#linux namib

Hello people and welcome back to my ongoing series about my time playing with Linux.  Since I originally started this blog it is now been going for 2 years.  That is unreal.  I never thought it would manage to last this long, which makes it my longest ongoing project I think I have even done.  Scary...

Anyway enough waffle onto the task at hand.  Since we last spoke I have once again changed things with the Xeon.  Over the last few months it has been many things.  I have ran EndeavourOS, Namib Linux, Windows 10, Haiku, Hackintosh (Mac OS X High Sierra) and now the latest Linux Project it is now running is BlueStar Linux.

BlueStar Linux is another Arch based Linux from the team in the USA.  It is using KDE for its main Desktop Environment.  Now me and KDE have had a very strange relationship  as it normally has crashed spectacularly on me.  With about a million segmentation faults.

However this one I am using is working no problem.  Maybe it’s because every time I have used KDE it has been with an Nvidia card and this is an AMD Radeon.  It seems to be working fine, the transparency is working and all the programs are running fine without keeling over which was my main complaint.

Another thing I must say is that it seems to running things much faster than it did with Namib or EndeavourOS even though they were both installed on the same 240GB SSD.  So KDE is working quicker than MATE which is something I never thought I would ever see.   I know they have been working on refining it but it seems they have done a damned impressive job.

When it installed it included a dock called Latte which was quite nice but its icons were incredibly small for some reason.  So after a bit of fiddling I in the end just changed across to Cairo Dock which is what I have been using for quite a while.

It initially covered the screen with quite a few widgets but they were quite easily removed.  I don’t like my desktop been full of clutter I know some people like having CPU monitors and other extraneous stuff on screen I just find them annoying.

So I ended up with just a digital clock in the upper right and I can live with that.

Now I normally sit and try and get Vulkan and stuff working which means changing all of the drivers.  To be honest I can’t be bothered as its not as if I play games on this machine given it’s the test bed machine so I have decided just to stick with the base Radeon driver and it is working fine for most things.

It manages to run Hedgewars and Gdash which is fine for me.  I spend far too long trying to get games to work under Lutris and then never play them.

I did not like the original colour scheme of BlueStar Linux it was a Dark Green almost black setup with Yellow text and a very hard to see black cursor.  Don’t get me wrong it looked aesthetically nice but not very practical.  I also changed my cursor to Red Diamond which is still black but it has some nice red inflections and animations making it very visible.

It originally comes with Octopi to install software and update but I quickly changed it to Pamac as that’s what I prefer.  Don’t get me wrong the Synaptic type installer is more than functional but very basic.  

To be honest I really thought I was going to hate BlueStar but to be honest it’s actually quite impressed me.  It runs quite smooth and to be honest hasn’t crashed on me once which is quite a surprise.  SO I have to give credit to the KDE team who have obviously done a damned good job fixing bugs.

Would I say the same if it had a Nvidia card in here.  I honestly can’t say.  Considering when I had tried to install BlueStar Linux in the past on a machine with Nvidia I could not even get to the main desktop to install it would crash out as at the time Nouveau didn’t support the card I had.

One minor caveat I could not get it to install Shutter which is my preferred screen capture program due to not finding half the libraries similar to what i had with Manjaro but I installed Flameshot instead and can live it.

So what version of Linux would you like to see on the Xeon next?  Let me know at [email protected] after all it is the test bed machine so it is designed for distro testing.

On the i7 due it being Christmas I have had very little time to sit in front of the machine.  All it has been is regular system updates which I have had no problems with.  I did play a few Commodore 64 games using VICE but other than that it has been having a quiet holiday.

Well that brings us up to date with everything that has been going on in My Linux Life.  So thank you for reading and until next time, take care....

Hello people and welcome back to another episode of Linux Life.  My seemingly never ending quest of messing about with Linux.  Its funny you know as when I originally started this blog.  It was regarding my transition from windows to Linux but over time I now very rarely ever use Windows.  In fact there is now only one machine I own that still has Windows 10 on it.

In fact its the recent acquisition which is HP Z400 workstation which contains a Intel Xeon W3550 with 12Gb of ECC memory.  The reason I even mention this machine is it has been the subject of my most recent Linux adventure.

Now the machine has sat under my desk gathering dust for a few months but I decided it was time to do something with the thing, so I finally dusted it off and set it up in another room.

First I had to find a video converter as the card in the Xeon is a AMD Radeon R9 370X with 4Gb of memory.  Th issue was not with the card itself but the spare monitor I had was a VGA only monitor and the two connectors on the R9 are DVI-D and DVI-I.  I did order a converter but I had to rake around to find it.  Luckily I found it in the end so now video is working fine.

However there is a rather large blue dongle-like converter sticking out the back of the machine so it won’t sit flush against the wall so it is sitting at an angle to work.  Not the most inconvenient thing in the world but I don’t have another DVI monitor spare so we make do with what we have.

However it is happily running at 1680x1050 32-bit colour through it so I am not complaining.

OK so I tried to install Namib Linux which I have been running on my i7 desktop for quite some time.  Sure enough set up the USB stick using Rufus on the Windows 10 partition and prepared to install.

Sure enough on boot a few failed things and when we get to MATE it can see the Ethernet port but can’t see the Wi-Fi card.  Now I admit even Windows 10 did not have a pre-installed driver for the card in question so I had to download the driver to the i7 and transfer it using aforementioned USB stick.

Now the Wi-Fi card in question is a TP-Link Archer 9E PCI Express card.  It’s a A/b/g/n/ac card with three aerial connections.  However because it can’t see the card Namib will not install as it needs an online connection to install.

Most Arch installers do this so it was not a huge surprise.  OK well luckily for me as I mentioned last episode EndeavourOS (the new team who took over the Antergos system) at the moment have a version that uses an offline installer.

So I went back into Windows 10 downloaded the EndeavourOS ISO and managed to transfer it to the USB using Rufus just like I did Namib.

Sure enough I managed to install EndeavourOS on the Xeon but it also could not see the Wi-Fi card.however as it was an offline installer it did successfully install an Arch system with XFCE.

Everything else worked including sound it was just the Wi-Fi card so I decide to trawl the net and find out if Linux can use the Archer 9E card.  Sure enough on the AUR there is a set of drivers called broadcom-wl-ck as the Archer 9E uses a Broadcom chipset.

OK so I boot back into Windows and pull down the snapshot from the AUR onto the USB stick and then go back in to EndeavourOS and transfer it to my Downloads directory.

After unarchiving it as I did try using pacman to install it locally but it wasn’t having it.   I run makepkg which will build the package using the given manifest sure enough it immediately informs me I am missing the Linux-ck headers.

Can’t build it.  OK so I look up Linux-ck.  Now I admit I had no idea what it was but given Linux-ck had headers I assume it some form of kernel.  It is indeed.  Apparently it’s a custom LTS based kernel made by a user known as Con Kolivas.

I will spare you the details of exact files I needed but every time I tried to build Linux-ck I needed another file.  So every time I needed to go back into Windows download the appropriate file and then move it back to EndeavourOS.

Lets just say I ended up doing that about six times so it was a bit  tedious to say the least.  Eventually I managed to get all the files required and started the makepkg command.

All good but it refuses to acknowledge the PGP key and after about a minute it throws it out.  OK not happy so I ultimately decide to set he makepkg flag of --ignorepgpsignature.  Probably not the best method in the world but after a minor warning it seems to start to compile the kernel.

The whole compilation took 5 hours to complete on the Xeon.  Now the W3550 has 4 cores and 8 threads so I didn’t think it would take that long but it definitely took forever.

Eventually it did build and using pacman -U  I was able to install the Linux-ck kernel from the local directory it was in.  It obviously installed the Linux-ck kernel and the headers so finally I could now build the broadcom-wl-ck drivers.  Yay!

It built the drivers in about five seconds flat.  So 5 hours for kernel, five seconds for the driver.  Oh the irony.  OK so now installed I restart the machine and sure enough the Wi-Fi card is now working.

EndeqvourOS now tells me there is about 200+ updates to download which is about what I expect so I set it off working.  Sure enough it installs the updates all fine.  Having waited for 5 hours for the kernel it was now getting late so I closed the machine down for the night.

Wi-Fi is working the system is updated.  All good.

Day Two of EndeavourOS on the Xeon.  I boot up and everything is just fine as the Wi-Fi connects without issue. Now I am not a huge fan of XFCE, don’t get me wrong its functional I just don’t like the way it does certain things like updates.

However I know that EndeavourOS had MATE on its servers. So I try pacman to get MATE.  First problem hit.  Apparently the MATE system is in the AUR not the main repo of EndeavourOS.  OK try and install pacaur but for some reason it doesn’t seem to want to do that.  Why I don’t know.  OK then I will try and install Yaourt.  Nope I can’t seem to find that either.

I’m starting to get desperate at this point and the Arch guys seem to recommend YAY as apparently Yaourt is a bit older now and not quite as good as it once was.  Sure enough I manage to get pacman to install YAY.  Progress...

So it seems to use the same flags as pacman but can access the AUR.  So I manage to install MATE and get it running.  However now as I am using that I don’t seem to have a way of installing software via GUI. sure i can use Yay but that’s a command line tool.

So I decide using Yay to install pamac-aur which will give me a nice frontend.  Sure enough it installs and after a reboot seems to be installed fine.

Then the fun begins as the first thing Pamac notices is the broadcom-wl-ck driver and the Linux-ck stuff has been updated.  OK I think well surely now it has the Linux-ck kernel it will just patch it and then the rest can be done from there.

Nope apparently it has to totally rebuild the kernel and the headers so I have another 5 hour wait upon my hands.  The good thing is this time it does sort out the PGP keys so at least this time I don’t have to ignore them.

OK so many hours later the update finally finishes and I restart the PC to check that everything is running fine.  Sure enough it seems to have upgraded without any issues.  A few minor updates later I am ready to go.

Or so I thought.  As I go to run the minor updates from Pamac it seems to keep dropping out and not picking up the network.  Hanging many times while trying to download the actual update files.

However if I run Yay -Syu from the command line.  It works no problem.  Strange.  Also every time I build something from the AUR in Pamac I have to keep clearing out the cache or it stops working.

I eventually get everything I want to work installed mainly using Yay instead of Pamac. Which kind of defeats the point of even having Pamac installed.

I still have not solved this issue and I have no idea why it is happening.  If anyone has any insight into why this is happening please let me know as it is a bit of a pain in the arse.

Sure I can update using Yay but its annoying having to see Pamac tell me there is updates, refuses to download them and then yay does it first time without problems.  I’m sure its something pretty simple but I can’t seem to get it to work.

The ironic factor is sometimes after a bit of searching Pamac can install sometimes but nine times out of ten it just times out the connection of the repo servers.  Its probably a setting in one of the config files I need to correct but i have no idea.

Help me out if you know what i need to do.  So I now have the Xeon w3550 running EndeavourOS running MATE.  Thanks to Yay everything is up to date and I have managed to install all of my usual applications.

It took two days of messing about and lots of time.  I hope that the Linux-ck kernel is not hugely updated regularly as having to wait 5 hours for it to compile is not the most fun time in the world.

Luckily after the second time it seems to have managed to remain OK for the time being.  However I will not doubt updates will eventually come in time, after all this is Arch and it will no doubt inform me of such an update.

So now the Xeon is a dual boot machine running Windows 10 and EndeavourOS.  The Wi-Fi works on both and its working reasonably well with the exception of Pamac.  I have tested it with a few other programs and all seem to work fine.

If I have any further issues or manage to find out why Pamac is being like it is, I will no doubt update you on the Xeon’s progress.