The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

Yes. That's pretty much what's going on. Although TBH, the computer is pretty old ( built in 2010, win 7) , I'm just trying to make it last another year until I can afford the bits to build one that will play games made after 2014, LOL. I put the mint on to have another interface to access the internet after support ends for 7 (sharing data via a partition both OSs can access), but as stated, it's just been a bit wonky since. I'll probably just take it out for now, use the xubuntu to get my linux playtime and try again later.

That said, if anyone has some insight, I'd be open to suggestions.

You're dual booting Xubuntu & Mint? Why dual boot two Debian clones?


That's an interesting issue. It seems like they changed member names for skb_frag_t in a recent-ish kernel update (precisely, here) and it's broken some things. Seems like forcibly reinstalling the latest VMware packages should fix it, but the gist I'm getting from my preliminary google-fu is that VMware is often run with all sorts of patches to get it to play nice with the Linux kernel, so extra unlinking/manually removing patch files seems to be necessary too (e.g. as per this guy's post here).



I might try installing VMware myself when I get home from work and have a bit of a play and see how it goes on my end, and see whether I can get the same sort of thing happening. Sorry that I couldn't be more help 



The Aur workstation package has the patches to make it work.


 
  • Like
Reactions: ditto and Yotsubaaa
You're dual booting Xubuntu & Mint? Why dual boot two Debian clones?






The Aur workstation package has the patches to make it work.


The xubuntu is on a very obsolete desktop. The mint was added to a different machine. I'd be willing to try another distro if that might clear things up, although I'd need one with a decent forum/user base as I am still figuring this stuff out and need questions answered from time to time.

I've dual booted xubuntu before on an old laptop and had no problems, that's why this is puzzling me. I'm more of a builder than a programmer, but I like to get things running right.
 
The xubuntu is on a very obsolete desktop. The mint was added to a different machine. I'd be willing to try another distro if that might clear things up, although I'd need one with a decent forum/user base as I am still figuring this stuff out and need questions answered from time to time.

I've dual booted xubuntu before on an old laptop and had no problems, that's why this is puzzling me. I'm more of a builder than a programmer, but I like to get things running right.
My first thought is: what does your BIOS boot order look like? Does it list CD-ROMS and USBs above the main hard drive? Because if so, it might be trying to boot from peripherals (e.g. do you have an external hard drive plugged into it all the time?) and getting stuck, which is apparently a thing.

(Funny story about my own experience with that. After I'd finished one of my old Debian installs I took my laptop to work. But when I plugged everything in and turned it on, it wouldn't start, and even started making weird beeping noises as I kept turning it off and on again trying to get it going. I thought I'd messed up the install really bad before I realised: I still had USBs listed at the top of my BIOS boot order, and for whatever reason I think my laptop was trying to boot from the USB Hub/power deck on my office desk. Sure enough, started up just fine once I unplugged the deck.)
 
While I find Arch to be a superb distro, the install is a bit much (unless coming from a Gentoo background). There is an "easy" version of Arch known as Manjaro.

https://manjaro.org/

As for your GRUB issue with Mint, is it a UEFI system or traditional BIOS?
Be warned the price of ease with Manjaro is significant bloat.
 
While I find Arch to be a superb distro, the install is a bit much (unless coming from a Gentoo background). There is an "easy" version of Arch known as Manjaro.

https://manjaro.org/

As for your GRUB issue with Mint, is it a UEFI system or traditional BIOS?

Bios.
Thanks for the recommendation of Manjaro, I'll take a look. Even if the problem isn't solved it would be educational to work with a different OS family.

My first thought is: what does your BIOS boot order look like? Does it list CD-ROMS and USBs above the main hard drive? Because if so, it might be trying to boot from peripherals (e.g. do you have an external hard drive plugged into it all the time?) and getting stuck, which is apparently a thing.

(Funny story about my own experience with that. After I'd finished one of my old Debian installs I took my laptop to work. But when I plugged everything in and turned it on, it wouldn't start, and even started making weird beeping noises as I kept turning it off and on again trying to get it going. I thought I'd messed up the install really bad before I realised: I still had USBs listed at the top of my BIOS boot order, and for whatever reason I think my laptop was trying to boot from the USB Hub/power deck on my office desk. Sure enough, started up just fine once I unplugged the deck.)
That is the second thing I tried (after the bios battery). I had left it in usb after the initial install and that was causing some problems, but even after I switched it, the problem is still there on occasion. I would say like 20% chance of it not loading immediately. But yeah, I left my external HD hooked up one day and it was probably almost comical to watch me freaking out because my system was no longer finding an OS. Good times...
 
  • Like
Reactions: Yotsubaaa
Be warned the price of ease with Manjaro is significant bloat.
I might need the training wheels bloat. I've played with linux for about five years now but 'sudo apt-get' is about my limit of commands. I'd ideally like an OS that will perform well with a 2.5Mhz chip and 4G RAM. I don't mind installing some stuff by hand but still would need to be able to find the commands to do so.
 
I might need the training wheels bloat. I've played with linux for about five years now but 'sudo apt-get' is about my limit of commands. I'd ideally like an OS that will perform well with a 2.5Mhz chip and 4G RAM. I don't mind installing some stuff by hand but still would need to be able to find the commands to do so.


Manjaro should run better than Xubuntu. But instead of Apt you will have pacman.

pacman -S gobuster | instead of | apt install gobuster
 
I've been using mint because it's easy to use, however I don't know how to get windows based steam games to work; I've tried using playonlinux but it says I need a newer graphics card.
 
I've been using mint because it's easy to use, however I don't know how to get windows based steam games to work; I've tried using playonlinux but it says I need a newer graphics card.

Then I'd wager that you'd need a newer graphics card.

Thank you! Good to know.

You're welcome.



General pacman usage is easy, pacman -S package-name will install that with its dependencies. pacman -Ss string will search for the string in pacman. Similar to apt-cache search.



To update, it's just pacman -Syu.



There is also Aur, which is nice.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Yotsubaaa
Then I'd wager that you'd need a newer graphics card.



You're welcome.



General pacman usage is easy, pacman -S package-name will install that with its dependencies. pacman -Ss string will search for the string in pacman. Similar to apt-cache search.



To update, it's just pacman -Syu.



There is also Aur, which is nice.
Well, I got Lutris able to run the windows based games; however I can't seemed to put it on the monitor I want.
 
The monitor I want it on is a ASUS VG245, my graphics card is a NVIDA GTX GEOFORCE 1070.
 
The xubuntu is on a very obsolete desktop.
and yet it's still one of the better ones, such is the state of linux desktop environments, especially for Ubuntu

i'd been looking forward to the lxqt project making Lubuntu the distro of choice, but then there was an upstream issue so they just let it languish for a year or two and now Lubuntu is largely forgotten
 
  • Like
Reactions: Yotsubaaa
I've been using mint because it's easy to use, however I don't know how to get windows based steam games to work; I've tried using playonlinux but it says I need a newer graphics card.
Steam has wine with winetricks literally built in, called steam play/proton. No additional software needed anymore for ~90% of gaymes.

Does anybody use tiling window managers here, since everyone talks about lxqt, xfeces, KDE but not bspwm or dwm, the patrician's choice?
 
Back