Projects update; Steam Deck as a Laptop, T440p Refurbishing

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Hello there friendos! Recently I was going through the tech I have in my storage, and found a NexDock Touch! Niceu! Next, I thought why not use this with the Steam Deck to make it a laptop for work? Also, thinking of finishing up my refurbishing of a T440p soon.

I’ve always been a hardware junkie, so I love messing with new tech combos.

Once I jumped the Deck over to Desktop Mode, I went ahead and plugged in my NexDock Touch. I sat the Deck on the couch cushion next to me, and just the NexDock Touch as a laptop interface for the Deck’s Desktop Mode! Then, I went ahead and made a little one-time-run script that you could run from Konsole on the deck. I named it deckscript since I’m not good at names haha.

In the image above, you’ll see me installing openSUSE Tumbleweed here in a VM via the Boxes flatpak to check it out. That said, I mainly worked on that deckscript from Konsole on the Deck.

As you can see above, I’m now working on this from a desktop hub from jsaux that has my Deck plugged in. I’m doing further work on the deckscript and have also opened an issue to see if I can resolve the missing headers that are required for getting yay installed on Steam Deck, further enabling you to install stuff from the AUR. You know, packages you might use if using the Deck for work, like Slack.

In the case that the above asciinema embed doesn’t work, I’ve linked this sentence to head to my asciinema page. Made a recording of a first attempt to grab yay. Further information can be found on issue 1 for the deckscript. If any of you reading this would like to help out, I welcome all pull requests! Happy hacking on your Decks!

"Old Boi" build and Upcycle projects

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Hi there again! It’s been a while. Work and life are going as they usually go. Prepping to go on a road trip back to California in late August, perhaps I’ll sell some of my builds while there!

Building that last desktop during the shortages, along with a Xeon-based guest gaming pc have taken up my time recently. I’ll add those build links below.

As I’ve already completed my iteration of Eggy’s xeon-based budget build, I’ll mainly focus on the Old Boi build that I’ve been working on getting together for testing ReactOS. The “Upcycle V2” build I linked above on pcpartpicker will be a more-future-upgradeable AM4 build centering around a used A12 series processor along with the RX590 and a drive I had in storage.

For this Old Boi build, It was centered around an i5 processor I had in storage and the cost of “renewing” an old radeon 6770 1gb card I had. This will mainly be for testing older software or games, such as the open source ReactOS based on Windows NT, or possibly HaikuOS, a rewrite of BeOS from back in the day. Maybe this setup may end its days as a NixOS system, who knows?

Above we have an image from my workbench as I was testing to see how things are running. After testing some video output from the motherboard and from the Radeon 6770 card, I learned that the cheapo Raidmax 300W power supply would not be enough. I went on to get a better Thermaltake unit from the nearby Micro Center. Perhaps I’ll save that 300W one for a tiny build in the future that has RDNA2 or greater integrated graphics.

Next, on to the testing with a better-wattage PSU!

The system legitimately booted with a better PSU, a Thermaltake 600W of sorts I picked up at the local micro center. Glad to see the ol boi build booting up fine now! Next, I made sure to rip apart this old Radeon 6770 from circa 2011 to clean it out and then repaste it. The extender that this thing has on it, to fit into older style full tower cases, is a bit annoying. After some jiggling around though, everthing looked fine!

I don’t have too many other pictures of the process outside of this side shot of the finished build. The cables, this being a non-modular power supply, were a bit annoying to manage, so there’s a bit of a rats nest of cables around the area where a CD drive would go, but that’s fine. Only thing mounted up there is the 480gb sata SSD. Look how red ATI GPUs used to be!

On another note, I think this machine could use a back exhaust fan, as the case only came with an intake fan on the front and the hot air kind of wanders. Once I add an exhaust fan in the future, the temps will be stable and this will be perfect for testing older software!

Though my week of testing operating systems so far, though, I haven’t been able to get Windows XP or the open source ReactOS to properly boot, so this guy might end up running some distro with KDE themed like Windows 7 for now, to give the retro feel.

I’ll likely end up selling this along with a Thinkpad T440p I’m finishing up soon and a Thinkpad X230 that is incompatible with flashing coreboot.

Building a desktop....for the first time in years

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Hi there tech family! It’s been a busy few months at work, and I’ve mainly just sunk into a couch to watch a show or play a game after most days. I let things get to me too much, and am slowly learning to give myself space and take time for myself to chill out.

That said, one form of chilling out is working with your hands. I enjoy the process of refurbishing older laptops to bring new life to them. While I’ve been falling behind on my corebooted thinkpad projects (linked here), I have indeed finally finished a desktop build.

I went all-AMD this time just for simplicity of use with any linux distro. Here’s the full build spec and part page.

Here we have the motherboard as I left it previously. Two sticks of 4000mhz cl19 or cl16 DDR4 RAM and a Ryzen 5600x with a WD Black 512gb NVMe (3 not 4) under a heatsink. Now we just needed to open the new cooler.

With the help of kind fellow GloriousEggroll, I learned the below case I got secondhand wouldn’t work. Missing a food and the places where one would place standoffs had some ouchies.

So he gave me a massive fractal case and we built in that.

He also gave me some cabling so I could add a few SSDs and previously-server-used WD Red drives to this build in the future. The plan is to game on this and use it as a network share until prices return to normal, then I’ll relegate my older RX590 8gb and my RX6600XT to mining duty while gaming on a higher-performing GPU and Zen 4 processor. Anyway, here’s the build with everything good to go. He and I were cut quite often on this damn motherboard I had in my closet lol.

It also posted fine! I ended up installing Eggy’s fresh release of Nobara on it. Nobara is a spin of Fedora Linux, optimized for desktop use, gaming and feeling snappy. I’m trying out KDE this time. I’ll add a carousel of post-build images below.

Short & Sweet Dec Update

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Hi there everyone! Just checking in for this month. I still exist, believe it or not hahaha. I’m planning on working on cleaning up, corebooting and refurbishing some Thinkpads for 2022. Also plan on making a FOSS Meme PC build based around an Optiplex 9010 with a 3rd gen i7 and a low profile RX550 GPU. That’ll have a corebooted motherboard and fairly open-source-friendly components. The wifi module is all I’d have to search for…

One of the many greats

The projects that I’m actively working on are all over in the trackers page here if anyone wants to check them out. After finishing a few corebooted thinkpads and building the optiplex FOSS machine, I intend on making a Ryzen 5 desktop out of leftover parts from 2020-2021 and utilizing that for a secondary gaming machine or possibly a server host. Looking forward to seeing what fun little handhelds and mini-laptops 2022-2023 will bring us, with the upcoming AMD Rembrandt APUs using RDNA2 graphics looking to be pretty awesome.

That is all for now! Whether you celebrate or not, I wish you all a happy holiday and new year!

Here are some fun things I’ve found recently: