Opensource gaming with nouveau nvidia driver
Games you can play with the nouveau 3d driver on Linux.
formicapunk
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Latest posts
Running Linux i386 binary (steamcmd) via debootstrap foreign chroot
The Steam command line client , which I need to download the game data for the Doom3 BFG shooter , is only available as an Linux i386 binary. As my main home computer is an arm64 box, this could be an issue, but today we have no less than three different ways to run a Linux i386 binary on arm64: Fex, Box32/64 and the older qemu-user mode. According to the Box64 benchmarks , qemu-user is the…
Arm64 Linux Desktop: one year after, all systems up
So I am using Debian on a System76 Arm64 (aarch64) workstation since 9 months, and I can say: everything works. It should be noted that I use very few proprietary software, so I rely mostly on Debian packages for what I am doing. What I can say is basically all open source software which exists today, takes care to build on aarch64 or is available as a binary, either in the Debian archive, in a…
Minix 3 on Beagle Board Black (ARM)
Connected via serial console. Does not have a package manager, web or ssh server, but can play tetris in the terminal ( bsdgames in Debian have the same tetris version packaged).
Storing GPG private keys on a dedicated device
The limits of cryptography Since this blog post is about security and cryptography, it makes sense to start with this XKCD reminder about the value of encryption: . There is a similar, complementary discussion in this article : crypto can help but cannot safeguard against all actors. Public Key encryption 101 GPG, the most widely used tool for end to end email encryption and signing software…
Meta post about this blog
In the future I will try to link to each blog post via my mastodon account at https://mastodon.sdf.org/@formicapunk That way readers can comment via Mastodon without creating a wordpress.com account. Also this blog has tag-based feeds: if you are interested for instance in Kubernetes and OpenShift topics, you can subscribe via RSS to these two topics only via…
Configuring a mail transfer agent to interact with the Debian bug tracker
Email interface of the Debian bug tracker The main interface of the Debian bug tracker, at http://bugs.debian.org , is e-mail, and modifications are made to existing bugs by sending an email to an address like 873518@bugs.Debian.org. The web interface allows to browse bugs , but any addition to the bug itself will require an email client. This sounds a bit weird in 2025, as http REST clients with…
Troubleshooting the unexpected: black screen in Quake due to hidden mouse button
I was playing the Quake First Person Shooter this week on a Rasperry Pi4 with Debian 13, but I noticed that I regularly had black screens when during heavy action momments. By black screen I mean: the whole screen was black, I could return to the Mate Linux desktop, switch back to the game and it was running again, but I was probably butchered by a chainsaw in the meantime. Now if you expect a…
Best Pick-up-and-play with a gamepad on Debian and other Linux distributions: SuperTux
After playing some 16 bits era classic games on my Mist FPGA I was wondering what I could play on my Debian desktop as a semi-casual gamer. By semi-casual I mean that if a game needs more than 30 minutes to understand the mechanics, or needs 10 buttons on the gamepad I usually drop it. After testing a dozen games available in the Debian archive my favorite Pick-up-and-play is SuperTux . SuperTux…
How configuration is passed from the BinderHub helm chart to a running BinderHub
Context: At $WORK I am doing a lot of datascience work around Jupyter Notebooks and their ecosystem. Right now I am setting BinderHub , which is a service to start a Jupyter Notebook from a git repo in your browser. For setting up BinderHub I am using the BinderHub helm chart , and I was wondering how configuration changes are propagated from the BinderHub helm chart to the process running in a…