Xbox 360 controller on Fedora 32
by Greg Woods
It has been a couple of years (which means 4 or 5 Fedora releases ago)
since I did this, but I used to be able to play Xonotic using my Xbox 360
Wireless controller. Now I cannot get the controller to work properly in
F32 (it works in Windows 10 so I know the hardware is OK).
This most likely has something to do with the move from xboxdrv (which is
no longer available in Fedora) to xpad kernel driver, and/or the move from
the old js driver to evdev. The xpad driver comes with the current kernel,
but what I cannot figure out is how to calibrate the controller. If I run
Xontic with the controller connected, the game world just spins
counterclockwise. This is a symptom of the controller needing to be
calibrated, but I don't know how to do it. I tried using "jscal", but if I
run "jscal -c" to calibrate it, it appears to work but doesn't. I can
immediately run "jscal -t" and it will say it is not calibrated, and
running "jstest" also shows it is not calibrated (several of the axes are
not centered, i.e. show nonzero values in jstest).
I attempted to download and compile xboxdrv, but it does not work due to
Python 2 vs. 3 incompatibilities, and it doesn't look like any work has
been done on xboxdrv in quite some time. If I try to make it, I get this:
root@snowcrash xboxdrv-linux-0.8.8]# make
scons
scons: Reading SConscript files ...
File "/local/src/xboxdrv-linux-0.8.8/SConstruct", line 34
print target
^
SyntaxError: Missing parentheses in call to 'print'. Did you mean
print(target)?
make: *** [Makefile:24: xboxdrv] Error 2
Certainly looks like Python version incompatibility.
Can anybody point me to information on how to use an Xbox 360 controller on
F32, or how to calibrate it when using the xpad driver? I have done a lot
of Googling, but most of the articles I found mention things like "apt-get
install xboxdrv", showing they were written for Ubuntu rather than Fedora
and are wanting to use the xboxdrv driver.
Thank you,
--Greg
2 months, 2 weeks
btrfs system slow down with 100GB file
by Richard Shaw
I'm getting significant iowait while writing to a 100GB file. I have
already made it nocow by copying it to another directory, marking the
director nocow (+C) and using cat <oldfile> <newfile> to re-create it from
scratch.
I was under the impression that this should fix the problem.
On a tangent, it took about 30 minutes to delete the old file... My system
is a Ryzen 5 3600 w/ 16GB or memory but it is a spinning disk. I use an
NVME for the system and the spinning disk for /home.
Currently I'm getting random GUI freezes due to the iowait problem and my
HDD indicator light basically stays on solid for over an hour now.
Any tips?
Thanks,
Richard
3 months
What sets QT_IM_MODULE in F33?
by Robert G. (Doc) Savage
Using Fedora 33 with MATE desktop...
I'm working with the developer of a very handy RPN calculator app
called rpCalc to figure out why it doesn't work for my regular user
'doc' but works perfectly for a newly created user 'test'. The
developer strongly suspects a Qt5 setting. We have narrowed our search
to my local environment:
$ env | grep QT
QT_IM_MODULE=xim
QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR=0
QT_SCALE_FACTOR=2
The developer believes the first (set to =xim) is causing rpCalc not to
function at all, and that the next two cause the font sizes on the
calculator buttons to be oversize.
I'm looking for one or more config files -- probably in my home
directory -- that set these variables. Talk about looking for a needle
in a haystack.
Is there a cat | grep command (or equiv) that can recursively look for
"QT" in all files in my home directory -- including hidden files? It
would have to be able to output the full path to any files in which
"QT" is found. Unfortunately cat does not support recursive searches.
--Doc Savage
Fairview Heights, IL
3 months, 4 weeks
Identifying what is accessing a USB device.
by Patrick O'Callaghan
I have an external USB-3 2-disk docking station, and a script which can
power up and down the drives as needed.
I have a systemd automount unit that correctly powers up the dock when
accessed, then mounts the drives (thanks Ed).
After an idle time, automount unmounts the drives. A script detects
when this happens and powers them down ... *at which point they
immediately power up again, and remain up until I intervene manually,
even though they are unmounted*.
This never happens if I run the script directly from the command line
(i.e. the drives power down and stay down).
Clearly the docking unit isn't just doing this flakily on its own.
Something is making it happen, and I've no idea how to discover what it
is except that it seems to be correlated with systemd in some way.
All of the above is 100% reproducible.
I'm open to suggestions if anyone has any ideas.
poc
4 months
mdadm -> BTRFS conversion
by Patrick O'Callaghan
I currently have a pair of external drives configured as ext4 with
RAID1 using mdadm, and mainly used for backup. My / and /home
filesystems are now BTRFS so I'm looking at converting the external
drives to BTRFS with RAID1. My main reason is to take advantage of
BTRFS checksumming as a guard against bitrot, but I'd also like the
flexibility of setting up subvolumes with different properties (the
disks are currently 90% empty).
Any thoughts on this? What would be the simplest conversion strategy if
I go ahead?
poc
4 months
Suggestion to improve documentation of
Changes/BtrfsTransparentCompression
by misterx42＠protonmail.com
Just a small thing, but as someone who never actually played around with filesystems so far, I was looking to try out the changes outlined in Changes/BtrfsTransparentCompression, but the command on the page:
btrfs filesystem defrag -czstd -r
doesnt work without an additional argument. This is pretty obvious for people who already worked with filesystems before, but I think it would be a good idea to add a small, one sentence explanation of how to add the required path to the end of the command (ie / in my case). It would help people like me from getting confused and hopefully bring in more casual tinkerers trying the new change out.
Thanks.
4 months
Compose Key
by David
Thank you Mr. Matthew Miller,
I have never heard of a "Compose Key."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key
I try to learn this computering stuff, but I feel like a dog
chasing my tail.
In Gnome 40, the setting is easily found in the Keyboard settings menu
under Settings.
I have been needing this for years. It might maybe be possible that I
once
knew it, but the idea became forgotten to me.
David Locklear
4 months, 1 week
software trivia
by David
Somewhere deeply hidden in the author credits to a program that
ships with Fedora
is the phrase:
"Help poor children in Uganda !"
Can you guess that program ?
I guess that is an easy question for all you serious / hard-core
Fedorans.
Nothing against Uganda, but I doubt anybody reading that
is going to help poor children anywhere, much less another
country.
Hint: Version: 8.2.2637-1.fc34
David Locklear
Ref:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bram_Moolenaar
4 months, 1 week
BTRFS settings for media storage
by Richard Shaw
I've been running MythTV for about 10 years now and I've finally outgrown
my media storage, currently a single 4TB disk drive. I have purchased 3
additional drives of the same model and plan to put them into a BTRFS RAID1
array.
Setting nodatacow on the media directories is a no-brainer, but what other
optimizations can I do?
Thanks,
Richard
4 months, 1 week
How to debug grub2-efi -> kernel transition issues?
by Richard W.M. Jones
I have a weird problem on an old Asus Zenbook UX305C where new kernels
cannot be installed by grub. Specifically what happens is they appear
in the boot menu fine, but if you try to boot them then the machine
hangs hard with a completely black screen.
Oddly the kernel installed by Anaconda can boot, but obviously this
makes upgrading the kernel RPM impossible.
My real question is how on earth do I start debugging this?
I edited the kernel command line, removed “rhgb quiet”, added
“loglevel=9 nomodeset” but still no output at all is visible before
the hang. The machine doesn't have a serial port.
Any ideas? Does grub have debugging that can be enabled somehow?
Rich.
--
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
Read my programming and virtualization blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com
virt-p2v converts physical machines to virtual machines. Boot with a
live CD or over the network (PXE) and turn machines into KVM guests.
http://libguestfs.org/virt-v2v
4 months, 1 week
