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