ChimeraOS Testing on the Win600, The Job Hunt Continues

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Hello again there! Here goes another blog post. Not much happened in April, so not much to say. I’m still on the hunt for an ethically-paying remote job due to the possible implications catching COVID or other blood-related infections could mess with my Hemochromatosis.

Anyway, if anyone is hiring Linux Support Engineers or Customer Support people remotely, I’m available!

In other news, I was sent an Anbernic Win600 lower-end handheld by a generous friend recently. They wish to keep anonymous, so I’ll respect their wishes. This little guy has an AMD Athlon 3050e Silver in it. I went ahead and upgraded the RAM From 8GB at 2666mhz to 16gb at 3200mhz though. As I don’t have any 2242-sized M.2 drives, nor the funds currently to grab one, I’ll keep this little guy at its stock 256gb storage.

It originally came with Windows 10, which was a terrible experience. The system wouldn’t power on until it was fully charged, about 2.9 hours on the cable it came with, and then it took 10 minutes to “power through” the Windows boot-up.

There’s my little Crucial RAM upgrade there. Note that you should always unplug batteries when working on electronics. Also, that fan is practically always-on…going to need to see if I can get a better thermal pad for this 6W APU.

After plugging in a flash drive, I went into the boot menu on the Anbernic Win600 to see if I could load my Ventoy USB. If you try to change boot selection without anything else plugged in, it seems you’ll have a bad time. I ended up trying three different USB-C hubs before ending up on one from Cable Matters that worked. After plugging in a keyboard and mouse (no HDMI output in boot menu or installation) I successfully went into Ventoy and chose my ChimeraOS installer, as this experience will be a hell of a lot better than Windows. You can check out their website here.

After getting the image to boot, with a dock plugging the device into a keyboard and mouse as well as Ethernet and power, it went ahead and booted then ran through the automated installer.

I’m comfortable leaving that QR code here, as I ended up refreshing it, and then logging in via the Steam app. This is what the welcome screen for ChimeraOS looks like! Once you’re booted up and signed in, all the controls work perfectly fine! The only somewhat not-intuitive aspect of this is that the Windows button on the right acts as the Steam button and the Home button on the left acts as the *** triple dot button you’d usually find on the Steam Deck for Quick Settings.

In my testing with this little guy, it can’t really handle too many large 3D games, but I played the following games perfectly fine when locked anywhere between 30fps and 60fps on this amazing screen:

  • Vampire Survivors

  • Factorio

  • Core Keeper

  • Monster Crown

  • Graveyard Keeper

  • Cave Story

  • Hades

  • Cult of the Lamb

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:

Reviving a 2006 Macbook (Part 1)

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At this point, I think you know what I mean by reviving.

While in California, I managed to clean this sucker internally and externally, then get 32-bit Debian running on it. Maybe I'll donate it to family or friends after, if anyone has a use for it. Though a good bit older and chunky, I kinda miss this old school style of MacBooks….though I lust over the eventual success of running Arch on an M1 Mac Mini…

The OG boyo

This trusty old sidekick was a free grab from a prior coworker, when I lived and worked back there.

I had prior experience running Debian on it, but perhaps now I’ll see if it can run Void or other lightweight Linux distros. I’m sure Gentoo would be an option, but I’d rather not do something as intensive as installing that from scratch.

Another cool idea would be running Elementary OS, which is slightly mac-themed and runs well under limited hardware, as well as React OS. React OS is a reimplementation of Windows XP/Windows 7 code, but completely rewritten to avoid Microsoft legal action. But enough of this thinking to ourselves, let's get cracking!

Above, you’ll see the install of Debian I had running on the old Macbook booting…but here we run into our first issue. Yes, this Macbook will boot to an external drive, but NOT a modern flash drive. All 32 of my variously-sized flash drives I own are USB 3.1…..none of them are USB 2 or older. It seems that, if the drive is configured to interface in a USB3+ transfer mode by default, we can’t boot to it on the Macbook….time to order a cheapo USB2 drive off ebay and wait for it to arrive.

A few days have passed, and I have obtained said drives.

Now to see if we can get something other than Debian 10 running on here. Maybe Void Linux in 32bit form? I selected that with the LXQt desktop environment, the lightest thing I can imagine running on here.
Burned to a flash drive, inserted…only to find…..

mac2006rip.jpg

Yup, guess we’ll have to burn a DVD or CD drive installer. Time to steal an external dvd drive burner from a family friend!

A few more days have passed and the calls from prospective employers have dropped off, so now to get back to this! It appears I’m still having that “Select CD-ROM Boot Type” issue. According to a youtuber, who has also tried this, I’ll need rEFInd installed on the macbook to be able to boot from external media. So I’ll go reinstall OSX Snow Leopard on this using this script from a Linux machine, and then install rEFInd as this guy has.

macrefind.jpg

As we can see here, I got the rEFInd bootloader installed succesfully on this old boy….but now it isn’t seeing the Lubuntu drive I’ve inserted to the side….
Maybe I’ll try this with my flash drive that utilizes the Ventoy interface to boot many operating systems at once…

macventoy.jpg

Now it looks like we can finally boot to the flash drive with Ventoy and various operating systems on it…however when we try to boot the 32bit versions of Lubuntu, Void or MX Linux…

macboooot.jpg

Well, back to the drawing board, I guess. I’ll see you back here for Part 2 soon.

I made a Hackintosh! (Thinkpad T440s)

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t440s-macos.jpg

When looking around for machines I could use for projects at work, I found a little T440s with an old HGST drive in it. With Windows 8.1 currently installed, I felt something shinier could give this machine a new lease on life.

After following a great guide made by my buddy Wolfgang, I got MacOS Mojave running natively on the hardware! Thankfully his guide made the process quite easy, though the T440s doesn’t entirely need the graphics injector after install. My T440p I have Fedora Silverblue on could likely pull this off as well, though it would seem a bit unwieldy to my coworkers that are used to the thinness of Dell’s 7390s and Apple’s new Macbook Airs (2019).

The goal of this was just to see if it could be done, and it is! There are some modifications I could make to make the whole thing a smoother experience, what with brightness controls and all, but the gist of this is that it is possible to run Apple’s OS on far superior hardware!

Also, some things I’ve been reading recently:

Come back next time for some news on my LARBS-in-the-cloud project and other upcoming things!

t440s-macos-2.jpg

Upcoming projects (quick update)

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Hello again! Just a quick update here, since I likely will have a large gap between now and reporting upon my next projects.

  • I recently won some auctions and will be unlocking the BIOS on a T440p as well as upgrading the parts

    • The Thinkpad T440p will serve as an interim for my Thinkpad A485 until the Star Labs Lite MkII arrives, as both will be far more stable than that machine

  • I will be looking into Librebooting an old Macbook soon as well as getting some help with wiring for Corebooting the Thinkpad X230

  • My LARBS-in-the-Cloud project is on hold as I figure out some VNC server issues with my Linode VPS

  • Might be downsizing in the future and selling a few of my project computers as well as my gaming laptop, then switching to Linux OEMs/Resellers’ products, for better hardware support in the future. Still on the fence with this one.