Short sweet June update

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Greetings there! I’ve mainly been slowly gathering supplies to turn my Framework Laptop 13, the OG model shipped in 2021, to a Tablet. I don’t have many picture updates here, other than this one of all the stuff on the desk waiting for me to do something with it. I’ve been working a little on my Steam Deck script too, which I’ll discuss further in this post.

Having been pouring a fair few hours into Diablo IV, tinkering with Steam Deck theming, cleaning the place (minus workbench) and job hunting, I haven’t gotten around to it. I’ll be following WhatTheFilament’s guide here on how to turn the old mainboard into a tablet. He was kind enough to send over his 3D-printed enclosure as well, as my AnkerMake3D doesn’t have a large enough bed.

On the Diablo IV front, I can confirm it works perfectly fine on both Steam Deck and Desktop Linux installs through the Battle.net Lutris installer. You just install Lutris via your GUI software store or via terminal through your package manager and then install Battle.net. Once that’s installed, open ‘er up and install Diablo IV.

Part of my Deckscript that I’ve been working on over on my Github here will install Lutris and all these other fun little utilities automatically for you…but do note that the pacman packages noted there may need to be reinstalled when there’s a new SteamOS stable update if you’re on the stable update channel. Most are by default.

Ubuntu on my Switch, Pastel Miyoo Mini, and the Job Hunt continues...

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Greetings, fellow geeks. I’ve recently received an RCMLoader/jig combo kit for my OG Nintendo Switch. I’ll be walking through the process I went through to get Ubuntu 18.04 (the only one NVIDIA supports here) running on my Nintendo Switch on my project page over here if you’re interested.

I’ve also recently received limited edition decals and buttons from SakuraRetroModding to Kirby-ify my Miyoo Mini, so I’ve gone ahead and done that and loaded more PICO-8 cartridges on there.

Here’s a little teaser image of what I’ve been documenting over on my Nintendo Switch Linux project page. Looks like the community contributors have come an awfully far way now! There are some libraries from 20.04 or newer releases that would really help where I’m trying to get with this effort, but I suppose compiling and installing things on the older Ubuntu 18.04 release works just as well. Ubuntu 18.04 seems to be the focus of that Switchroot project due to NVIDIA having drivers for that specific release, but not for newer ones that use a similar ARM/NVIDIA setup as the Switch.

Despite the decal being slightly askew, which I can fix later, here’s an image of my Miyoo mini I’ve recently dazzled up a bit! I acquired a limited run of pastel buttons from SakuraRetroModding on Etsy for this guy, updated OnionOS and added some Kirby games to finish the feel. I’ve mainly been playing through Kirby: Nightmare in Dreamland, Megaman Battle Network Blue Moon, Cave Story (Dokutsu Monogatari) and Advance Wars on here. I was happy to learn that most of these ROMs are available if you search the lovely Archive(dot)Org website! Gosh I love the game archiving community.

Here you’ll see that I’ve added a few more PICO-8 carts to this OnionOS install. Turns out there was a newer iteration of PCraft for PICO-8 consoles (or fake8 on OnionOS) that you could actually save your game in and fight a boss in.

That’s about all I have for this last bit of February! My job hunt is ongoing and I’m open to any and all remote opportunities for Linux-friendly companies! I have built up more of a focus in customer support and hardware support in that industry as of late, and am definitely open to anyone wanting to talk or interview!

Here are a few notable things I’ve found in the past two weeks:

A New Year, A New Outlook

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Greetings once again! Alex here. Going for a more positive outlook on job prospects this year, despite the current state of the Tech economy. I have a few things planned in the beginning this year. I’ll likely be going on more road trips this year, as well.

In case you haven’t seen it, click here to check out my page with dedicated links to spreadsheets detailing the status of my yearly projects! Moving on…

Hope everyone’s enjoying the new calendar year with friends or loved ones! I know I did. Love my parents and my childhood friends to bits, and it was great to see them one last time before I change up my end-of-year plans going forward. Will likely drive to see them when I eventually pick up my Aptera at the end of this coming year or beginning of 2024.

On the topic of projects, soon I may be doing a write-up in a blog post or dedicated project page on the Miyoo Mini after mine arrives. I’ll be doing more Steam Deck write-ups as well. This year I’ll also be building an AM5-based open-air desktop in the Streacom DA6 XL as well, and that might be my last desktop build for quite a while. Soon I’ll have an Ayn Loki 8 GB model with a 6600U on the way that I scored for cheap, and I’ll test out running HoloISO on there, after configuring BIOS options to be efficient with battery life.

In the last bit of news for this new year, check out my Linux Gaming reflection that I posted on Medium as a follow-up to my 2020 reflection. Things have changed quite a bit since the Deck was released! Above you’ll see me continuing to relive my childhood as I play through Pikmin 2 on my Deck. OS 3.4 is quite smooth, by the way. Love the initiative Valve is taking to support this machine.

Also, as always, here are some cool things I’ve read around the internet recently:

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!

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!