To the Window to the Linux . . .

[Madchatthew]

So everyone knows about the upcoming Winblows 10 being flushed down the toilet by MS and trying to force everyone to go to Winblows 11. Well who has two thumbs and isn’t playing that game? This guy!

So on that note, last week I decided I wanted to get a jump start on making Linux my daily driver on the main computer. Which by the way is over 10 years old. Thank you Asus, AMD, Corsair and Samsung, Western Digital. Sorry had to do a shout out to them. They aren’t the cheapest, but they do make excellent products and I don’t use anything else when I build my PCs. That is also based on experience repairing computers.

I digress, lets get back on topic. So due to the success of the Arch Linux server that I am running for a production web hosting server on Hetzner, I decided to go ahead and install Arch Linux with KDE Plasma on my main computer. Well I should say our computer since my wife and daughter use it as well. The wife just uses the web browser, and now LibreOffice to write stories for freelancing. Also Gnucash for invoicing and such. So she is pretty much taken care of for now.

My daughter uses the desktop computer for voice to text to quickly write a story or idea that she has come up with. Before she was using Word, but now will be using LibreOffice as well. The downside to this is that I will have to find a program that will do voice to text. I did a little research on this already, but need to test some of them out. Currently she uses a laptop with Windows on it to play games. As it gets closer to Winblows 10 going the way of the dodo bird, I will put Arch Linux with KDE Plasma on it as well.

Finally for me, I play games, one of them being Minecraft. I run a Minecraft server on the desktop for my daughter and I to play on, and that migration from Winblows to Linux was so very simple. And I must say playing Minecraft on the desktop and playing on the server at the same time, they both run ssssoooooo smooth. Better than when running both on Winblows. I have Steam installed and am struggling a little bit with getting American Truck Simulator working without so much lag. On Winblows it had a little bit of lag, but not as bad as it is now and was thinking it would run better than on Winblows. I have been testing different Proton versions and think I am getting close. I was able to get the Bluetooth headphone working and the printer working from Linux. Of course I do more with the Desktop and still have things to test and make sure they are working appropriately.

So far, I am very happy with the switch. There are things that will come up with Linux that will need to be troubleshooted, but that will be part of the fun. When I first started using Winblows, there were many things I needed to troubleshoot and try to get working and it was fun. I look forward to applying those same things with Linux and rather than just blowing away the install and going with something else, troubleshooting and learning the operating system and becoming better at it. No operating system is perfect and there will always be issues, but I am finding Linux a lot of fun to troubleshoot and get things working.

Thanks for reading and don’t be afraid to make the switch and maybe no sweatin as you go down the hall.

[Madchatthew]

My next project is to figure out how to get the bridge working with an imported arch dev server. I exported it from Virtualbox and ran the code to migrate it for qemu. NAT seems to work out of the box, but I really want a bridge so I can ssh into the server. Virtualbox takes care of all that for you, but I really want to figure out setting up the bridge. Just another way to get deeper into Linux and learn. It should be interesting. So far I have not been successful with my attempts and research. I’ll get there. Hopefully sooner rather than later.

Edit: I forgot to add this. I am still working on ATS on Steam. I downloaded a different proton version off of the AUR, but the game is still laggy. That will be an ongoing project and look forward to having it resolved.

[Madchatthew]

BOOOOOM!! I was able to figure out and get the bridge working today. I used this git page for setting up the bridge and it actually worked the way it was supposed to after setting it up.

Edit: Then go to the Configure bridge interface section. This adds the bridge to your host machine. Aslo, complete the Configure bridge network section. This adds the bridge to Qemu/Virtual Machine Manager.

https://gist.github.com/tatumroaquin/c6464e1ccaef40fd098a4f31db61ab22

Now I was still having an issue of the virtual server not being able to connect to the internet. I had been putting in my router as the gateway and figured out that I needed to put the ip of the bridge I created as the gateway IP in the virtual server. Which in this case is my dev environment of the Arch production server. The virtual server is where I do upgrade to Arch and testing the websites before doing the upgrades on the production server, which also runs Arch.

This virtual server is running on Qemu with the Virtual Machine Manager. And so far I believe it is quicker than Virtualbox. I also accidently close the Virtual Machine Manager and the virtual server stayed running so that was nice.

So in short, I am pretty pleased I was able to figure it out after hours of research and trying to different things to get it to work. When I create another virtual machine I will need to remember to put the bridge that I created as the gateway. So yeah, pretty stoked right now haha

[Madchatthew]

The next project will be figuring out how to get American Truck Simulator working like it should. It should technically run better in Linux than Windows. This one isn’t as important, but it is something that will take a deep dive to get working properly and another aspect of Arch to understand.

[phenomlab]

@Madchatthew This is all very encouraging! Keep up the good work and keep posting progress.

[Madchatthew]

So this is an impromptu test that I had planned on doing in the future, but now am doing sooner.

So today I am ripping and burning some dvd’s. I am using a program called MakeMKV. It wasn’t finding the optical drive that was loading when I would start the program. I verified that the cdrom drive was indeed loading the DVD and accessible. I found that I had to add myself to the optical group, then I rebooted and the program started up and recognized the cdrom drive. I am now ripping a DVD and so far it is going splendid. When I did start up the program again, it did give me a SCSI error, but people were saying to ignore it has long as it is ripping the DVD appropriately. I haven’t burnt a DVD yet as that will be the next test.

Edit: In process of burning a DVD right now and so far it is going good. I just had to install three extra packages for K3b to function properly and the program had a popup window that told me which three packages to install. So far so good. It is writing the DVD image at 16x.

[Madchatthew]

DVD rip and burn = Beautiful Success! - Minimal Effort

[Madchatthew]

So I was able to finally resolve getting the video card driver figured out the other day. I thought I had it figured out by editing and adding some code the the grub file but that wasn’t actually working. Here is what I had to do. I should also say that this is for an AMD Radeon video card, that is over 10 years old.

When you install Arch using the archinstall script, you have the option of what video drivers to use. I chose the open source AMD video drivers. This installs the “mesa” package. But it doesn’t end there because you need to verify which driver is being loaded and running. Now before you do all of that, you also want to install lib32-mesa, xf86-video-amdgpu. You would use the following commands to install all of those if you are manually installing Arch.

sudo pacman -S mesa
sudo pacman -S lib32-mesa
sudo pacman -S xf86-video-amdgpu

You can also put the packages on one line with a space between each package. I just like to install things separately in case there is an error, it is easier to track down.

Now we need to see what video driver is being loaded. You will run the following:

lspci -k -d ::03xx

For me this resulted in the following:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Curacao PRO [Radeon R7 370 / R9 270/370 OEM]
        Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device 048d
        Kernel driver in use: amdgpu
        Kernel modules: radeon, amdgpu

This is what it should look like. Now when I ran it the first time, I received an error message, which told me that the incorrect driver was being loaded. So if you get anything other than the above, then most likely the amdgpu driver is loading. So the next step was to get that driver to load and run. It wasn’t as hard or as crazy as it might sound.

First I had to edit the mkinitcpio.conf file using the following:

sudo nano /etc/mkinitcpio.conf

In this file you find the line MODULES=(btrfs) and change it to the following:

MODULES=(btrfs amdgpu radeon) making sure to put a space between each module name and making sure to put amdgpu before radeon. This line was also located at the very top of the file for me. You also want to make sure that that modconf is in the HOOKS line. You will have other hooks in there but if modconf isn’t listed then add it in the list so the line look similiar to this.

HOOKS=(base udev autodetect microcode modconf kms keyboard keymap consolefont block filesystems fsck)

Now save this file and exit out of it.

Next we will be creating two new files in /etc/modprobe.d folder. Of course you will want to look in that folder to make sure the files don’t exist already, but I doubt they will, because they didn’t for me. You will want to do the following:

sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/amdgpu.conf

In that file copy and paste the following:

options amdgpu si_support=1
options amdgpu cik_support=1

Save the file and exit. Next you will create the following:

sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/radeon.conf

In that file copy and paste the following:

options radeon si_support=0
options radeon cik_support=0

Save the file and exit out. So with AMD video cards they had two different versions. One from the Southern Islands and one from the Sea Islands. Whether or not they are actually from islands with those names I don’t know. I didn’t go that far into it. I just wanted my games to play appropriately along with other video stuff. So by doing this you are ensuring that whichever one you have will load properly.

Once you have all of this completed, then you need to recompile the files so everything loads properly. Enter the following:

sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Once this is finished running, which it doesn’t take long. Then reboot your computer and then run the above command again:

lspci -k -d ::03xx

And you should get an actual description like this that displays:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Curacao PRO [Radeon R7 370 / R9 270/370 OEM]
        Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device 048d
        Kernel driver in use: amdgpu
        Kernel modules: radeon, amdgpu

The Kernel driver in use should say ```amdgpu`` or which ever driver that should be loading for you. Some people will have an NVIDIA card. I believe that would be a whole other set of instructions and maybe not even as much work. I don’t know the answer to that.

So I hope this helps anyone in the future to get their video card working properly. To test that it was working properly, I am able to run American Truck Simulator with no issues, The Elder Scrolls Online with no issues, and of course Minecraft Java version runs even better now as well.

[phenomlab]

@Madchatthew Now THAT is a mammoth exercise! Great write up.

[Madchatthew]

@phenomlab said in To the Window to the Linux . . .:

Now THAT is a mammoth exercise! Great write up.

Thank you very much! I appreciate it!! Hopefully, now it won’t be a mammoth project for someone else and they can get their video card working properly sooner.

[Madchatthew]

I have to say that I am kind of impressed with the education programs that come with the KDE apps install. There is one for math and creating equations. Libre office has a math equation program as well. There is a chemistry periodic table app, that gives you different views and other features. There is a keyboarding app as well to get better/faster at typing. There are some other ones as well.

To get these installed in Arch Linux, go to your terminal and enter in the following:

sudo pacman -S kde-applications-meta

This will install all of the main KDE apps. Other flavors of Linux may already do this for you. If not a quick google search will show you how to install them.

[phenomlab]

@Madchatthew it’s hard to not be impressed by KDE. Still my favourite DE

[Madchatthew]

So lets take a stab at Fstab.

Fstab is located in /etc/fstab and is used for loading local disk drives along with network drives as well. You don’t need to use fstab to access these drives. When you don’t use fstab then you will usually need to put your password in to access them. When you install Arch Linux the fstab file should contain your current drive that Arch is installed on, along with the partitions that were created. DO NOT TOUCH THOSE EXISTING LINES PLEASE! Doing so can render your OS unable to boot.

We can however add any extra internal drives or network drives to the fstab to have them load automatically upon reboot and so we don’t have to enter the password every time. So the first thing we need to do is to find the hardware ID of the hard drive we want to add. This can be an internal hard drive, an external one or what have you.

To find the hardware ID type the following:

lsblk -f

You will get the following result:

What you see in the above image in the red box is the UUID of each hard drive device. So you would select the UUID of the device you want to add and copy it. I recommend pasting the ID into a note taking program like Kate or another note taking program.

In order to mount a drive we need to point it to a location so we can access it. So basically we are going to create a folder to point the hard drive too. Don’t worry it isn’t copying the data to your main drive, it is just linking to it so we can access the data.

First you want to create the directory using the following command:

sudo mkdir /mnt/nameofthefolderyouchoose | permissions will depend on file system and are addressed further down.

I usually name the folder the same name that the hard drive is labeled. If it is a network drive, then I usually name it the same name as the shared folder on the network.

Next you will go into the fstab file with the following command:

sudo nano /etc/fstab | You will have to enter your password to save changes.

You can use VIM or Neovim or whatever editor from the command prompt that works for you.

Arrow down to the bottom of the file. This is where you are going to add your entry. Now there are different entries depending on what format you have the hard drive formatted for. I will attempt to give some examples, but it may require testing and making changes depending on your setup.

This is what you would add for a file system using btrfs:

# /mnt/name of your hard drive
UUID=copy/paste UUID of your device here       /mnt/smoresdata btrfs           defaults,relatime,compress=zstd:3,ssd,discard=async,space_cache=v2      0 0

This is what you would add for a network share:

# Network Share
//SERVER_ADDRESS/SHARE_NAME /mnt/nameofyourfolder cifs username=YOUR_USER,password=YOUR_PASS,uid=1000,gid=1000, file_mode=0775,dir_mode=0775,x-systemd.automount,_netdev 0 0

To make this more secure you can create a file with a dot in front of it like .credentials on your main drive. Then enter variables for the username name and password like below.

username=your_username
password = your_password

Then, instead of using username and password typed out in your fstab, you would enter the following in place of that:

credentials=/path/to/file | remember if you put a dot in front of the filename you would put a dot in front of the filename in the path.

Sometimes you will have to edit the lines you create if it doesn’t work the first time. Check your permissions, make sure something isn’t misspelled. Make sure you are using the name of the folder you created and troubleshoot. I use Google all the time to find my answers, which is how I came up with this and finally have a way better understanding of how fstab works.

You can use spaces or tabs for separation, it doesn’t matter. Now lets run through what each thing does.

UUID - hard drive ID
Path - path to folder you are mounting the drive to
defaults - includes rw, suid, dev, exec, auto, nouser, and async
relatime - stamps times to file access
noatime - Improves performance by not updating file access times.
compress=zstd - Enables zstd compression, which is fast and efficient. Other options like compress=lzo - are also available but zstd is generally recommended.
subvol=your_subvolume_name - Specifies which subvolume to mount. For example, subvol=@ - would mount the subvolume named @.
ssd - Enables optimizations for solid-state drives, but it’s recommended to use ssd=… for newer kernels if you have an SSD.
commit: Sets the time interval for synchronizing data to permanent storage. The default is 30 seconds.
discard=async - Deletes blocks from the storage device asynchronously, which can improve performance for some drives.
rw - Mounts the filesystem in read-write mode. This is the default, so it is not strictly necessary to include.
quiet - Suppresses most of the verbose output from the kernel messages.
fsck - The fsck command is not applicable to Btrfs. Set the last two fields to 0 0 in your fstab entry.
space_cache - The space_cache option is now space_cache=v2 by default in newer kernels, so you don’t need to explicitly set it in your fstab.

Folder/File Permissions

With the btrfs file system, you will change the owner/group and file permission directly on the folder you created in the /mnt directory. You would use the following and adjust the permissions accordingly to what you want.

sudo chown -R root:group /mnt/nameoffolderforbtrfsdrive

Note that I leave the owner as root but I do create a group and add all the users that should have access to that folder to the group I created.

Add a group - sudo groupadd nameofgroupyouwanttocreate
Add user to group - sudo usermod -aG groupname username

Add the file permissions:

sudo chmod -R 775 /mnt/nameofyourfolder

Take note that for network shares you DO NOT change owner/permission to the folder you created in the /mnt folder. It won’t work, you have to use the permissions in the fstab file.

These are the steps that I used with much troubleshooting and pulling out of hair. I hope that this will save you from becoming bald like me. Thank you and Linux on!

[phenomlab]

@Madchatthew great guide!

[Madchatthew]

@phenomlab thank you very much!

[Madchatthew]

So latest update on running Arch Linux as my daily driver for pretty much everything now. Except for work, I can’t control that, but they give me a laptop and I have to use windows on it. So on the desktop computer which has a graphics card that AMD isn’t supporting anymore and is over 10 years old, I updated Linux and it installed the new KDE Plasma and the mouse pointer is all glitched out. I did some research and it is a known issue that will be fixed in the next patch when they come out with it. I did try some work arounds but they didn’t work and it has to do with the old AMD video card that I have. So just waiting for that fix. Otherwise, it is still usable of course, just a little annoying with the glitched mouse pointer.

[phenomlab]

@Madchatthew Yes, surprising how even the smallest thing catches your eye.