Projects update; Steam Deck as a Laptop, T440p Refurbishing

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!

Giving ChromeOS an Honest Try

Hello there again! Long time no see!

Recently, I’ve been getting to using ChromeOS a bit more, with the Thinkpad C13 Yoga that was on sale recently in the USA.

My little ChromeOS desktop

So far, I’ve used this for a few use cases:

• Blogging, as you see here

• My job, customer support- mainly firefox and chrome with some VSCode in between

• GeForce Now gaming

• Casting videos to our various “smart” sticks in my family’s TVs

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Some of the “workspace” functionality I usually see in my various Linux flavors is even here too! Well, I guess that should make sense, considering ChromeOS is technically based on Gentoo with some Google flair and design language thrown in.

The Linux container experience with Debian is definitely adequate for most developers’ needs it appears. A friend of mine who worked at Google for a short stint once mentioned “A Chromebook should be as simple as possible, while having the tools a web developer may need” and I can definitely see that here. Tons of partitions for updating on reboot, kind of like the frzr idea, and keeping the Debian instance in its own container…while also allowing you to see your Linux apps as icons in the launcher alongside everything else.

Now, onto the use cases in more depth!

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Having edited this blog post, turned Medium article, on the Chromebook, everything is smooth as butter. When I receive a new machine, or have a machine that I’ve refurbished, I usually end up going through the quick process that is installing Fedora or Pop!_OS on it. However, running my bash script to set things up the way I like usually takes a while afterwards.

Not the case on ChromeOS. You sign in to your separate work and personal emails, and just get stuff done. Here I show myself doing some web browsing, editing this blog post and checking out the new Framework laptop, with fully modular components. This Thinkpad C13 Yoga breezes past it all.

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For my work, now at System76, I’m mainly on my work-provided Gazelle getting things done. I would say I probably use this Chromebook two days a week for work, due to various time-sensitive things needing a full Linux experience. When I am on the Chromebook though, I’m answering calls through our dedicated call app, typing up notes in VSCodium and testing various packages in the Debian VM.

Outside of having a few web browser tabs open, a terminal and a text editor, I don’t need much else for my job. Having access to the Android app for our calling system is nice, for sure. That way I can have a dedicated device for it. I need the computing power to compile Linux kernels from time to time, but other than that I mostly live in the browser. Need I mention the keyboard? I’ve been spoiled by Thinkpads for most of my young adult, and now maturing adult life. I can type up to 100wpm on this bad boy.

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Consuming media. We all do it, on various devices we own. I like that this is a 2-in-1 style laptop, so I can just fold it when I want to use it as a “director” of sorts for Youtube video playlists on the TV in our living room.
Want to have a music session? Easily cast various Soundcloud songs/Youtube videos to the television and sound system my family owns.

Not much more to say here, everything just works!

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Something else I’ve been using this Chromebook for, is for testing various cloud gaming and streaming services.

I own a lot of games on Steam, but mainly play games on Linux- more info about that in a prior post. I’ve been testing GeForce Now game streaming for a month or two. When all I have is this Chromebook, I just plug my wired Xbox 360 controller into it, and jump into a Rocket League or No Man’s Sky session.

Games such as Destiny 2 or others that have had issues running on Linux either due to developers who do not support Linux or some sort of anti-cheat software incompatibility, I’ll play via this method…and in my testing, they run fine! Our home internet is fairly quick at around 100mb/s down and 40mb/up, and my work-from-home friends that I visit occasionally also have fairly quick internet, so game streaming wasn’t an issue there either. One thing to be careful with is if you’re streaming something like Rocket League from your phone, though, as that latency could potentially result in a lost match.

I have tried a Bluetooth 8bitdo Pro controller, but had issues using it with Moonlight or GeForce Now on my C13 Yoga. It appears that GeForce Now is very picky about what bluetooth controllers they’ll accept, so I mainly have been sticking to my USB Xbox 360 controller.

Those are my short thoughts on the use cases I’ve been testing out ChromeOS for recently, feel free to let me know your thoughts!

Hello System76!

Quick update.

I now work at System76 on the Happiness team.
Going to build some machines and sell them as a side project for a short while, and downsize everything I own that doesn’t play well with Linux so I can have a streamlined setup in the future.

Also I’m super psyched for our upcoming open keyboard launch.

Some cool things I’ve found recently:

• Booting a 486 from a floppy with a modern Linux kernel

• Someone made a glorious Pi-based terminal with mech keyboard built-in

• I wanna build a RISC-V laptop with the BeagleV

• AA Computers made some upgrades to the same old macbook I’m working on

• This cool dude made an insulated camper he could pull with a snowmobile

The Pi 4 Laptop and C201 Failures

Back at it again with the new things to tinker with!

This time I nabbed a Raspberry Pi 4 plus a FLIRC Case and various accessories to see if I could replicate a Pi 4 Lapdock project someone did already. Looks pretty much plug and play….

This Pi 4 laptop was meant to hold me over until the Pinebook Pro December Batch ships out. Here’s a shot of the Omars cheap external battery I’ll be using. This one has Power Delivery through USB-C so I know for sure it can power the Pi 4.

Here’s a shot of the Pi 4 in its case on top of the Motorola Lapdock I grabbed for super cheap on eBay.

The Lapdock was once used as a docking station of sorts for the failed Motorola Atrix phone project from Motorola. Fear not, my friends! It lives on through projects!

With the proper connectors (linked above when I mentioned the Pi 4 Lapdock project) you can easily plug in the Pi 4, though this more powerful unit needs power from an external battery due to the improvements over the prior model. The good news is that we’ll be going straight from Micro-HDMI to Micro-HDMI so you likely won’t need an adapter!

After plugging up the connections, and later on powering up the Pi 4……I realize I ended up losing the power adapter for the Motorola Lapdock D: so it looks like I’ll be waiting a while for a replacement to arrive.

…….however…

I took apart a replacement ASUS C201 Chromebook I found on eBay and removed the write-protect screw again…but forgot to plug the trackpad in before I left for home….we’ll see if we can properly enable Developer Mode on this next time and see if we can Libreboot it!

More Procrastination + Star Labs

As I procrastinate personal projects by throwing random Linux distros on anything I can get my hands on, I realize there’s really no use in installing operating systems, only to never use the devices again.

In the above pic, I threw GalliumOS on an Acer C720P chromebook, am working on getting Luke Smith’s LARBS scripts working on a nanode on Linode, and have updated my Aero15Xv8’s Pop!_OS install. May sell the Aero sometime next year as I go for something from System76 for portable gaming.

The only hardware updates I have is that now I have the cheapo C720p for note-taking and will be owning a Star Labs Lite MKII later this month when they get shipped out. I haven’t done any corebooting of the X230, though I am in the process of spinning up another Factorio server on Linode. Perhaps I’ll post on github when the slightly-modified LARBS files get turned into a StackScript for Linode.

Fairly certain the Star Labs Star Lite MK2 is going to replace my Thinkpad A485 as my non-work daily driver, since the A485 is having quite a few stability issues now, what with daily freezes and all. Will be doing more cloud-based stuff in the future, so hardware won’t be as much of a concern anymore.