More Progress on Switchbuntu, Job Hunt and Living Room Steam Machine

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Hello all! I recently went to SCaLE 20x in Pasadena, California. It’s a wonderful mostly-community-led and -oriented event in Southern California. Here’s a fun pic of me helping out at the Lutris booth!

I also met some super cool people at the Ubuntu booth! Aaron Prisk and Monica were so cool to talk to. I ended up setting up my Nintendo Switch with Ubuntu on it as a side-showcase at their booth. I’ll definitely be helping out again with the Lutris booth next year and bringing even more cool projects! I met quite a few people at that event and I’ll also be following up with the companies I’ve talked to, to see if I can finally get another remote tech job!

Side note; The Division 2 has some cool events going on right now. With GE-Proton7-49 and above, you’ll be able to play it just fine on both Steam Deck, and any Linux installs you have! This won’t run on the Ubuntu 18.04 Nintendo Switch, but on the other hardware I’m using daily, it runs fine!

I’ve added the above image, accompanied by a terminal session recording, to my Nintendo Switch Ubuntu project page here if you’re interested in learning more about how that’s going. Seems something may have been taken away in recent Steam updates, as I can’t get the application opened via the Switchroot wiki instructions.

Some last things before I end this blog post here for now!

Ubuntu on my Switch, Pastel Miyoo Mini, and the Job Hunt continues...

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Greetings, fellow geeks. I’ve recently received an RCMLoader/jig combo kit for my OG Nintendo Switch. I’ll be walking through the process I went through to get Ubuntu 18.04 (the only one NVIDIA supports here) running on my Nintendo Switch on my project page over here if you’re interested.

I’ve also recently received limited edition decals and buttons from SakuraRetroModding to Kirby-ify my Miyoo Mini, so I’ve gone ahead and done that and loaded more PICO-8 cartridges on there.

Here’s a little teaser image of what I’ve been documenting over on my Nintendo Switch Linux project page. Looks like the community contributors have come an awfully far way now! There are some libraries from 20.04 or newer releases that would really help where I’m trying to get with this effort, but I suppose compiling and installing things on the older Ubuntu 18.04 release works just as well. Ubuntu 18.04 seems to be the focus of that Switchroot project due to NVIDIA having drivers for that specific release, but not for newer ones that use a similar ARM/NVIDIA setup as the Switch.

Despite the decal being slightly askew, which I can fix later, here’s an image of my Miyoo mini I’ve recently dazzled up a bit! I acquired a limited run of pastel buttons from SakuraRetroModding on Etsy for this guy, updated OnionOS and added some Kirby games to finish the feel. I’ve mainly been playing through Kirby: Nightmare in Dreamland, Megaman Battle Network Blue Moon, Cave Story (Dokutsu Monogatari) and Advance Wars on here. I was happy to learn that most of these ROMs are available if you search the lovely Archive(dot)Org website! Gosh I love the game archiving community.

Here you’ll see that I’ve added a few more PICO-8 carts to this OnionOS install. Turns out there was a newer iteration of PCraft for PICO-8 consoles (or fake8 on OnionOS) that you could actually save your game in and fight a boss in.

That’s about all I have for this last bit of February! My job hunt is ongoing and I’m open to any and all remote opportunities for Linux-friendly companies! I have built up more of a focus in customer support and hardware support in that industry as of late, and am definitely open to anyone wanting to talk or interview!

Here are a few notable things I’ve found in the past two weeks:

A New Year, A New Outlook

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Greetings once again! Alex here. Going for a more positive outlook on job prospects this year, despite the current state of the Tech economy. I have a few things planned in the beginning this year. I’ll likely be going on more road trips this year, as well.

In case you haven’t seen it, click here to check out my page with dedicated links to spreadsheets detailing the status of my yearly projects! Moving on…

Hope everyone’s enjoying the new calendar year with friends or loved ones! I know I did. Love my parents and my childhood friends to bits, and it was great to see them one last time before I change up my end-of-year plans going forward. Will likely drive to see them when I eventually pick up my Aptera at the end of this coming year or beginning of 2024.

On the topic of projects, soon I may be doing a write-up in a blog post or dedicated project page on the Miyoo Mini after mine arrives. I’ll be doing more Steam Deck write-ups as well. This year I’ll also be building an AM5-based open-air desktop in the Streacom DA6 XL as well, and that might be my last desktop build for quite a while. Soon I’ll have an Ayn Loki 8 GB model with a 6600U on the way that I scored for cheap, and I’ll test out running HoloISO on there, after configuring BIOS options to be efficient with battery life.

In the last bit of news for this new year, check out my Linux Gaming reflection that I posted on Medium as a follow-up to my 2020 reflection. Things have changed quite a bit since the Deck was released! Above you’ll see me continuing to relive my childhood as I play through Pikmin 2 on my Deck. OS 3.4 is quite smooth, by the way. Love the initiative Valve is taking to support this machine.

Also, as always, here are some cool things I’ve read around the internet recently:

Finishing up the T440p repairs, attempting to fix Risk of Rain 2 modding this holiday

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Hello there again everyone! Hope you’re having some happy holidays, for those that celebrate. This week I’ve mainly been working on finishing up the fixing of that T440p I mentioned previously, and attempting to get the r2modman mod manager working again for Risk of Rain 2. On my Nobara and Fedora Linux installs, r2modman previously opened up Risk of Rain 2 with my mods perfectly fine when hitting “Play Modded” however now that is far from the case.

That all said, first let’s take a look at those T440p repairs!

As you can see, I finally got that back panel fastened down with some screws I own!

Next, here we are replacing the LCD since the last one was bad…

…and good to go…nope! Now I’ll put this up on my Projects for Sale page once I replace the screen again. That said, I’ll likely be disabling the store while I’m out of town, then re-enabling it with all the machines I have fixed up and ready for sale when I return the first or second weekend of January. Expect another blog post out around then. I’ll be gone from the 16th of December until the 6th or 7th of January, so I’ll re-enable the store after then, with some new entries from machines I’ve fixed etc.

In other game news, here’s a screenshot of my Core Keeper server’s map! This game is my cozy place, and it’s nice that I have a dedicated server for it now. If you’ve been previously added to my Discord, I’ve pinned the game ID for the server there. Now, on to Risk of Rain 2 modding…

Recently I’ve run into some issues being able to play my favorite game in the way that I wish on Fedora and Nobara, and per my Github bug I made here, I’m experiencing some issues with the r2modman utility I’ve long been using to run Risk of Rain 2 with mods. Going to do further testing these next few days and make another blog post to see if there’s a fix for r2modman running on Linux as an appimage/rpm/deb install so we can get the game running modded again. Going to follow along with troubleshooting r2modman as I get time while I’m with my family. Above is the same video from that Github bug.

Long live my Oryx Pro. The above is a shot of my fourth gen model Oryx Pro, the oryp4 model, running Nobara Linux. Runs fine and graphics switching runs well too. This machine is going to replace the Guest Gaming Xeon machine I was using previously, as a guest gaming setup. As the battery on this doesn’t last longer than 10 minutes, and as parts are becoming harder to find for this machine, it’ll have a place next to the workbench for anyone that comes over who wants to game.

In one last little nugget of info, I’ve acquired an ODROID GO Ultra and I’ll be testing some games on there as well as possibly another tiny handheld that it has been hinted at me being gifted this holiday once I arrive in that part of the country. On the ODROID GO Ultra I flashed the most recent emulationstation image (oddly ubuntu 18.04 based) and if I end up getting a that other little chad handheld, I’ll see about flashing OnionOS on it as I’m told it may be one of the ones to support that. For now though, with the ODROID, we check to see if it can run my n64 and ps1 games from eras past!

To add some cool other things I’ve read about or found recently:

Nifty Utilities + The Store

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Hello there everyone! It’s been an interesting month over at casa de la Seibz. Lots of work has gone into fixing up my condo here and there where needed, and replacing light fixtures etc.

Recently I re-imaged my Steam Deck, and made an associated issue for my steam script project over here. I’ll probably work on that more in November as things begin to cool down outside quite a bit and I’m home more often.

I’ve recently been messing around with RetroArch from Steam, installed on my freshly-imaged Steam Deck to see what, if any, changes have been made. I also found a great script from a community member over here for running in Desktop Mode. That script will make sure all available RetroArch cores are installed to your RetroArch install, since not all of them are available on Steam currently.

This helps a ton in enabling Gamecube/Wii emulation along with ScummVM and a few other RetroArch cores that weren’t natively available out of the box after installing it from Steam.

I’ll add below the terminal commands I used to run that script after going into Desktop Mode on Deck and opening Konsole.

cd
wget https://github.com/icculus/twisty-little-utilities/blob/main/steamdeck-retroarch-download-all-cores.sh
bash steamdeck-retroarch-download-all-cores.sh

If you haven’t pinned it to the task bar yet, if you dock the Steam Deck in Desktop Mode, the windows/super key on your keyboard will correspond with a KDE-start-menu equivalent, and then you can search for and open the Konsole terminal from there.

I’ve also done more testing with the inovato quadra, and this little guy definitely seems to be a great little machine for someone’s first internet-enabled desktop, or for emulating some N64/GBA games on portable monitors etc.

Having done some work on the Steam Deck script, I thought about moving my Guest Gaming Desktop’s (more info in a post here) Steam client to Beta mode, so you can just run updates on that Nobara install, and then jump into the new “gamepadui” Big Picture mode that has the Steam Deck UI enabled per the Beta channel now.

As I haven’t updated that desktop in a while, looks like we’re on a newer mesa and kernel release now too!

Soon I’ll have some more images up of my second upcycle desktop build, but a summary of the parts is below

  • Ryzen 5 3600

  • Asrock b350 pro4 motherboard

  • t-force vulcan z 3200mhz 16gb ram

  • XFX RX590 8GB Fat Boi edition

  • 512gb sabren rocket nvme

  • Montech air v100

More news on that build and the status of my store page to come! I’ll be selling that build, my previous upcycle build as well as some Thinkpads I’m working on fixing up to sell as well. Might have some other treats to sell there soon too!