vortexal

joined 4 years ago
[–] vortexal@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 weeks ago

After trying vmtouch, it only seems to be partially helping. I'm not sure if I'm just using it incorrectly or not but if I remove the files from RAM and then use vmtouch to add them back in, the hitching issues are still partially there.

To fully explain what my issue is, I currently using the Linux version of the Cyber Lancer demo from Itchio as it's small enough to fit onto my 128 MB SD card, which is very slow. I can easily run the game from other storage devices that have much higher read speeds but I want to get the most out of my older and slower storage devices. What's happening is when the game first loads when it's files aren't stored in RAM, is the game essentially freezes for a split second every time it has to load an asset that wasn't previously loaded.

vmtouch isn't making the hitching go away, it just making it load a little faster. This does mean that it'll help but if you're aware of a better solution, I can try that out as well.

[–] vortexal@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 weeks ago

That wont be necessary, after doing more "extreme" tests with preload, it seems like I was wrong about preload. I used sudo sysctl vm.drop_caches=1 to make sure that none of the game's files were loaded in RAM before using preload like I did yesterday, but the game still has hitching issues. This means that the game's files were probably still loaded in RAM when I was testing it yesterday.

For context, what I'm trying to do is find a way to run smaller games more smoothly from some very old storage devices that are very slow. I thought that preload would be the solution but since it doesn't seem to actually do what I thought it did, I'm going to need a different solution. I will try vmtouch and respond back if it works.

[–] vortexal@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 weeks ago

After doing some more "extreme" tests, it seems like I was wrong about how preload works. In fact, it didn't seem to actually preload the files at all, so I'm not sure what it actually does. I ran sudo sysctl vm.drop_caches=1 to make sure that none of the game's files were loaded and then used preload like I did yesterday, but the game still has hitching issues. This means that the game's files were probably still loaded in RAM when I was trying it yesterday.

[–] vortexal@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 weeks ago (5 children)

When I used preload, it let me manually add files to ram. I used sudo preload filename for each file (the game I tried it with only had two) and it seemed to add them to ram. I know this because the game had hitching issues even after just adding the main executable but the hitching went away when I added the second file.

[–] vortexal@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I mean, as long as they don't require an ID that's fine I guess, even though what they're proposing can be easily circumvented. But my biggest, and everyone else's, concern is that, as with what's been going on with age verification, it's possible that it'll just snowball into something worse. It doesn't help that there are people, like me, that currently can't get IDs. There are already several websites that I have to use through a VPN, so if these age verification laws keep getting worse, people like me might completely lose the ability to use the internet entirely, unless they make getting IDs easier.

[–] vortexal@lemmy.ml 5 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

When you say "remove", do you mean completely remove or move them to swap/zswap/zram, depending on what the system has enabled?

[–] vortexal@lemmy.ml 10 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

I know that we do need better regulations for protecting children online but I don't think we're ever going to get that. It seems like the government that we have now just wants to have full control over everyone. In fact, the FTC made a statement saying that they're basically giving companies a loophole that allows them to partially ignore COPPA, which is one of the best protections children had online. It's obvious that they have no interest in protecting children online, if they're making statements like that.

 

If you're not aware of what preload is, it's a command line application that allows you to add files to ram, so they can be accessed faster by the applications that need them.

It seems to work well for what I'm using it for, which is to run games from slower storage devices, but there doesn't seem to be any documentation for a proper way to remove the files once they've been added to ram. What I've been doing is to just use htop to terminate the preload command, but I feel like this is not intended at all. Is there a better way to remove these files?

I should mention that while trying to search for a solution myself, I did see gopreload mentioned a few times. I would try this out myself, but there's no proper installation instructions, at least not any I could find that work in Linux Mint.

[–] vortexal@lemmy.ml 16 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (14 children)

I saw the developers of MidnightBSD state that they are going to block users in California when this law gets put into place. I hope that more OSs do the same. Especially Windows, it could be devastating to California's economy and make them, along with other states and countries, reconsider their decisions on age verification.

I don't live in California but I'm interested in seeing if there are any other OSs that will be blocking California users. I'm probably fine to just continue using Linux Mint but I'm open to trying other distros/OSs in order to participate in this protest if Linux Mint doesn't.

[–] vortexal@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

This is my first time hearing about zram. I tried looking into it myself but there's still some things I could find answers to. Are there any downsides to using zram, or is it something that I can set and forget about? If I were to be using compression tools, like 7zip, would I be able to use a higher dictionary size than I normally can, or would zram cause problems outside of potentially slower compression speeds?

Edit: I think I'm just going to test this myself. I've been reading more about zram and alternatives and it seems like there's conflicting information.

[–] vortexal@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I don't know what most of those numbers mean but most of them are 0 and the overall assessment says "Disk is OK", so I guess it wasn't used much in the past two years. "program-fail-count-total" has a value of 94669670143499 but I'm not sure if that's actually bad or not because "program-fail-count" is 0.

Also, as I stated before, I'm still going to prioritize my slower hard drives so I'm not stuck with them if the SSD fails before I can buy a faster drive.

[–] vortexal@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 month ago (3 children)

I know it would be better to move Linux Mint to the internal hard drive but I'm keeping it on the external hard drive just because I don't know how stable the SSD is. On top of the fact that I've heard that SSD are less stable than mechanical drives, I don't know if the hard drive was replaced when it was refurbished and if it wasn't, I don't know how much it was used. I also want to prioritize my slower external hard drives so that way I'm not potentially stuck using these older hard drive, or even my much slower USB storage devices, several years from now.

Also, I ran a benchmark test on the SSD and it's nowhere near as fast as I though it would be. The read speed is only around 520 MB/s and the Write speed is around 470 MB/s. This isn't much faster than my current external hard drive which has somewhere around 300 MB/s for both, it's been a while since I last tested it.

[–] vortexal@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 month ago

I just realized that my post is missing context if you only read just this post and not the one I linked to in the post. I have Linux installed on an external hard drive and Windows was installed to the SSD which is in the laptop. I've added this information to the post but I don't need help with this anymore. I've already removed Windows from the SSD and have reformatted it to ext4 so I can run games from it.

 

As a sort of follow up to the post I made on my alt account, would I need to do to anything to Grub to continue using Linux Mint after removing Windows or would I still be able to boot into Linux Mint without having to do anything? As stated in the previous post, Windows is installed onto an SSD and I want run games from that SSD but I'd need to reformat the SSD in order to use it.

Edit: I don't need help with this anymore but because it seems like there is some confusion, I'm including the fact that I have Linux installed onto an external hard drive and Windows was installed onto the SSD which is in the laptop. I've already remove Windows from the SSD and reformatted it to ext4 so I can run games from it.

 

There's a game that, while I will admit that I don't really have an interest in playing, isn't working properly because it's trying to default to a GPU driver that isn't even loaded ( and possibly not even installed). The game is called Zbridge and it's standalone app is only distributed through Flathub. For some reason, it's trying to default to using "iris" even though the only GPU driver that's loaded is "i915". I have confirmed this with this:

j@j-Latitude-E7470:~$ lspci -k -s 2
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Skylake GT2 [HD Graphics 520] (rev 07)
	DeviceName:  Onboard IGD
	Subsystem: Dell Latitude E7470
	Kernel driver in use: i915
	Kernel modules: i915

But the game, on top of giving some other errors I've found to be trivial, still tries to load iris by default for some reason:

j@j-Latitude-E7470:~$ flatpak run club.zbridge.zbridge
[2:1229/172053.425891:ERROR:bus.cc(407)] Failed to connect to the bus: Failed to connect to socket /run/dbus/system_bus_socket: No such file or directory
Gtk-Message: 17:20:55.221: Failed to load module "xapp-gtk3-module"
[2:1229/172056.788306:ERROR:bus.cc(407)] Failed to connect to the bus: Failed to connect to socket /run/dbus/system_bus_socket: No such file or directory
[2:1229/172056.788423:ERROR:bus.cc(407)] Failed to connect to the bus: Failed to connect to socket /run/dbus/system_bus_socket: No such file or directory
MESA: error: Failed to query drm device.
glx: failed to create dri3 screen
failed to load driver: iris
[41:1229/172103.010356:ERROR:viz_main_impl.cc(196)] Exiting GPU process due to errors during initialization
MESA: error: Failed to query drm device.
[2:1229/172118.159439:ERROR:gpu_process_host.cc(989)] GPU process exited unexpectedly: exit_code=512
MESA: error: Failed to query drm device.
[2:1229/172133.299896:ERROR:gpu_process_host.cc(989)] GPU process exited unexpectedly: exit_code=512
MESA: error: Failed to query drm device.
[2:1229/172148.425964:ERROR:gpu_process_host.cc(989)] GPU process exited unexpectedly: exit_code=512
MESA: error: Failed to query drm device.
[2:1229/172203.465700:ERROR:gpu_process_host.cc(989)] GPU process exited unexpectedly: exit_code=512
MESA: error: Failed to query drm device.
[2:1229/172218.491001:ERROR:gpu_process_host.cc(989)] GPU process exited unexpectedly: exit_code=512
MESA: error: Failed to query drm device.
[2:1229/172233.517237:ERROR:gpu_process_host.cc(989)] GPU process exited unexpectedly: exit_code=512
[2:1229/172233.517295:FATAL:gpu_data_manager_impl_private.cc(448)] GPU process isn't usable. Goodbye.

I have found a temporary solution by running export MESA_LOADER_DRIVER_OVERRIDE=i915 but as far as I can tell, I shouldn't have to do this because it should just be defaulting to the driver that's already loaded. If this is an issue with the app itself, I am going to submit a bug report but I want to make sure this issue isn't on my end before submitting one.

 

Final update (hopefully): It seems that I have been able to fix the issue. I'm not sure what exactly caused the problem but either removing fluidsynth or installing the wireplumber ppa fixed the issue and I have working audio again. I've also removed pulseaudio and undid my edit to the modprobe blacklist, as they were only done as a temporary solution and they are no longer necessary.

For the past three days, I've been having this issue where my computer starts with no audio and the only sound device listed is a "dummy output" device. I've tried looking online for solution but the only solution I found has to be redone manually every time I start/restart my computer. It also seems like this issue is common with and possibly specific to the sound card my computer has, which is an "Intel Sunrise Point-LP HD Audio".

The solution that worked for me was to add blacklist snd_soc_avs to the modprobe blacklist and then run the two commands sudo alsa force-reload and pulseaudio. Adding snd_soc_avs to the blacklist permanently brought back my actually audio devices but it didn't fix the audio nor did it remove the dummy output device. The two commands I listed do restore the audio and remove the dummy output device but they only work for the current session and I have to run them again after starting/restarting my computer.

I have no problem doing this if there isn't a permanent solution but I would like a permanent solution, if possible.

 

I'm using the Cinnamon edition of Linux Mint 22 (Wilma) and I've installed all of the dependencies listed on the build documention but when I try running meson setup builddir in the android_translation_layer folder, it gives me this error:

ERROR: C shared or static library 'art' not found

Assuming that the "art" that it needs is "art_standalone", I've already installed that and it seemed to install just fine but for some reason meson still can't find it. Assuming that it can work in Linux Mint, what should I try next?

 

Edit: I think I've figured it out, it seems like Linux Mint defaulted to the wrong Kernel driver and I was able to switch it to the correct one.

I've already tried searching for this online but there is a reason I'm posting about it here. The last time I tried to install Vulkan drivers in Linux Mint, there was an update to the oibaf PPA that completely broke my Linux Mint installation and I had to manually reinstall it. I've read that, at least in the past, the oibaf PPA causes problems in Ubuntu but I can't find another solution to installing Vulkan drivers in Linux Mint. Is that the only way to install the Vulkan Drivers in Linux Mint, or is there another way?

Also, yes, Vulkan works in Windows and it did work in my previous installation of Linux.

 

Edit: Last night, I used the "Fix MergeList problems" option in the maintenance tab of software sources and at least for now, it seems to be working. So I probably wont need help with this anymore, hopefully.

Every hour or two, the Update Manager keeps giving me an error message saying that my APT configuration is corrupt and that I should switch to another Linux Mint mirror. It usually goes away when I do a manual refresh but it just keeps coming back. I have also tried switching to a different mirror but I get the same error. It also tells me to run apt-get update but even if I add "sudo" it just gives me an error message saying to run apt-get update.

It happened again so I'm adding screenshots in case they help. The first is the initial error, then it's the error I get when I try to change the repository and the third is the error I get when I try running the command it suggested:

 

I recently found out about a Linux Distro named Q4OS and I wanted to test out their claim that it only requires 256 MB of ram when using the trinity desktop environment. However, when I used the live cd in virt-manager with 256 MB or ram, it just kernel panicked at boot. So I then tried it with 512 MB of ram. In addition to some issues that are not present when you are using at least 1 GB of ram, such as "sudo apt update" causing the entire VM to become unresponsive, I noticed that it seemed to actually use anywhere between 290 MB to 370 MB of ram when the only thing running was the process viewer (which is htop).

Obviously, this is still very low for a modern Linux distro but I was wondering how accurate VMs are for testing ram usage.

And, yes I know that it would be pretty much useless on a PC that only had 256 MB of ram even if it did work. I'm actually checking the ram usage because there is a possibility that I may be using a very old computer of mine that only has 1 GB of ram at some point in the future. So I'm just testing it and eventually other distros out to to see which one I'm going to end up using (assuming I do actually end up even using that computer).

Edit: I just tried the 32-bit version in virt-manager and htop stated it was only using 232 MB of ram, which means that their claim was right and that I might have been using the wrong version.

Edit 2: I just tried installing the 64-bit version in virt-manager and htop stated that it was using about 350 MB of ram, so I don't know if installing it actually made a difference.

 

Edit: I'm no longer looking for help with this. The issue seems to be with the app itself and I have submitted a bug report for the app on github.

Before you tell me I should try another n64 emulator, I have been using other emulators but I have a game that isn't working and I'm trying to run it in other emulators.

Anyways, if I try to run simple64 through the terminal, I get the error message:

Failed to load module "xapp-gtk3-module"

I tried to look into this and it seems that I'm supposed to install "xapp" but I'm getting the error message:

The following packages have unmet dependencies: xapp : Depends: libxapp1 (= 2.2.8-1) but 2.8.2+virginia is to be installed E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

I tried to fix it with sudo apt --fix-broken install xapp but it's just giving me the same error message. Is there anything else I can try before I try another emulator?

 

I need to reinstall Linux Mint but MOK Management is preventing me from booting into the live CD. I tried looking for a solution online but (assuming I did everything correctly) I couldn't find anything that actually worked for me. How do I properly disable it?

Also, I forgot to mention that I do have access to Linux Mint, I just have to run it in recovery mode because it wont boot normally.

Update: I was able to bypass MOK using my password, I still wasn't able to disable it but I was at least able to boot into my Live CD for Linux Mint and I'm in the process of reinstalling it. I would prefure if I could just disable MOK but I at least know how to work around it.

Update 2: I have fully reinstalled and updated Linux Mint but for some reason everything looks different despite the fact that I'm using the same settings and software I was before everything broke. But whatever, outside of the fact that I no longer have the dual boot menu and instead I get a string of text saying "booting in insecure mode" for some reason, it seems to be working fine.

 

I got an external hard drive enclosure for the purpose of recovering some of the files from my old laptops hard drive. The hard drive and all of it's partitions show up in both disks and gparted but it wont mount. When I tried to mount it manually, it gave the error message stating that it can't read the superblock. I've never had to deal with this issue before, so the only things I've tried so far were fsck and the data recovery option in GParted, and neither of them helped.

I tried searching about it online but all of the solutions I found online either didn't work or required methods that are currently not possible for me. The hard drive had Ubuntu (22.04 if I remember correctly) installed on it and I just need access to the files in the sdd3 partition, which was formatted in ext4.

 

I tried looking into this myself but I couldn't really find much about this error. The only solutions I could find didn't work for me. The first one was to use mokutil but at the point where I was supposed to run sudo mokutil --import MOK.der it gives me the error message "Failed to get file status, MOK.der" even though I did everything it told me to do. The other one was to disable secure boot and then run sudo '/sbin/vboxconfig' but even though it looked like it worked, I'm still getting the error message. I have re-enabled secure boot, so you don't have to worry about that.

Is there something else I can try or does VirtualBox not work in Linux Mint for some reason?

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