I’ve recently been upgrading my PC, and part of this included a new motherboard. Strangely, after making the change, I would suddenly find that when I try to suspend my system, it would sleep, then immediately resume (or wakeup) itself. As it turns out, there is a bug with certain Gigabyte motherboards that cause the system to erroneously wakup too early. I just so happened to have found the issue listed on the Arch Linux Wiki, though for a different model of motherboard than mine. As it turns out, that page also lists various ways to correct this. The easiest, in my opinion, is to setup and enable the Wakeup Triggers service through systemd, which disables all of the acpi devices that are permitted to wake the system up for you.
What Happens When Running Out of VRAM
Years ago, I made the decision to cheap out on my graphics card. I knew I wanted to get an NVIDIA GTX 1060, but that model had two main configurations: 3GB of video memory, and 6GB. Naturally, being the cheap person I am, I opted for a 3GB card. While I do not regret this purchase, this has lead me to need to upgrade likely sooner than I expected.
Continue readingRipping Audio CDs on Linux
After applying an EQ profile for my headphones, I discovered that some older audio tracks that I had, particularly lower quality ones, were notably not as good sounding as the rest of my audio library. As a result, I wanted to rip the audio from some of my CDs in order to get better quality ones. Having not done this for several years, I found myself searching for a suitable application to accomplish this. One thing I wanted, along with the tracks themselves, was metadata, either from the disc directly, or from an external source. I eventually landed on whipper, which allows one to get high fidelity tracks from a CD, and with several advanced features.
To use it for the first time, it’s recommended to run:
whipper drive analyse
whipper offset find
This will determine the caching behaviour of the CD drive, as well as identify the numeric offsets it has. This will allow for more optimal and accurate rips. Note that, because the goal is accuracy, the ripping process may be slower than with other applications.
Once complete, the disc can be ripped with: whipper cd rip
This will analyze the tracks, retrieve metadata from MusicBrainz, and extract them in flac format, since this one is a lossless codec. If a different format such as MP3 is desired, a separate application (like VLC) can be used to convert. In any case, I do recommend converting after the fact, if needed, since whipper is designed to rip the most accurate version possible from the disc.
Equalizing Audio for Headphones on Linux
A few months ago, I was watching a review on various headphones, when it was mentioned in passing that using an equalizer can make a difference (sometimes significant) when using even lower quality headphones. I’d owned a moderate pair of Sennheisers for a few years, and although they do have a more premium feel, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit the sound profile wasn’t quite right. I’m no audiophile, but even I could tell some music didn’t sound the same way I had experienced with previous ones I’d had. With this in mind, I did some research, and it turned out I was correct: an equalizer was necessary. Continue reading
What to do with that Old SSD
I’ve recently upgraded my PC’s storage, adding a shiny new NVME SSD with a 1TB capacity (it was a killer deal). This meant it wasn’t a problem to migrate all of my current assets from my previous SATA SSD onto this one. This however left me with a dilemma: how should I use this now empty SSD? It has a smaller capacity than both my HDD and my NVME, and its performance sits right in the middle of the two. After contemplating my options, and even considering selling it, I’ve found several uses that will come in handy.
ALL Controller: Initial Impressions from a Linux User
A few years ago, I backed a project on Kickstarter for the ALL Controller. This is meant to be a “universal” gamepad, compatible with Windows/Mac/Linux on the PC side, Android and IOS on mobile, as well as consoles like Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and the Nintendo Switch. Beyond this, it is programmable, and has upgradable firmware, meaning that it can have support for new platforms added as time goes on. Personally I was particularly interested in the Linux support (no surprise there), but more so its programmability. Having now had it for a couple months, I can say it is certainly delivering on its promise.
Removing WPA Supplicant for Good
Previously I posted about switching to IWD to manage my wireless internet connections, over using WPA Supplicant. While this has been working out great, there was still one problem: I could not remove WPA Supplicant. Because I use Gnome for my desktop environment, this requires using NetworkManager. Although this can be configured to use IWD internally, it by default requires WPA as a dependency. This will also mean that, even when not being used, the WPA service will also get started. Thankfully, I recently found a package on the AUR which enables building NetworkManager without any need for WPA at all. I am now happy to report that NetworkManager is running fine, and WPA has been completely removed.
PRIME Render Offloading: The Official Bumblebee Replacement
I’ve written several times in the past about bumblebee, which to this day remains as my preferred method to handle the NVidia Optimus problem on Linux. Despite there being various community projects to in some capacity improve the experience of hybrid graphics laptops, there are always compromises and limitations. Enter PRIME render offloading, which is the officially supported method straight from NVidia. It’s easy, clean, but is not yet ready for prime time.
Updates to Live Noise Filtering Script
Quite some time ago, I posted about how to perform live noise cancellation for audio inputs. I’ve finally got around to updating it, in hopes it will be better utilized and maintained. Here are some of the changes:
- Automatically load needed kernel modules if not present
- Improved audio device identification
- Utilize PulseAudio for noise sample recording, instead of Alsa
- Dynamic audio filtering properties, based on input and output devices
Furthermore, I have posted the script on my GitHub to allow for easier tracking of issues and maintenance.
Whispers of More Work Towards Multi-GPU Support on Linux
Over the past few weeks, I’ve seen a few articles pop up around PRIME support in various forms. Firstly, we have on the X.Org front details about efforts towards binding additional GPUs to screens, which I speculate could allow for support with mixed output devices, such as laptops where HDMI outputs are tied to the discrete GPU.
Next, we have NVidia experimenting with enhanced support for GPU offloading for certain types of rendering. This has the potential to allow for their proprietary drivers to work with optimus, without the need for tools like Bumblebee or Nvidia-XRun. This however is also pending the X.Org updates to be functional.
Lastly, we have support within the Linux Kernel for improving the ability to perform testing on multi-GPU setups, likely related to the two previous articles. This does show an overall renewal of interest in getting proper hybrid graphics support, which at this point is long overdue. I will try to provide updates as I learn more, and when these updates reach the main stream.
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