Linux OS stuff Thread

I'm not really sure what gnome I had but it was a fresh install, so I didn't have much on it, just had set up for vulkan coding.

I grabbed a new iso for kubuntu and installed that and running it now. Workin pretty good so far!

I've built up a nice list of stuff to do when I reinstall like kill mouse acceleration and get rid of the annoying unattended-upgrades

So after a day, really like K buntu more than Gangsta buntu. It looks a bit more windowsy somehow, has nice wallpaper controls on each desktop, like the little file explorer equiv dolphin more than the gnomey one, and the default text editor Kate is nice.

I have seen a few strange things. Twice I got into a strange state where I thought my keyboard wasn't working. I clicked around and spewed keys a bit and it eventually caught up. The trouble was the windows in question just weren't updating (all my spewed keys were working).

Then kdeinit5 crashed a few times but I have no idea what that is and it didn't seem to affect anything.

Discord started with a bordered window, which I'd never seen before. I removed it but now I can't move or minimize.

Played a few hours of Rimworld with no problems. Vulkan coding stuff all just worked (I've had hell with that in the past).

Looks like Netgear A7000 on Ubuntu 16.04 not working worked for some people.

on windows it is called Snap Assist, what is it called in Kubuntu? and how can i fix it from 1/4 screen to 1/2 screen.

A friend upgraded his NAS drives and sent me his old ones, so I finally decided to put looney loonix on my server machine (and secondary EQ machine). It's a dual cpu 32 core xeon of some sort made by supermicro.

It was / is a nightmare. The old nvidia card has been a battle, and they changed the way everything updates between 19 and 20 of the buntus. Eventually ended up grabbing a newer ISO and starting over. Had to update my bios to even get it to begin installing though.

The worst has been basic partitioning though. I cleared off one of the 8tb drives to play with, thinking I'd carve out 300 gigs to install on. When I get to the install step though everything is scsi4 scsi5 scsi7... I have no idea which drive it is. So I boot to the live cd and hey magically everything is sda and sdb like you'd expect.

I tried carving out a partition myself but it refused to use it. Eventually I just caved and told it to use the entire drive thinking I'd resize it later. When I finally tackled all the other problems I went back to it and it just refused to resize.

Eventually I find through a bit of lucky googling that there's a bug with resize2fs and / or e2fsck where it is using some kind of messed up timezone stuff. Resize refuses to run unless you've checked the drive with e2fsck but doesn't see it unless you set your clock in the future, do the e2fsck, then set the clock back, THEN resize2fs. Needless to say the gui tools won't do this so I had to fully command line a partition resize and it is not easy.

I messed it up completely, so I just put the damn thing back in ntfs and started dumping 30 years of tv shows on it so I can use the other drive and went to sleep. The installer really seems to hate sda for some reason.

Kharzette said:

A friend upgraded his NAS drives and sent me his old ones, so I finally decided to put looney loonix on my server machine (and secondary EQ machine). It's a dual cpu 32 core xeon of some sort made by supermicro.

It was / is a nightmare. The old nvidia card has been a battle, and they changed the way everything updates between 19 and 20 of the buntus. Eventually ended up grabbing a newer ISO and starting over. Had to update my bios to even get it to begin installing though.

The worst has been basic partitioning though. I cleared off one of the 8tb drives to play with, thinking I'd carve out 300 gigs to install on. When I get to the install step though everything is scsi4 scsi5 scsi7... I have no idea which drive it is. So I boot to the live cd and hey magically everything is sda and sdb like you'd expect.

I tried carving out a partition myself but it refused to use it. Eventually I just caved and told it to use the entire drive thinking I'd resize it later. When I finally tackled all the other problems I went back to it and it just refused to resize.

Eventually I find through a bit of lucky googling that there's a bug with resize2fs and / or e2fsck where it is using some kind of messed up timezone stuff. Resize refuses to run unless you've checked the drive with e2fsck but doesn't see it unless you set your clock in the future, do the e2fsck, then set the clock back, THEN resize2fs. Needless to say the gui tools won't do this so I had to fully command line a partition resize and it is not easy.

I messed it up completely, so I just put the damn thing back in ntfs and started dumping 30 years of tv shows on it so I can use the other drive and went to sleep. The installer really seems to hate sda for some reason.

Click to expand...

I feel like a weekend (or more) evaporates every time I need to touch linux. Otoh, once whatever it is gets fixed, I basically never have to touch it again. I'd be better at it if it broke more, but then I probably wouldn't bother /shrug

It is really nice once you get it going, but it was very painful. Lots of hand editing xorg stuff.

I have it running a starwars galaxies emulator server now

Adventures in Linux

(Yes, these are distro / use-case issues more than Linux ones)

Moving to a new laptop - old laptop was non-UEFI and dual booted between Solus Linux and Windows 10, which each being on a separate SSD and each using disk encryption. New laptop is UEFI only and has two NVME drives and planning for a similar setup. I boot into the default Windows 11 install and copy drivers, etc, use Win11 Media Creation tool to make a Win11 install USB drive, then proceed to format both disks.

1st Problem: Solus doesn't support Secure Boot
2nd Problem: Native resolution is 2560x1600. Solus is limited to integer scaling (1x,2x,3x) but 1x is native and too small for text while 2x is crayola res. Windows does fractional scaling just fine and so does Ubuntu/Gnome (and KDE), where 1.25x seems just about right.
3rd Problem: Graphics are either hybrid or discrete/mux. Solus works okay with the IGP-only or with the discrete, but not hybrid to use IGP for dekstop and games with the discrete. It sees the Nvidia discrete and tries to install the drivers but just fails. I do test installs with Ubuntu and it works, allowing me to run apps with either the IGP or discrete GPU in hybrid mode, and of course discrete works just fine, except...
4th problem: Ubuntu chokes if I swtich between hybrid and discrete in the BIOS - it will sort itself out, but the screen is garbled until it does.
5th problem: Solus installer wants to share the drive with Windows 11 (because it sees the EFI partition) but won't install onto the second drive. I change the partition type from EFI to MSdata and this allows me to install. This requires me to use the BIOS to select the boot disk (rather than the bootloader Solus uses, although GRUB can do it) - not ideal but workable.

So, switch to Ubuntu. Which has Secure Boot support, so re-enable that in the BIOS. With 3rd party drivers like Nvidia one needs to sign the drivers with a Machine Owner's Key (MOK) and enroll that in the TPM. After a trial run, I get that figured out (it's automated). Go to setup my dual boot with Windows 11 and Bitlocker and...

6th problem: Bitlocker with a TPM will not let one set a pre-boot password. Edit Group Policy and get close, where the preboot PIN can be up to 20 characters (instead of just numbers). Less than my old Bitlocker passphrase but workable. Install Win11, enable Bitlocker, etc and
7th problem: Ubuntu won't install because Bitlocker is enabled and it wants to install onto the same drive.

At this point I am going to pull drives out and install OSes seperately. I can use the BIOS to swtich between them and I can likely add Windows as a boot option once I get them working individually.

Falxy-US said:

Same! I setup a radarr/sonarr/plex box on Ubuntu something like 4+ years ago. It was hell, all the permissions, startup scripts to mount drives, etc. But it works, and basically always works. Every once in a while Plex will shit out and I use TeamViewer to remote in and reboot the computer. Otherwise basically zero issues. I don't even know if I should do the kernel updates because I'm scared of it crashing something. Honestly I've thought that if it all breaks, I'll just toss it and be done with it. I think that media companies are trying to figure out ways to combine all your existing streaming platforms into a unified interface, so who knows.

Click to expand...

Plex is trying to do this.

I'm finally using kubuntu as my daily machine. For awhile I was booting back into 10 to run vroid, but I got that working in linux as well so no need!

I'm planning on doing directX development as crazy as that sounds. So far I've only done a bit of audio and that works. The dx11 stuff will go through a dx to vulkan layer. I'm not super confident it will work.

It works but you want dxvk-native. Dxvk normal version is sort of focused at wine, the freaky windows emulator stuff.

So far I've just created a window and a swap chain. Next is loading/storing/compiling shaders.

BTW unrelated to the above, yesterday I was playing Valheim and it had some kind of seizure. I could tab out but I had no mouse and the main monitor was kind of frozen.

So I figured I'd just alt tab to a terminal and ps -A |grep val or Val but nope, nothing. I tried ps -A |more but it was seriously like 30 pages of kthis and kthat and kworker junk. Didn't see a damn thing.

So I start randomly mashing keys and I get a sort of kde task manager kind of thing up. I see Valheim and tab around and select it and hit end task. An "are you sure" box pops up BEHIND the taskman window, and can't be navigated to via keyboard.

So I try top, but in the game's wedged state it isn't doing much more than run a thread streaming music. Doesn't show up.

Finally I ctrl-alt-F2 out to the text mode terminal and try top there since all my terminal windows were tiny. I finally see a candidate called gam_server way down the list. Kill the pid and sure enough that was it.

I wonder what a battle scarred veteran of the linux would have done? I'm fairly new to running it as a desktop full time.

You did fine. In my experience using both daily, Windows is more stable than Linux when running as a desktop.