Finishing the Steam Machine

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Heyo! I finally got all the parts together, this past weekend, to finish my older-hardware living room build for TV gaming. Click here for a full breakdown of all the parts.

Humble beginnings. This process took probably around three months to get all the parts somewhat-affordably used or free from friends.

…I might eventually end up getting custom-sleeved cables though, as this spaghetti monster of power cables is quite difficult to keep neat in this tiny case, for airflow reasons. Sadly, the CPU is currently hovering around 60-80c depending on the game that’s being played, due to its Noctua cooler being right under the PSU fan.

After building it, while quite inebriated late at night, I was honestly surprised to see everything fire up without blowing up hahaha. I’m using the vizio soundbar + subwoofer for sound through the TV and have the TV connected to it via HDMI to the AMD card. The internet is over ethernet, as I don’t want to futz with wifi attenuation issues due to the solid wall between the router and it.

I burned ChimeraOS to a USB, chose it as the boot device, and let the automated installer do its thing. On first boot-up, I signed into Steam and started installing games! My favorite part is the webUI that you can use for easily installing other games via flatpak/GOG or retro roms. I’ll add some photos of that below.

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.

The Depthboot Project

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New blog post, but this might be a short one. No updates on the job front, but a friend has tipped me off to a project that may finally get a full Linux distro booting on my Thinkpad C13 Yoga Chromebook that I purchased back at the beginning of 2021.

Perhaps I haven’t done enough research into getting it to run, but I haven’t previously been able to get any full Linux distro booting as the main OS on this thing. Perhaps it’s because of the odd AMD Ryzen 5 3500C SoC processor, perhaps it’s due to some hackery that Google has done regarding the booting firmware for AMD processors on Chromebooks in general. Either way, I was unable to get anything booted other than ChromeOS or Linux via an LXC container previously.

Below, I’ll run through a recording of what you need to do, according to the Eupnea Project’s instructions here, to get a bootable install of Linux running from a flash drive on your target Chromebook of choice. The Depthboot Project is an effort from the Eupnea Project’s community to get proper bootable Linux distros installed on Chromebooks without modifying the system’s firmware or hardware. Their scripts build a full bootable install of one of the available distros, utilizing Depthboot and the ChromeOS kernel or Mainline kernel depending on your choices.

For my C13 Yoga Chromebook, I found that only the ChromeOS kernel boots properly on this machine...so far. We’ll explore more later in this post. There are some occasional graphical glitches, and suspend is non-functional, but everything else works perfectly with this installed!

Below I’ll add a screenshot of my currently-installed Fedora KDE w/ChromeOS-kernel image on the system. Now I’ll get that Cinnamon install running the more recent mainline kernel booted and do another recording of the terminal in there on how I install it to the disk.

I then went ahead and setup audio while booting to the Fedora-38-with-Cinnamon-and-Mainline USB that I had built. I also went ahead and ran the install-to-disk script that the Eupnea project had added to image the drive with the current install I was booting from…but it seems asciinema corrupted that recording. So here’s the audio setup recording.

After I had the Thinkpad C13’s audio working fine from that script, and ran the install to drive script, I tried restarting the system from the terminal, but it seemed to hang on the screen that says “system rebooting NOW!” for at least five minutes. I hard powered it off, removed the USB and powered it back on. Things look to be working better now.

Next, I went ahead and installed Steam, Discord, Protonup-QT, my Mullvad VPN etc and took a screenshot :)

While it seems suspend still isn’t working properly on this fresh DE and mainline Kernel in this install, the audio is working fine and I don’t see nearly as many graphical glitches as on the ChromeOS-kernel install. Thanks again, Jade, for recommending them!

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

More Progress on Switchbuntu, Job Hunt and Living Room Steam Machine

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Hello all! I recently went to SCaLE 20x in Pasadena, California. It’s a wonderful mostly-community-led and -oriented event in Southern California. Here’s a fun pic of me helping out at the Lutris booth!

I also met some super cool people at the Ubuntu booth! Aaron Prisk and Monica were so cool to talk to. I ended up setting up my Nintendo Switch with Ubuntu on it as a side-showcase at their booth. I’ll definitely be helping out again with the Lutris booth next year and bringing even more cool projects! I met quite a few people at that event and I’ll also be following up with the companies I’ve talked to, to see if I can finally get another remote tech job!

Side note; The Division 2 has some cool events going on right now. With GE-Proton7-49 and above, you’ll be able to play it just fine on both Steam Deck, and any Linux installs you have! This won’t run on the Ubuntu 18.04 Nintendo Switch, but on the other hardware I’m using daily, it runs fine!

I’ve added the above image, accompanied by a terminal session recording, to my Nintendo Switch Ubuntu project page here if you’re interested in learning more about how that’s going. Seems something may have been taken away in recent Steam updates, as I can’t get the application opened via the Switchroot wiki instructions.

Some last things before I end this blog post here for now!