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!

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!

What Does The Future Hold?

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Hope everyone out there has been staying safe and healthy! I’m sad to report this week was my final week with System76, as some layoffs occurred. I bolstered up my savings a bit during that nearly-two-year period working for them, so I’ll be doing a bit of soul searching mixed in with applying to new places.

In other news, I’ve been going on a few walks recently. Clearing my head, thinking about my future.

I’ve also gone ahead and wiped any work-related stuff on my Dell G5 15 SE that I was using instead of my Pangolin pang10 for System76 work. Backed up my notes I kept in Github in case I need some good messaging to learn on in the future. Went ahead and cleaned up this machine physically, then installed openSUSE overtop of the wiped 500gb NVMe I was using for work-related tasks and I gotta say, YaST is super cool! Might throw this on my Framework in the future as well.

For the record, That’s openSUSE Tumbleweed, which I’ll probably throw on the Framework at some point as well. When my Oryx Pro oryp4 model comes back from repairs, I’ll likely give Eggy’s Nobara distro and NixOS a dual-boot try on that!

You might hear from me a few times in October, now that I have indefinite free time as I job hunt. Might be selling off some project Thinkpads as well as a custom build or two I still have sitting in storage as well. Toodles!

"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.