GNU/Linux

[Thad]

I'm a fan of Arch-based distros but I've never tried installing vanilla Arch before. That might be a question for the Arch forums. They've got something of a reputation for being unfriendly, but it sounds like you followed the guide and read the instructions so that probably counts for something.

[Thad]

Not going to use this for playing SNES games anyway, given that I've already got both a MiSTer and an actual SNES hooked up to the same TV. It's more for 32-bit and early 64-bit consoles. PS1 is unplayably slow at this point, but N64 works, so I think PS1 (and Saturn, and maybe less-demanding games on PS2 and Dreamcast) might be salvageable if I tweak the settings properly.

Clock speed may be part of the issue too. PS1 emulation worked fine on the old Pentium, so I figured it would work on a newer Sempron, but then I actually compared the specs and nope! The Sempron's more efficient but it's a way lower spec. Could try overclocking it. Or I could go back to the Pentium and see if I can find a cheap graphics card with VGA out; it consumes a lot more power than the Sempron, but OTOH this isn't one of those computers I intend to run 24/7.

I still haven't managed to get PS1 emulation to run at a reasonable speed. I thought "Hey, maybe I should just buy a cheap mini-PC with VGA out and a better clock speed than that Sempron." So I got a ThinkCentre Tiny, which seemed like a neat idea but it looks like onboard graphics don't support 240p (or, as far as I've been able to tell, any resolution that will display on my CRT TV), and of course since it's a mini-PC I can't just add a graphics card to it.

I got it for cheap and I'm sure I can find some use for it (if nothing else, my dad could use a new computer), but it's still annoying.

There's also that old laptop with the cracked screen that I don't want to use as a laptop anymore. It's got a VGA port so it could work. Only problem is that one of the major reasons I don't want to use it anymore is it doesn't have an SSD and its HDD is not easily replaceable; it takes forever to do anything.

Haven't tried that yet but that may be the next thing to try. Pretty close to saying "fuck it" and just getting a Raspberry Pi; whatever latency I'll get from converting digital video output to analog is probably not going to be significant enough to put up with this much hassle to get VGA 240p.

[Brantly B.]

Retropie has latency offset built in so with a little tweaking you can get it down to irrelevant.

[Thad]

The main reason I've avoided RetroPIE on x86 is that it doesn't have a 64-bit version. Does it have one on ARM? Does it matter?

[Thad]

Of course, it occurs to me that if I'm not worrying about latency from converting digital to analog, then there's not really any reason I should be using a Raspberry Pi instead of, say, the i7 desktop that I'm typing this on right now, which is a few feet away from the CRT TV. Except just to set up an emulation box on a Raspberry Pi for the sake of doing it.

[Thad]

Meanwhile:

Grandma keeps calling me with computer trouble and she can't really follow basic directions like "go to the Apple menu and click on System Preferences." She keeps asking me if I can come over and take a look at it, but I'm not going in her house; I know for a fact she routinely has visitors who don't exercise proper COVID-19 precautions.

I did a search to see if I can remote into her desktop. Apparently Messages has a built-in feature for this, but of course I'd need a Mac myself to use it. I don't have a modern Mac (I've got a couple old ones running Linux, but they won't support current versions of the MacOS).

So I decided to look up whether I can run macOS in a VM. And I found a project called macOS-Simple-KVM on Github that appears to deliver what it promises. Clone the repo, run a couple commands, and it sets up a VM using QEMU and KVM and downloads and boots the installer image for macOS Mojave.

Now, I don't know how well this is actually going to work once I start using it, or whether Grandma will be able to understand "open up Messages" any better than she understands "go to the Apple menu". (And I guess I should probably go to the Apple website right now and see if I can figure out what her Apple ID and password are before I try to walk her through logging in, because I know for damn sure she doesn't know them.) But as of right now I'm looking at a macOS installation screen in a window on my Linux desktop, and it took me less time to get to that than it took me to write this post, and holy shit compared to the way setting a VM up in QEMU used to work this is like magic.

Anyway, I'll see how it goes. And if we can't make it work, I guess I can always see if she can put the computer on her back porch and have me come pick it up.

[Mongrel]

I guess I can always see if she can put the computer on her back porch and have me come pick it up.

For a moment I was like "What?!"... and then I remembered where you live.

[Thad]

Keep saying "Maybe I should try that broken-screen laptop as my emulation box; it's got VGA out."

Finally got around to testing it and it's got the same problem as the chip ThinkCentre Tiny I bought; it's got the port but doesn't seem to actually support any of those low resolutions.

Frankly getting that output from the Sempron seems like it was just a luck-of-the-draw thing (though it's possible it's an AMD thing; all the other machines I've tried have had onboard Intel graphics).

The Sempron seems like it'll give me PS1 and Saturn at playable-but-not-100% speeds, even overclocked. Might be able to tweak it with frameskips and such, but I'm also considering maybe just get a better processor for the same board. (The best CPU it will take is an Athlon 5370, which sells for ridiculous prices secondhand, but there's somebody selling an Athlon 5350 for $20 on eBay so I might grab that. Again, I could just say "fuck it" and grab a Raspberry Pi, and still might, but I kinda like the way this project is going.

Need to do something about that case, though; it's ridiculously massive. It's one of those things I ordered online and it looked a lot smaller in the screenshot.

I wonder if I could get the Sempron guts to fit in the ThinkCentre case. I'd have to put the 1TB hard drive in an enclosure or something, but if the ThinkCentre board is a standard microATX form factor I should be able to swap the MBs.

[mharr]

Finally managed to get that Arch setup into a state of basic functionality, turns out the guides forget to mention installing NetworkManager because who would want to attach a computer to some kind of network amirite.

Anyways turns out my gut was tuned and it is exactly powerful enough to run a basic game server provided it's doing as close to nothing else as possible. Score.

(Now I just need a way to display a couple of command shells at once to monitor temperature, cpu load etc.) Okay I found tmux, very nice. Everything's coming up War Games in here.

How much jank is involved in giving this thing a network name on the Windows boxes rather than just an ip address?

[Thad]

The Sempron seems like it'll give me PS1 and Saturn at playable-but-not-100% speeds, even overclocked. Might be able to tweak it with frameskips and such, but I'm also considering maybe just get a better processor for the same board. (The best CPU it will take is an Athlon 5370, which sells for ridiculous prices secondhand, but there's somebody selling an Athlon 5350 for $20 on eBay so I might grab that.

Grabbed that. Suikoden 2 intro sputters slightly with no modifications but I bet an OC could smooth that out. Anyway, looking pretty good. Haven't tried Saturn, Dreamcast, or PS2 yet.

(ETA: PS2's a nonstarter; can't even get Phantasy Star: Generation 1 to run at a half-decent speed, and it ran fine on my old Pentium. Saturn is close; not as good as PS1 but seems like overclocking and some tweaks to settings might get it into playable shape. Haven't tried Dreamcast yet; know I had some images here somewhere but don't know where the hell I put them.)

Also, just saw this:

How much jank is involved in giving this thing a network name on the Windows boxes rather than just an ip address?

Samba's what you're looking for. I never got it to work quite right and eventually stopped trying because now I've got a mostly-Linux network with a few Windows machines, not the other way around, but there should be a way to get the config file set up so you'll have an SMB share name.

[Thad]

This GPU doesn't seem to support Vulkan

I was mistaken. The Sempron 2650 supports Vulkan; so does the Athlon 5350. What I had to do was switch from the old "radeon" graphics driver to the new "amdgpu" one; I thought that was automatic but apparently not. I had to do it manually in my boot config. See Ask Ubuntu: I think I'm using radeon instead of amdgpu? How do I change? (These processors are in the Sea Islands/"cik" family.)

So far switching to amdgpu/Vulkan hasn't helped any. The custom modelines that were working before are all scaled wrong now on my desktop. Which, NBD, my plan eventually is just to launch straight into Retroarch and not look at the desktop at all; Retroarch looks fine. But Saturn emulation doesn't seem any faster than before, and trying to emulate PS1, PS2, or Dreamcast immediately crashes and locks up my screen. Apparently before it can do any logging about what's going wrong.

So, still a work in progress. But I feel like there is progress.

[Mongrel]

[Thad]

Red Hat has effectively killed CentOS, which is not entirely surprising given that CentOS's whole deal is that it's just Red Hat except that it doesn't cost anything.

They're keeping the CentOS name but it's going to be a rolling release from now on. Not sure who the audience is for it except for bug testers, but then, "I'm not sure who the audience is for this other than Red Hat internal developers" has kinda been Red Hat's development model for the past 20 years.

While buying out and then killing a competitor is a common enough business practice, I don't think that was Red Hat's goal in the beginning, partly because it spent the past six years continuing to put resources into CentOS and partly because the nature of Red Hat's software stack and the licenses it's built on is that there's nothing stopping anyone from just releasing another distribution that's identical to Red Hat except with names and logos swapped out. Which appears to be already underway, with former CentOS devs announcing the development of Rocky Linux.

So ultimately, this is one of those weird little dead-end detours that leaves me going "Huh. Yeah, what was all that about, anyway?" Which I'm a lot more used to from Canonical than Red Hat.

ETA: A guy in the comments who says he works for Red Hat has indicated that this is actually because they're planning on releasing a no-cost, no-support version of Red Hat, rendering CentOS redundant, but for various corporate red-tape reasons they don't have all the details ironed out and therefore can't issue an official announcement.

If all that's true, then it would seem that they really botched this announcement. There are a hell of a lot of people using CentOS in production environments, and this is going to make them panic and start making plans to transition to another distribution. And even if a free-as-in-beer Red Hat release comes sometime next year, it may be too late to win back those users' trust.

[Thad]

Snagged a Raspberry Pi 4. Hypothetically for emulation but mostly just to fuck around with, because I only have so much use for it as an emulation box, seeing as I've already got a MiSTer, a Wii, a PS2, and a SNES with a Super Game Boy 2 hooked up to my CRT. I guess I can use it for MAME ROMs that MiSTer doesn't support. Maybe N64 games, though those run pretty well on the Wii's proprietary N64 emulator.

The Saturn's always been a blindspot for me and I'm curious about a lot of Saturn games, but the Pi 4's not really up to the task. Some of them might run playably, if I overclock it and enable frameskip.

Anyway. Installed RetroPie and got it working at 240p. Couple of problems so far: you can choose different themes for EmulationStation but apparently you can't actually change the menu font without recompiling the fucking thing from source? That, uh, seems a little amateur-hour.

But the main problem is, when I launch a game (any emulator I've tried so far), the picture is horizontally squished. Like, about a quarter of the screen on either side is just a giant black column. Vertically, it's fine; fills the height, with probably a slight overscan (and if I want to adjust it, it recognizes my overscan settings in config.txt). Horizontally? Squeezed to the middle of the screen; ignores the overscan settings in config.txt. EmulationStation fills the screen in both directions; so does the console if I switch to that; games don't.

So that's fun; something to figure out. Resolution handling isn't like anything I've ever seen on Linux before, I think due to a combination of this being framebuffer-based and not using X and the general weirdness of the Pi's GPU. Not even sure if I can get the resolution to change on the fly, but I'll look into it.

[Thad]

I found where to configure an emulator's resolution at launch but it's a bunch of presets that don't work and after the first time I launch my keyboard stops working as a keyboard and only works as a game controller (meaning I can't use it to tweak settings a second time -- not sure if this is the result of me killing the emulator from the command line -- because I can't read the screen to exit it gracefully -- or would happen anyway if I exited the correct way). Anyway, it turns out my current resolution is 720x240, which, okay, if it's a widescreen resolution with black bars around the 4:3 picture, scaled down to 4:3, that would explain the pinched picture and the black bars.

I should probably figure out how to switch resolutions manually from the command line. Apparently with the Pi 3 you used the tvservice command, which still exists on the Pi 4 but doesn't seem to do that anymore. The fbset command seems like the framebuffer equivalent of xrandr and looks promising, but I haven't gotten it to actually do anything yet. The poking about continues.

[Thad]

Apparently Retroarch's switchres only works with X, so that means it's not (currently) compatible with RetroPie, which, as noted, renders directly to the framebuffer and doesn't use X.

That's probably fine since I'm not sure how much I'll actually be using Libretro emulators anyway. Apparently Yaba Sanshiro is the way to go for Saturn emulation, and you want to use the standalone version because the Libretro port is abandoned.

Might still be a good idea to try booting to a distro with X and seeing if I can suss what modelines libretro would use, just to make sure I've got them exact and not approximate. The case I got for my Pi covers up the microSD slot, but I should be able to boot from a USB stick.

That just leaves the games which switch their resolution during play (like for menus and such). But eh, that's outlier stuff.

Still haven't been able to get a 480i resolution to work, which is annoying. I'd like to be able to watch videos on this thing too.

[Thad]

Martijn Braam: Why I left PINE64
Drew DeVault: PINE64 has let its community down

So, to recap:

Pine64 is a company that makes cheap computers (laptops, tablets, phones, etc.) that tend to target hobbyists and tinkerers. It's kinda like Raspberry Pi only you're buying a complete computer that runs without having to plug other shit into it, except there's a good chance it doesn't run without a whole lot of additional fucking around because it doesn't have the robust developer ecosystem that the Pi does.

They've partnered with a Linux distribution called Manjaro and that appears to be all they support now. In theory, targeting a single distribution improves development because you don't have to worry about making sure things are compatible with a million different possible software stacks. In practice, Pine64 relies heavily on unpaid community developers to make its products work, and it's just told all of them to fuck off, which is perhaps not as strong a strategy for growth as management thinks it is.

And Manjaro's team is kind of terrible? Like, I like Manjaro. I use Manjaro. I've got Manjaro running on three different computers in my house (including my main) and am seriously considering putting it on a fourth. But, as noted upthread,

I really like Manjaro as a distro but I'm about six seconds away from finding another one because my experiences asking for help have been absolutely fucking abysmal. It's ranged from people pimping their unsupported pet projects to bad advice for partition sizes to bad advice on how to set up regular snapshots to, most recently, scolding and mocking me for doing what that last guy suggested I do, all by people whose native language is clearly not English.

And the thing is, even if there weren't any problems with the Manjaro team, if Manjaro's going to be the only distro you support, then you're pretty effectively alienating every developer who isn't a Manjaro user. Which might work for some projects, but is absolutely catastrophic for a project that relies as much on community development as Pine64. Like, imagine if the Pi Foundation had told everyone who didn't use Raspberry PiOS to fuck off.

Here's what Jim Salter said about the situation:



And now they seem set on losing the former group, too.

[Thad]

I really like Manjaro as a distro but I'm about six seconds away from finding another one because my experiences asking for help have been absolutely fucking abysmal. It's ranged from people pimping their unsupported pet projects to bad advice for partition sizes to bad advice on how to set up regular snapshots to, most recently, scolding and mocking me for doing what that last guy suggested I do, all by people whose native language is clearly not English.

Latest example: something called ceph-libs, from the AUR (ie not an officially-supported package) recently showed up on my list of installed apps. And when I'd try to upgrade it, it would fail and hose my KDE workspace so I'd have to restart it.

I looked it up and here's a thread where a smug asshole fails to explain what ceph-libs is doing there and mocks the person asking the question (disclosure: the person asking the question is an acquaintance of mine from other forums). TBF a mod shows up, links to the relevant release notes, and quotes the relevant section of them. But god damn, my opinion of Manjaro at this point has pretty well firmed up as "It's great as long as you don't have to ask for help; fortunately, I rarely have to ask for help." It's still my distro of choice, but got damn the people on the official forum really like to test that.

And anyway the ceph-libs dependency was mishandled in the first place. I guess there are some packages that used to depend on it but don't anymore, and so Manjaro removed it from the list of officially supported packages, but transitioned everyone who had it installed to requiring the AUR version instead, whether they needed it or not. This is, let's say, not an ideal way to handle a situation like that.