Rade UK

I am currently using Ubuntu 23.10 with OBS Studio installed from the OBS Studio launch pad PPA and have an Intel Arc A770 LE 16GB graphics card. After installing OBS I was unable to use any Quick Sync encoding, the moment I click on record I would get an error that the output failed. Checking the OBS logs revealed the following: 11:20:18.315: [qsv encoder: 'advanced_video_recording'] debug info: 11:20:18.317: Failed to initialize MFX 11:20:18.317: [qsv encoder: 'msdk_impl'] Specified object/item/sync point not found. (MFX_ERR_NOT_FOUND) 11:20:18.317: [qsv encoder: 'advanced_video_recording'] qsv failed to load After a bit of online research things were pointing towards missing software packages required  for Quick Sync, specifically oneVPL. After playing around all you need to do is to install two additional software packages, these being openvpl-tools and libmfx-gen1.2. Easily achievable by issuing the following commands in a terminal: sudo apt install onevpl-t...

By default Dolphin File Manager is set to open the last viewed location, and I find that quite annoying because if the last location was a USB drive that is no longer mounted, when you open Dolphin it will try and load that last location but it will display an error as it is no longer mounted. Additionally if the last location was a folder you accessed that required sudo, it will also display an error. You can easily change the behaviour of Dolphin File Manager so that it will always open to a location of your choice, for example your home directory, which makes the most sense to me. Personally I think KDE should default to opening your /home directory and not the last location you accessed.  Or is it just me?

I've been using Ubuntu 23.10 as my main OS for a few months now and its been really great, doing everything I need. My needs are not much, I use my PC to browse the internet, record game play from my PlayStation 5, simple edits to videos and that's about it. Well... I've started playing a few games again in Steam through Proton and it is impressive to see older games like APB Reloaded and Warframe run better in Ubuntu than Windows 11 on my Intel Arc A770 graphics card. Ubuntu 23.10 with custom icons and background July 2024 marks the end of Ubuntu 23.10 but April 2024 will see the release of Ubuntu 24:04 LTS which I am looking forward to, and it will be my main OS going forward. I think right now in 2024 Linux based operating systems are a very viable alternative to Windows but holding it back is a lack of awareness about open source software, and some areas where mainstream hardware support is lagging behind, wireless networking is a good example. There is...

This is a little tip on how to boost gaming performance in Linux when gaming on an Intel Arc graphics device. By default your Intel Arc device will be scaling its GPU clock frequency, my Arc A770 scales its frequency between 300MHz and 2400MHz. This can be a performance issue especially when playing games and if we fix the frequency so it does not scale we can achieve more consistent FPS or in some cases better FPS. It will be the older less GPU intensive games that see the most benefit. To quickly illustrate this, I am going to run glxgears with vsync disabled in a terminal vblank_mode=0 glxgears 21805 frames in 5.0 seconds = 4360.969 FPS 21947 frames in 5.0 seconds = 4389.193 FPS 21930 frames in 5.0 seconds = 4385.876 FPS 21966 frames in 5.0 seconds = 4392.969 FPS 21934 frames in 5.0 seconds = 4386.701 FPS This is with GPU frequency scaling. The next set of results have frequency scaling disabled, GPU frequency is fixed to 2400MHz. 52209 frames in 5.0 seconds = 10441.599 FPS 53527 fr...

This guide will show you how to recompile and customize your current Ubuntu 23.10 kernel. Reasons you may wish to do this include learning, changing kernel settings or just for fun. There are a number of different ways to do this, I like simple and easy to manage (see Debian kernel handbook chapter 4 ) and in this guide we will download the Ubuntu linux-source using apt install and compile the kernel as a *.deb package. At the time of writing in Ubuntu 23.10, the current linux-source is 6.5.0. Updates may change that, therefore take this into account when reading this guide. Also as a side note, this guide assumes secure boot is disabled. Before you begin I strongly recommend changing the default grub boot behavior so that you have a grub menu on boot and can select your kernel. By default the grub boot menu is hidden. This will make it easy to boot into a working kernel should your custom kernel result in a system that fails to boot. Using a text editor edit the defa...

A very interesting development if it does happen, I first became aware of this from a site called Phoronix and as pointed out over there more details can be found at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/2051342 Ubuntu and many other Linux distributions come with a very generic kernel, not optimised for anything in particular but one key area this impacts quite negatively is gaming and multimedia.  Gaming on Linux has increased phenomenally since the release of Valve's steam deck powered by their custom Arch Linux distribution and their efforts with Steam and Proton, and with interest in gaming on Linux being at an all time high more and more people are trying it out only to be let down by their Linux distribution being poorly optimised out of the box for gaming. The Linux kernel being a major contributing factor, so much so that we now have gaming orientated distributions such as Nobara that have kernels tuned for low latency and various other tweaks to improve gam...