TF2 and Dusk. Apparently in Discord it reads that I’m playing hl2_linux instead of TF2, that made me chuckle a bit. The last time I played TF2 under Linux it kept giving me stack errors, nice to see they’ve fixed it.
I prepped my laptop on the Linux side for some fun lunch time shenanigans tomorrow. Since DMC5 runs so well on my Manjaro desktop setup with pure AMD hardware I want to see how well it runs on my laptop with Intel/NVidia. I did a quick test launch and it automatically detected the best settings, always a good sign! It even sees the proper refresh rate (144hz). Should make for a fun, scientific lunch break. I also installed a few Portal 2 mods in case I wanted to do somewhat actual not actual science.