A personal work journal
I ve been installing Linux on whatever hardware I happen to have. It s worked OK on various video cards. But there s big differences. Most of this post is from the point of view of gaming (Windows games with Proton) but some AI stuff too. No deep expertise here, but I ve had to learn this all recently [ ]
I bought a cheap-but-nice wireless keyboard for occasional use. It works great in the system BIOS (with 2.4GHz) and Windows, but not in Linux. It d connect but not let me type. Whether connected via 2.4Ghz or Bluetooth. Turns out this is a known problem with a workaround. Apparently in this state the keyboard is basically [ ]
I use my Linux box with a long cable to play games on my TV. When I plug in the TV I want to change resolutions and change sound output devices for the TV. (The display is mirrored from my desktop). This is the kind of thing I d only do manually in Windows but in [ ]
/tmp filled on my desktop Linux box running Nobara (Fedora 44). WTF? The problem turned out to be Chrome leaving behind download files. What is /tmp on Nobara /tmp is not a disk-backed filesystem. It s tmpfs, which sits in RAM. Fedora sizes it to be 50% of RAM by default, or 14GB in my case. [ ]
I m deep in the weeds of tinkering with how Steam launches games. In Linux you have a bunch of options. Here s some experiments I did running Borderlands 4 (Unreal Engine 5) on a mini PC with an AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 8845HS and a Radeon 780M graphics chip, trying to run the game at 1080p [ ]
I got curious about what HTTP headers Chrome is requesting so I stood up a trivial HTTP server and this is what is on the wire. Goodness that s a lot of stuff! I still remember when even the Host header was optional (in HTTP/0.91). And my knowledge taps out around HTTP/1.1, the Connection: keep-alive and [ ]
One thing I miss from my Windows machine was it was easy to stream games to my TV. I installed a Steam Link client on the Android TV and it connected to my Windows box running Steam. Game streaming works surprisingly well on a LAN. Steam streaming from Linux server In theory I should be [ ]
I m finally understanding how Linux gaming works. Particularly the problem of setting display resolution and driver features. See also this CachyOS guide. Compatibility tool The most important Linux-specific thing is what Windows emulator Steam uses to launch your game. They call this a compatibility tool . I believe Proton 10 is the default these days. Valve [ ]
I continue to like my Nobara Linux system, a Fedora variant. But the upgrade process is not giving me a good feeling. Fedora 44 was released late April. Two months later Nobara updated to it. It s a huge update, some 8000 packages on my system. But part of the promise of Fedora (and Debian) is [ ]
Kiwix is a fantastic offline Wikipedia reader. Last time I tried installing a new library it was a usability nightmare. It s still not great but it s better now. Their library picker doesn t show you versions or dates. Consider looking at the direct download directory instead. The files named maxi include full text and pictures. A [ ]