Archives

It’s been an eternity in internet land, but I’m back.

Jul14

It’s been months and stuff since I last posted, but don’t worry I am still alive and am not just a cunningly placed zombie.

Let’s see, what’s been happening.

Well I guess most recently as in yesterday and last night I’ve been working on some PC stuff.
See, with July 29 creeping up on us, and the free upgrades to full version of Windows 10 for Insiders, I figured I might as well make the most of it.
A couple of months back I had to reinstall windows (because it totally killed itself on the registry level) so I pretty much shifted to 10 and condensed hardware in to one machine, which was up until that point my Steam Box (Praise GabeN).
I scavenged the RAM and everything, because why not.

Of course I kinda got used to running on 16gig, so if I was going to get the other machine operational again I had to acquire two things, a new SSD (amusingly the Win10 install sitting on the old SSD transferred between machines no issue) and new memory.

While I was at it I figured why not also get a fun new case, the Thermaltake Core X9 in black, and a Corsair 240mm closed loop radiator (I intended to acquire that one a year back).

So anyway I spent a few hours shifting my most powerful hardware in to the Core X9, I shifted my storage drives (well pretty much all my spare drives, there’s even a 200gig sitting in there for the hell of it) over to my Antec 1100 except for my Steam drive.
Then after that was up and running and windows was installing (build 10162) I shifted over to the Antec.

Would you possibly believe my installs were flawless other than a flap on the IO shield on the Core X9 blocking it’s dedicated USB DAC port.

Sure it’s a lot of work, sure I now have a case you could pack a human body in, and sure it’s going to be fun transporting the thing to the next Respawn LAN on the last weekend of September, but honestly I feel I achieved something.

So now once again after many years I have a machine dedicated to productivity stuff (storage, office apps, boring stuff) which I can remote in to, while at the same time having a separate machine I can take to LANs.

Sadly my poor Corsair Air 540 cube case is now feeling empty and unwanted.
It’s a good case, it just sucks when it comes to storing 3.5″ drives

Anyway, my file transfers between machines have finished, I should get some sleep, since sometime today I intend to redesign the network in my room to allow for gigabit between the boxes, with WiFi for everything else.

Totes Amazeballs – or how my adventures in dual-booting my steambox with win10TP are failing.

Dec13

So I’m sitting here in a room with a bunch of friends and good people, settling in for a good weekend.
Yet, I’m attempting to escalate my steambox to a full dual-boot.

What I did did previously was install SteamOS, then unplugged that drive and installed Win8.1 on the other.
Last weekend I totally mangled things, and the then win10 install was no longer viable (however I did manage to have steamos booting in nicely.)

This weekend I’m making the fresh attempt to get everything running. Firstly installing 10 on Drive0, and then SteamOS on Drive1.
Both are in place, however grub didn’t do anything with the boot manager.

This is what I’m choosing to do when not playing games, or waiting for other friends to turn up.

In the new year I’m intending to finally acquire a new SSD, from there I can do a fresh main system install, at which point I’ll probably be swapping motherboards between systems.
This is primarily as the g1Sniper, whilst nice, has sucky linux driver support, and thus is primarily wasted.
Alas I’ll most likely have to downgrade to a 5.1 setup, but what can you do.

The answer to my problems is obviously to praise GabeN, for I am 550 yards from the hole.

AmK

Further adventures in the steamboxen.

Aug7

So back in the first half of the year, as some of you may know, I built a Steambox, codenamed Project: One Wood.

Originally I’d planned to build something with a uITX formfactor or something equally small that could fit in a display unit.

That of course went out the window when I won a full ATX Motherboard at Respawn LAN  supplied by their wonderful sponsors over at Gigabyte.

Over the next couple of months I picked up components, where possible, from the various hardware sponsors, such as Corsair.
Then I stopped after finishing assembly at a LAN.

Since then I’ve been living with it hooked up to the TV, and honestly it’s got some real potential.

Sadly the number of gamepad capable games on linux is really disappointing, and I haven’t been able to stream games for use with the gamepad.
I practically turned it in to a Plex dedicated machine, which is amusing considering the grunt contained within the case.
The reason for that, well I use Plex on my main system, I use it on my nexus 7 and Galaxy SIII, and most recently on my brand new Asus t100. It quite simply does a better job than the PS3.
There’s also the fact I can control plex using any of those other devices.

I’ve done very little tinkering under the hood other than getting Plex running, as I want to see what Valve are going to do, and well I don’t want to break it.

Speaking of breaking, I managed to break Big Picture Mode a couple of times already, leading to it re-downloading Steam and reconfiguring it (the first was when I tested Sleep mode, and the most recent today was returning from the desktop).
Other than that and some initial kernel panicking after initial installation it’s been fairly solid.

So now, the steambox finally has a wireless keyboard/trackpad, I can finally play games from the comfort of a soft chair across the room.

Now I just need to wait for the steam controllers to be released and I should be set.

The future is looking good for games on linux, and a way to break out of the microsoft dominated PC gaming market.

All Praise GabeN: The beginning of a journey.

Mar17

So anyway, last year or so, Valve announced their Steambox powered by SteamOS, and I thought that it’d be pretty sweet if I could be one of those lucky people to be chosen to try out a prototype unit (out of the many thousands who also applied).

Valve did the fun thing of releasing the beta of SteamOS in to the wilds for people to try out, mess with and generally try to break.
Naturally I grabbed it with the goal to test it out in a virtual machine.

With the help of the internet I managed to get it installed in Virtual Box and got to play around with it without hardware acceleration, I found it pretty neat.

I then of course blew away the windows 8.1 test install and then installed a dual-boot of SteamOS on my main gaming rig (Stitch).
The big thing that kept me from spending more time with it was that I didn’t have audio available due to using DVI output and not having a receiver or anything available to handle it.
I acquired a game-pad at this stage.

I was at Respawn LAN back this most recent January, lanning there like I have for the better part of 14 years, they have a tendency to do random draws for door-prizes from their sponsors.
Of course I’ve never won anything at that venue in the entire time I’ve been there, and tend to joke about the name selection code being incredibly biased as the same people tend to keep winning stuff.
So when a G1.Sniper motherboard from Gigabyte was held up to be the next prize I made a comment that I could use it to build a SteamBox.

GabeN heard me, my name was called, much to my surprise.

I’ve now finished the initial construction of the SteamBox codenamed OneWood.

Sadly the journey is far from over as it’s been impossible for me to produce audio output via HDMI, the Recon3d (from Creative) support is absolutely non-existent, and despite managing to get output from a USB DAC I haven’t managed to get that sorted in relation to the TV.

The journey will continue, I will be gaming fully in the loungeroom without so much as a sign of microsoft, sony or nintendo, I will be on the bleeding edge.

Praise GabeN!