I refurbished a T440p! Or maybe the repairs are ongoing…

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Greetings fellow humans! I’ve been waiting a few weeks for some parts to come in for the T440p I’m upcycling and refurbishing, so someone else out there can continue using this bad boi. While I’ve learned a lot from my various tech support jobs and internships I’ve had during the past 10 years of my life or so, manually fixing modular hardware continues to be calming to my mind.

The current state of things, before rennovations. While this machine was probably one of my craigslist snags in the past two years or so, I found a somewhat-functioning Thinkpad Advanced Dock from a friend’s apartment complex’s e-waste area. That guy just needs a pin bent back into its proper slot and it should connect fine to laptops again. Pic of that below.

Lil pin boyo. If you look at the upper left of the connector, you’ll see the retaining pin that’s bent.

I also have some 8GB modules on hand for upgrading this T440p to 16GB of RAM. Going to give it an isopropyl wipedown next before I start swapping parts. This is the first time I took the CD-to-SATA adapter for this project out of its sleeve, and it looks like it came with a cute little screwdriver as well as screws! That’s cute :)

Changing laptop subjects real quick, above is the Thinkpad X230 I’ve had for a little while. It’s had a keyboard replacement, RAM upgrade, and the like. I will also be putting this up for sale at some point. I think I’ll replace the screen bezel (see bottom left corner) if it isn’t too costly.

Back on the T440p, I went ahead and replaced the CD drive with a SATA slot and a 240GB SSD. If you look real close at the little window-to-sdd-drive from the left of the RAM, you can see that PNY SSD’s serial poking through. Upgraded the RAM to 16GB as well, and swapped out the old 7000 series Intel wifi card for their newer AX201, which should be Wifi 6 compatible. This is shaping up to be a nice lil used machine! I’d say, prior to my moving to a Framework Laptop, this T440p and my subsequent P51 were the most modular laptops I owned.

Also, recently received a free backplate from a friend…but it turns out to have been hopelessly bent…and unable to go on the rear of the machine properly, regardless of bending it back with a vice.

Swapped that bad trackpad.

Here’s a shot of what that looks like from the bottom. As the machine wouldn’t boot with an AX201 card, I kept the original wifi card in there. Might have been due to some BIOS whitelisting. Also now two SSDS are installed!

Also added an i7-4710mq to replace the dual core i5 that was in there. I love swappable processors in laptops! Oh how I miss those days… I’m sorry for the blurry pic here! That was the only one I had before cleaning the rest of the dry thermal muck off, pasting it and screwing the cooler back on.

Since the original replacement back panel to this T440p I wanted to fix was quite bent, I’ve finally replaced it after weeks of waiting!

Here’s the test of Nobara Linux, technically Fedora 36 with newer stacks. As you can see here, the screen is damaged. Once I get a replacement 1080p screen to replace this damaged 768p one, I think I’ll list this project on my store soon.

Giving KubeSail a shot on my Pi 4

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I received a Pibox in the past from the Kubesail people, but I wanted to try adding an older Pi 4 to my cluster via their instructions.

Per the above recording, this was try number….seven? …at trying to get K3s setup on the Pi OS Lite operating system. It seems the documentation by Kubesail here recommends that.

Looks like running Ubuntu Server 22.04.1 for Raspberry Pi out of the box seems to work better, this time around? I was successfully able to add this test pi to my account this time around. Perhaps they need to update their documentation for getting your Pi synced up with KubeSail to recommend Ubuntu Server? Glad it’s working now. I used the Raspberry Pi Imager on Fedora to burn the image straight to the SSD my Pi is booting from.

Sadly, it looks like the Pi is not showing up in my cluster list after running through their instructions as well as prepping the ubuntu install with the proper modules etc. Seems I have a bit more research to do before I move forward…

Nobara Linux on an Oryx Pro oryp4

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Heyo! I have an older model Oryx Pro from System76 that I obtained fairly cheaply, prior to being laid off from the company with a few other people. Let’s run Eggy’s Nobara distro on it!

Sorry for the blurry photo, but the first installation attempt was seemingly a failure, due to a bad USB drive. I went ahead and burned the Gnome version of Nobara Linux (based on Fedora) to a different USB, slapped it in and the install went off without a hitch!

Once booted back up after the install completed, the Nobara team’s point-and-click installer for media codecs popped up. I went ahead and agreed to it, then a follow-up pop-up point-and-click installer came up for the NVIDIA drivers required to use this Oryx Pro oryp4 model’s GTX 1070.

I believe, outside of NVIDIA being pre-installed in Pop!_OS, this is the best experience I’ve had with a Linux distro to date when it comes to installing the proprietary NVIDIA drivers. This Oryx Pro is the only piece of tech I have, besides the Corsair One Pro I’m selling, that still has NVIDIA hardware in it. Moving forward, I’ll mainly be sticking to Intel/AMD hardware for ease of use in open-source computing, but this will be a great spare should my Dell G5 mess up at any point…though I think that isn’t likely.

Since it seems Nobara is handling the NVIDIA driver stuff fine with their auto-installer, I went ahead and installed some additions I usually make to my Nobara gnome installs via this script I have on github. Above you’ll also see me using their point-and-click solution to install the Xbox One controller firmware. Note that I had previously installed a few things on battery before the older battery cut out, so now I’m reinstalling the controller firmware. After that, my Xbox One wired controller worked fine!

Just a few last things needed and we’re good to go! That said, it looks like I would have to fully install the System76 nvidia driver package for Fedora here if I wanted active switchable graphics, as it looks to be that there’s no menu for choosing whether you want to be on Intel/NVIDIA graphics from the power menu in the top right of Gnome.

Above, you’ll see I also went ahead and installed some benchmarking tools to test the temperatures with the stock thermal paste that System76 and their repair partners apply after replacing system mainboards. Looks like the temps got between the 70-80 celsius range before the cpu began thermal throttling, as the fans were on full bore the whole time so there wasn’t much that could change in terms of airflow. Let’s see if we can increase that headroom a bit! I’m going to go ahead and repaste the CPU as well as the GPU with Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut to see if that makes a difference.

After the Kryonaut was applied, I re-ran the CPU benchmark for a few seconds/minutes to see how the termperatures were looking this time. After that, I ran a GPU benchmark as well. Threw a little neofetch in here too, so people could see what kernel I’m running on Nobara here from the fsync repo that Eggy uses. I’ll be keeping this Oryx Pro as a backup gaming machine, and might end up replacing the Upcycled Guest Gaming Build based around an older Xeon with this as it will take up less space next to the workbench. From what I’m seeing here, the kryonaut only gave slightly better temperatures in this test case. Regardless, it’s nice to have fresh paste!

I also have a Thinkpad T400 or T500 that’s fully librebooted as of a few years ago. Might update libreboot on that and list that in my projects-for-sale page if anyone would be interested in that.

Used Projects For Sale! (also Decky Loader news)

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Greetings, fellow nerdlings. I’ve finally got the store page for my site up and running! While Squarespace makes it easy to set up websites and stores, I ended up futzing around with my images and where to put descriptions for too long, so it took about two months lol.

The store page can be accessed clicking the link above or by clicking the Projects For Sale tab at the top of my site. Help me sell these machines to people that are in need, as well as fund other fun projects along the way!

In other updates, I’ve also had to re-image my Steam Deck due to breaking the UI too often with Decky Loader plugins. It seems that the current pre-alpha build here of Decky Loader is the only one that was booting for me when I was running the Beta channel OS of SteamOS 3 on my deck. That said, the pre-release build was crashing fairly often and I may have installed one too many plugins. Now that I’ve reinstalled a bunch of games and made sure the Chrome shortcut in Deck UI is heading to XCloud properly again, I think I’ll just stick to the VibrantDeck extension that makes your screen look a lot better.

Ignore the clutter on that workbench, I’m about to replace the guest gaming desktop’s wifi adapter with a little nub as well as replace a touchpad on a T440p soon.

Sorry if the above image here seems blurry. This was from when I headed over to the home of GloriousEggroll and we finished working on updating the BIOS for the Upcycle V2 build that I’m now selling in my Projects For Sale store here. We had to upgrade the BIOS about 5 times- due to the many iterations that have been released- and now it’s working perfectly with the faster RAM and GPU that were added. More information via the store listing HERE.

That said, I think I’ll keep the older, likely-less-worth-money Upcycle V1 build that has an old i7-3xxx processor and Radeon 6770 1GB video card, as I don’t think there will be as much interest in buying that as there will be for the Ryzen 5-based Upcycle V2.

The Upcycle V2 system is now back at my place, safe and sound. Just need to re-mount the PCIe-screw-cover that goes into the back and we’re good to go for sale. Note that I’ll be selling it with no OS installed, unless the new owner wants a specific OEM-Installable Linux distro installed. That’ll be the policy for all my hardware, as I won’t be paying for Windows licenses.

After I got the games reinstalled on Deck, and ProtonGE builds installed via ProtonUP for games like Shatterline and Halo MCC, I started running through a Brotato run again as well haha. This is basically a single-player equivalent to Vampire Survivors, except completely written in Godot which is pretty cool. Godot is an open source game engine, and it’s nice to see games on Steam utilizing it.

I also received my Pibox recently! I’m looking forward to working on hosting things once I can get two 4TB 2.5” drives for it. I have quite a bit I’d like to host on it…

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!