T440p to a P51

Aren’t upgrades always nice? I ended up having that T440p for about a year and a half before upgrading it when my prior machine died. Then I used that from 2019 till a week or two ago. Now I’m on the Thinkpad P series!

This thing is a bit of a chonker, just like the T440p, however, the expansion is lovely! A Thunderbolt 3 port AND PCI Express Card slot for external GPU upgrades either way! Four slots for RAM upgrades, four storage ports if using M.2s or three if using two M.2s and a 2.5” drive. Also, it appears this is the final P series to use one of the click-in mechanical Thinkpad Advanced Docks…so I will likely be using this for a while, as these mechanical docks have far better Linux compatibility than the Thunderbolt 3 docks that are out these days. I might not have enough experience in using those to make that claim, but that is how I feel currently.

Below is my config

View fullsize

Clicking on this will enlarge it

Also I’m fairly happy with the aforementioned disk setup. I have yet to use that second M.2 slot, but if I need further storage on this desktop replacement in the future, I know I’ll have space! Currently, as seen below, I have a main Samsung NVMe M.2 for the boot/game drive and then a 2.5” ssd for storing media. This machine came secondhand with the Samsung drive and I slapped the 2.5” drive in it from my prior T440p!

View fullsize

Made it so you can enlarge this as well. Note the external 8TB backup drive I occasionally use.

That’s all there is to this update! Hopefully in coming months I’ll have more to report on any personal projects I’ve been doing, but I’ve really been enjoying running that GPD Win Max through its paces!

Edit: My Gigabyte Gaming Laptop is now running Fedora as well

Linux-Powered Gaming As An Appliance

Imagine an efficient gaming PC set-top box to sit under your TV. It seamlessly boots into Steam Big Picture mode, all updates are done in the background and applied on reboot. Snapshots of every system image are automatically taken and reverted back to, when issues are faced.

That’s the idea behind GamerOS, an automated Arch-based equivalent to SteamOS, however it installs much fresher drivers for GPUs and has access to the AUR, with all those fantastic newer proton versions.

I now have, in my posession, a GPD Win Max. I could imagine, in a family scenario, a handheld for playing Steam games (namely a GPD device or something homebuilt of similar sorts), a few set-top boxes (example) in the house on various televisions and a powerful custom PC or two for those that are more involved. The GPD-or-similar handhelds could be given to the kids. If they’re more technically-inclined, I could imagine teaching them how to use a Gnome or custom-interface version of Fedora or something stable on those. All the set-top boxes would run GamerOS smoothly, and the gaming PC would run either Windows or Pop!_OS for the more powerful stuff.

All these devices are Linux-powered, sharing various Steam libraries and accounts, and in the future could possibly run Retroarch from Steam Big Picture mode and sync retro games. Retro ROM-syncing isn’t supported by Steam’s cloud services? Not a problem there! Syncthing is available for PC-to-PC syncing of retro games and the save states affiliated with them. Retroarch and all other games could be accessible from Steam. Add in a link in Steam Big Picture mode to Kodi and you have all the streaming/local media via Plex available to the family as well!

Although my current living situation doesn’t allow building all these projects out fully, I can still dream of the day it is possible!

The State of Fedora Linux on GPD Win Max (Contd)

Hello again!

Now it lives!

As you can tell, things are working now! After realizing my prior error

drm.edid_firmware=eDP-1:edid/gpdwinmax.bin: no such file or directory

was due to improper formatting in the grub file, I rewrote it according to this reddit poster's instructions and things are working now! Looks like I'm not the only one running Fedora! I've also learned that Minecraft Java Edition can run at a solid 45-60 fps with fancy settings, and Stardew Valley runs like a dream! I'll do some more game tests and Phoronix benchmarks in the future as the games all install. Thanks for reading!

Fedora Linux on the GPD Win Max

Hello there again! I’m working to get Fedora Linux up and running on the GPD Win Max this time around.

I’ll be brief; most Linux distros don’t configure the display properly at all, though all hardware functions as intended. I’ve tested Manjaro, Ubuntu and Fedora successfully with all the hardware buttons/sticks/wifi etc performing spectacularly.

It’s mainly the below issue that I’m figuring out now:

I will add a dedicated page on this site when I get everything up and running. I’m not much in the way of automating system changes yet on Fedora, so perhaps in the future either I’ll script this or someone can learn from what I’ve done and build a neat little script to do this.

So far it seems Martin Wimpress is working on scripts that allow Ubuntu respins to work on these GPD Win devices, but I’d love to get it running on Fedora or Manjaro more…especially Fedora, since I deem dnf to be a far more sane package manager, but I digress…

So far I have been following this reddit post on how to get the firmware for the screen loaded as well as get the proper grub parameters for this device. Having not edited grub files in at least a year, I had to relearn that Fedora uses the grub2-mkconfig command.

After changing the grub parameters accordingly for the display resolution and to load the edid firmware file (that I copied from their pasta in the post), I’m now stuck here:
drm.edid_firmware=eDP-1:edid/gpdwinmax.bin: no such file or directory

So I’ll probably have a future blog post here, when I get further! Feel free to comment and thanks for reading my struggles hahaha.

An Uncertain Future

Well there it is.

The Covid-19 pandemic has finally swooped in and affected not just my job, but the jobs of many others. Sorry I haven’t really updated this site in a while. I was quite busy with work and all sorts of other things my scatterbrained self was looking into.

Unemployment is definitely a new stage in life…here’s hoping it doesn’t last too long. Perhaps I’ll coreboot some old Thinkpads and Macbooks I have, and sell them through here or /r/hardwareswap or some place…

Perhaps I’ll finally get that RHCSA or Linux Academy certification of some sort I was talking about in the past with coworkers or family…who knows?

This is definitely a new chapter in my life. Time to apply to jobs and work on some side projects!