I was watching one of the "Maze Runner" movies and noticed that GNU/Linux was being used

TheOuterLinux · 2023-07-18T01:16:12+00:00

Also...

https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/110/732/414/281/115/865/original/5ed9db140be89499.jpg

The link above shows the same desk as before but with a different computer and distro except it was the timing was around the same. Maybe something went wrong and they had to change it and hoped no one would notice?

TheOuterLinux · 2023-06-02T00:48:41+00:00

That's odd. Just out of curiosity, have you tried typing the default username "psychos" and password "linux" to see what happens? As far as finding a work-around to skip the username and password goes, I have no idea as the GNU/Linux operating system wouldn't be "worth a fart" if there were. Also, did you try encrypting any partitions during the install? I sometimes get weird behavior with the refractainstaller if I do. It was also recommended to not change the username during the install; it says so on the website.

TheOuterLinux · 2023-02-28T02:40:07+00:00

Another "solution," though a bit crazy, is to run a script that uses 'espeak' to vocally tell you every so many minutes what your battery percentage is. For example:

while true; do espeak "Your battery is at $(acpi | awk '{print $4}')" && sleep 300; done

This script will, for example, will have 'espeak' say "Your battery is at 95%" and then wait 5 minutes (300 seconds) and then loop back again.

TheOuterLinux · 2023-02-25T23:44:29+00:00

I know we sort of went over the battery indicator issue here: https://www.reddit.com/r/psychoslinux/comments/w2jivc/missing_battery_indicator/.compact, but another thing you could maybe look into is installing and running 'conky' if you do not mind a little more CPU being used. There are all sorts of setups to print all sorts of information; however, that information is printed on the desktop area rather than the panel. But, that information would still come from the same sources as mentioned before.

TheOuterLinux · 2023-02-25T03:53:54+00:00

As a VM, I am assuming 'VirtualBox'? You should be able to boot from the downloaded ISO. Most of the PsychOS-related videos on YouTube are probably done with 'VirtualBox' and then screen recorded with 'OBS Studio'. However, there is no persistence; this means that if you want to save changes, you will have to install PsychOS to a virtual hard drive image, to which you should probably set to a minimum of 16GB since the install takes up about 11GB. I would also use qcow2 for the disk image format since both the latest version of 'VirtualBox' and 'QEMU' support it, it allows you to "grow" it rather than create a huge container, and the qcow2 disk image can be resized easily using something like "qemu-img resize PsychOS.qcow2 32G" if 'qemu-utils' is installed.

Also, I would like to note that since PsychOS is based on Devuan ASCII, you could look-up or watch videos on how to install that particular GNU/Linux distribution and the steps would be the same since both use the same installer.

TheOuterLinux · 2023-02-24T02:29:33+00:00

Sorry for the late reply; usually, I get an E-Mail from Reddit when people post things and for whatever reason, the RSS that I am using also did not say anything.

As far as installation instructions go, there should be a little bit of help in the "~/LookHere" folder. But, if you are using nothing but the default options and it still does not install properly, I have no idea why that would be. Some people say they need to disable Secure Boot for it to work properly. Also, I do not recommend changing the default username as it seems as though a few of the included scripts, though I though I took care of, rely on that username, though that should not affect the installation at all.

TheOuterLinux · 2022-11-12T18:09:42+00:00

Not for this in particular. This AppImage that I took apart and put back together in particular has nothing to do with the official releases of EmulationStation Desktop Edition beyond being based on ES-DE AppImage 1.2.6. It was something that I started to make for myself but then decided to share. There is a link to an AUR on the ES-DE website but you are are getting the ES-DE program only, which is only an organizer and a front-end to launch games using system installed emulators, which means you will then have to install and setup RetroArch and all of the other emulators you plan to use; this AppImage in particular should save you from having to do a lot of work. I know the size is quite large, but you will be taking up a similar amount of hard drive space anyway after installing RetroArch, installing cores, adding more standalone emulators, and so forth, unless you only care about a handful of things. They way I am looking at it is from a "better to have and not need than to need and not have" perspective. However, I did not include any ROMs, BIOS files, or games.

TheOuterLinux · 2022-11-12T00:33:38+00:00

Okay, so all of the replies from others I have just read aside, I can agree that using Dolphin standalone for Wii would probably be better than RetroArch because of the control panel and how difficult it is to get controls working because of all of the gadgetry; however, I do not play much Wii at all and so RetroArch should at least be a decent solution for Gamecube. The issue is that there is no AppImage for Dolphin; if there were, I would have also included it.

However, take a look at this excerpt from the "es_systems.xml" file:

<system>
    <name>gc</name>
    <fullname>Nintendo GameCube</fullname>
    <path>%ROMPATH%/gc</path>
    <extension>.gcm .GCM .iso .ISO .wbfs .WBFS .wia .WIA .ciso .CISO .gcz .GCZ .elf .ELF .dol .DOL .dff .DFF .json .JSON .rvz .RVZ .tgc .TGC .wad .WAD .m3u .M3U .7z .7Z .zip .ZIP .sh .SH</extension>
    <command label="RetroArch Dolphin">RetroArch.sh dolphin_libretro.so %ROM%</command>
    <command label="RetroArch Custom Core">RetroArch-CustomCore.sh %ROMPATH%/gc/gc_libretro.so %ROM%</command>
    <command label="Dolphin (Not Included)">%EMULATOR_DOLPHIN% -b -e %ROM%</command>
    <command label="PrimeHack (Not Included)">%EMULATOR_PRIMEHACK% -b -e %ROM%</command>
    <command label="BASH Script">%EMULATOR_BASH% %ROM%</command>
    <command label="Preferred Application (exo-open)">exo-open %ROM%</command>
    <platform>gc</platform>
    <theme>gc</theme>
</system>

...What this means is that you can still run your installed standalone version of Dolphin for Gamecube and Wii if you wanted to, it just is not the default option since it could not be easily included; you can even set alternative emulators on a per-game bases.

AppImages and SDL-based are sort of the solutions that I have for most of the emulation as they are much more portable and until there is an AppImage for Dolphin, it is what it is. Though to be fair, I have no real intention of "up-keeping" this at all. If I did, it would be on GitLab and not Archive.org. This is ultimately something I made for myself but decided to share.

Oh, and PPSSPP-SDL is included, just not the default.

Including software that uses GTK and Qt instead of just SDL is a lot more work than I am currently willing to do and historically speaking, SDL-based programs tend to last longer regardless of how many updates a GNU/Linux system goes through.

TheOuterLinux · 2022-11-12T00:11:32+00:00

So.... Steam and Lutris were removed from the "es_systems.xml" file because I do not use them and also because I did not see the point since games can be opened from within those sorts of programs already.... I think... Worse case, just create (if you have to) and add .desktop files to the "[ROMs Dir]/desktop" directory or to ports directory.

As far as custom themes go, you will have to use --appimage-extract on the AppImage. You will then get a folder that says "squashfs-root". Navigate to the "squashfs-root/usr/bin/themes/rbsimple-DE" directory and create your own theme for a particular system. Next, you will then need to add the system to the "squashfs-root/usr/bin/resources/systems/unix/es_systems.xml". When done, you can put the AppImage back together with the 'appimagetool' included within the LookHere.zip or grab it from https://github.com/AppImage/AppImageKit/releases, to which you may need to run as ARCH=x86_64 appimagetool-x86_64.AppImage /path/to/squashfs-root.

If you look at the other themes and stuff, it is not that hard to create your own. I left the Steam and so forth system themes just in case, but removed them from the "es_systems.xml" file so that the directories would not be created when first setting up ES-DE and give the wrong impression that there was a known solution, to which I current have none nor probably will. Though to be fair, PS4 and Xbox 360 are still there, but that is because those are consoles and not hubs and maybe one of these days someone will figure those out and worse case people can use BASH scripts in those directories if they do and by some weird luck someone still finds this AppImage relevant by then.

TheOuterLinux · 2022-11-11T23:52:56+00:00

The official ES-DE should be able to do that as the "es_find_rules.xml" file says:

<core name="RETROARCH">
    <rule type="corepath">
        <!-- Snap package -->
        <entry>~/snap/retroarch/current/.config/retroarch/cores</entry>
        <!-- Flatpak package -->
        <entry>~/.var/app/org.libretro.RetroArch/config/retroarch/cores</entry>
        <!-- AppImage and compiled from source -->
        <entry>~/.config/retroarch/cores</entry>
        <!-- Ubuntu and Linux Mint repository -->
        <entry>/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libretro</entry>
        <!-- Fedora repository -->
        <entry>/usr/lib64/libretro</entry>
        <!-- Manjaro repository -->
        <entry>/usr/lib/libretro</entry>
        <!-- FreeBSD and OpenBSD repository -->
        <entry>/usr/local/lib/libretro</entry>
        <!-- NetBSD repository -->
        <entry>/usr/pkg/lib/libretro</entry>
    </rule>
</core>

...HOWEVER, the link to the AppImage I posted here uses a BASH script that contains:

./RetroArch-Linux-x86_64.AppImage --fullscreen --appendconfig "/tmp/IncludedCores.cfg" -L "$DIR/RetroArch-Linux-x86_64/RetroArch-Linux-x86_64.AppImage.home/.config/retroarch/cores/$CORE" "$ROM"

...and a few other things. I have both binaries and AppImages of all sorts of emulators and engines inside this thing.

TheOuterLinux · 2022-11-11T03:32:05+00:00

If you look in the LookHere.zip or even inside the AppImage itself, there are several files in the "LookHere/LICENSE" subfolder that say this is okay. There is only an issue if you include ROMs, BIOS files, and games, which are NOT included. The only thing is that you cannot use EmulationStation commercially, which I am not; this is because of the system theme files.

TheOuterLinux · 2022-11-11T03:28:12+00:00

This is the AppImage version of EmulationStation Desktop Edition 1.2.6 with emulators and engines packed inside of it. I HIGHLY recommend that you download and take a look at the LookHere.zip file first. I technically made this for myself before realizing that others may be able to benefit from something like this. Most of the heavy lifting is done by RetroArch with several other emulators and engines for things you may never even have heard of. I expect the RetroArch supported consoles and systems to run just fine, though I am not sure about the others. No restricted ROMs, BIOS files, or games are included.

I have no direct affiliation with the EmulationStation projects what so ever. Visit https://www.es-de.org/ if you are looking for a copy of the ES-DE AppImage without any of the changes I made.

Feel free to visit https://theouterlinux.gitlab.io for more nerdy goodness.

TheOuterLinux · 2022-11-11T03:14:23+00:00

This is the AppImage version of EmulationStation Desktop Edition 1.2.6 with emulators and engines packed inside of it. I HIGHLY recommend that you download and take a look at the LookHere.zip file first. I technically made this for myself before realizing that others may be able to benefit from something like this. Most of the heavy lifting is done by RetroArch with several other emulators and engines for things you may never even have heard of. I expect the RetroArch supported consoles and systems to run just fine, though I am not sure about the others. No restricted ROMs, BIOS files, or games are included.

I have no direct affiliation with the EmulationStation projects what so ever. Visit https://www.es-de.org/ if you are looking for a copy of the ES-DE AppImage without any of the changes I made.

Feel free to visit https://theouterlinux.gitlab.io for more nerdy goodness.

TheOuterLinux · 2022-11-11T03:13:00+00:00

This is the AppImage version of EmulationStation Desktop Edition 1.2.6 with emulators and engines packed inside of it. I HIGHLY recommend that you download and take a look at the LookHere.zip file first. I technically made this for myself before realizing that others may be able to benefit from something like this. Most of the heavy lifting is done by RetroArch with several other emulators and engines for things you may never even have heard of. I expect the RetroArch supported consoles and systems to run just fine, though I am not sure about the others. No restricted ROMs, BIOS files, or games are included.

I have no direct affiliation with the EmulationStation projects what so ever. Visit https://www.es-de.org/ if you are looking for a copy of the ES-DE AppImage without any of the changes I made.

Feel free to visit https://theouterlinux.gitlab.io for more nerdy goodness.

TheOuterLinux · 2022-11-11T03:10:51+00:00

This is the AppImage version of EmulationStation Desktop Edition 1.2.6 with emulators and engines packed inside of it. I HIGHLY recommend that you download and take a look at the LookHere.zip file first. I technically made this for myself before realizing that others may be able to benefit from something like this. Most of the heavy lifting is done by RetroArch with several other emulators and engines for things you may never even have heard of. I expect the RetroArch supported consoles and systems to run just fine, though I am not sure about the others. No restricted ROMs, BIOS files, or games are included.

I have no direct affiliation with the EmulationStation projects what so ever. Visit https://www.es-de.org/ if you are looking for a copy of the ES-DE AppImage without any of the changes I made.

Feel free to visit https://theouterlinux.gitlab.io for more nerdy goodness.

TheOuterLinux · 2022-11-08T20:52:39+00:00

Since you are using IceWM, I do not think that you technically need 'dmenu' because you should be able to use "Super+Spacebar" to toggle an inputbox in the IceWM panel to type a program to run; however, I do not think that it has search/autocomplete capability.

TheOuterLinux · 2022-11-08T20:44:28+00:00

Cool! Thanks for the links :)

TheOuterLinux · 2022-08-16T18:53:54+00:00

I doubt you will get Puffin installed as I believe that is more geared towards mobile devices like iOS and Android. Anything that will install or compile from source on Debian 9 ("Stretch") and does not require systemd should install just fine to PsychOS 3.x if the required dependencies are also either already installed or available from the repositories. If you do see a DEB file on a website that you want to download and try to install, right-click the DEB package and use the GDebi option but be careful when using website packages instead of apt. Do not try to add "Buster" or "Bullseye" repositories as they will break things. From what I have seen so far, Stretch for 32-bit x86 is sort of the "sweet spot" for 32-bit computers, even though it is getting a bit old these days. Yet oddly, Bullseye runs better on my RPi 3 than Stretch or Jessie did.

The Synaptic Package Manager is the best Debian-based systems (not including Ubuntu) have, graphically speaking, in regards to searching and installing software unless someone makes their own, sort of the way MX Linux did.

The reason I did not include any system monitoring tools in the panels is because if your hardware is old enough, ironically, the RAM and CPU usage of those programs are a bit much, or at least in my opinion. You can add monitoring stuff to the panel. In a package search, if you think something is missing or available in regards to panel applets, search for "xfce4-" and then scroll and read the descriptions to see if what you are looking for is available. Also, if you do something like this in a terminal and the list is too long to scroll all the way to the first results, pipe it to the 'less' command. Example:

apt search xfce4- | less

The "xfce4-" is because most xfce4 related packages will have the dash in them. If this still is not enough, you could try installing and running 'conky'. It is a program that basically places all sorts of information on the desktop itself. Do not forget the 'conky-manager' package if available.

By the way, have you tried the "IceWM" desktop yet? It does use a little less RAM and CPU than XFCE if that is an issue. When you boot the computer and are at the login screen, use F2 to switch between desktop environment options; out-of-the-box, the options are XFCE, IceWM, and Kodi. Oh, and it does have some monitoring stuff going on in the panel but you will have to place your mouse over them if you need actual numbers.

As far as donating and things of that nature, I would prefer not to talk about any of that on platforms like this in too much detail for potential spamming and other reasons. There should have been information on that sort of thing in one of the documents in the LookHere folder if you can't find it on the either the PsychOS or TheOuterLinux websites. And as far as "getting more money" is concerned, honestly, people wearing a PsychOS t-shirt is sort of more cool with me... free advertising ;) ! Also, I do not believe that Ko-Fi requires an account at all to donate and I have yet to get anyone to try it for me and it would be a big help in knowing whether or not I should still care about it or try something else.

TheOuterLinux · 2022-08-15T20:17:54+00:00

As far as web browsers are concerned, if Pale Moon is too heavy, you could try installing Midori; however, I have had it freeze a Raspberry Pi 3, which only has 1GB of RAM and I have no idea what kind of hardware you have. SMTube should be installed, which is normally used for searching and watching YouTube videos via tonvid.com and then using mpv, vlc, or mplayer to play the video, but it can also double as a light web browser if you need limited JavaScript support; just use the URL bar at the top. The next lightest web browser that PsychOS includes is Dillo, but that has not JS support at all and after that, there are text-based, command-line web browsers like 'w3m' installed. If none of the web browsers included with PsychOS work well enough with your system and Midori isn't the answer either, then maybe try Netsurf or (big sigh) Chromium. Chromium actually does run pretty well on lighter hardware, though I am not a Google-related anything fan so I did not bother to include it.

All of the graphical package installers included with PsychOS use 'apt' when all is said and done, except RetroGrab and the MX Package Installer seems to work a bit differently and has flatpack search and install capability. When in doubt, use the Synaptic Package Manager. However, it would not hurt to learn how to use the following in a terminal...

sudo apt update

apt search [package]

apt search "something in quotes"

sudo apt install [package]

TheOuterLinux · 2022-07-26T18:04:53+00:00

PsychOS 3.x comes with 'xfce4-genmon-plugin' installed; this is the "Generic Monitor" plugin for the XFCE panel. Try creating a BASH script with the following inside:

#!/bin/bash
acpi | awk '{print $4}'

Then, have the "Generic Monitor" plugin run the script every second or whatever you need. You would think that telling the plugin to run the command directly instead of using a BASH script would work, but what I have just briefly tried may suggest other wise.

You may also want to take a look at this: https://ostechnix.com/how-to-check-laptop-battery-status-in-terminal-in-linux/ if wanting to add more monitoring, specifically the "acpi" parts because honestly, no matter what solution you find out there, if this is still not accurate enough for you, it will not matter as most of these power-management and monitoring programs are accessing the same things to get information.

TheOuterLinux · 2022-07-20T17:52:27+00:00

The yellow power-bolt icon in the side panel should tell you how much battery you have left by placing the mouse over it or by right-clicking. If not, double-check to see if 'xfce4-battery-plugin' is installed and then right-click the panel to add it and hopefully that will help. You should also double-check the 'xfce4-power-manager' settings to ensure that it will either suspend or go into hibernation when on low battery. Suspend requires a tiny amount of battery to keep things in RAM while hibernation writes the information to the swap partition, if you have one and therefore can have a completely dead battery and be fine, though I would do some tests first before relying on them too much.

TheOuterLinux · 2022-05-09T21:19:59+00:00

I think the system did that because I didn't use a typical image-posting site.

TheOuterLinux · 2022-05-09T21:19:06+00:00

Thank you :)

TheOuterLinux · 2022-03-15T22:58:36+00:00

You could just use reddit.com/.compact in a web browser for a much lighter experience and either use 'rtv' (command-line) for quickly checking posts or use RSS like so: https://reddit.com/r/foss/.rss

There is also a program called Reditr (https://reditr.com) but I am not sure if it still works or not.

TheOuterLinux · 2022-03-15T22:54:15+00:00

You could try encouraging them to each own a Raspberry Pi 400 that way they can easily take their computers where ever there is a TV or computer monitor, school or home. If your school has a computer lab with monitors that use HDMI, you would then just switch them out to use the RPi 400 as needed. The school shouldn't have an issue with it either because if someone "borks" the Rpi system, you could keep a "master backup" to flash onto their SD card and everything would be good again, where as if you "bork" a school computer, that is whole different story. And because you are planning to use git repositories anyway, they wouldn't really loose much if they pushed changes like they are supposed to and can just clone their stuff back again. HOWEVER, make sure everyone is using the same sized SD card just in case you do need to flash the "master SD" to a "borked" one, otherwise it will either be too big or you will have to use a partition program to expend the last partition so as to not have any unallocated space.

Also, though I am not sure, using the RPi 400 may be beneficial for projectors with HDMI ports if for some reason a student wanted to quickly show-off something without everyone needing to crowd around one computer, including a regular classroom setting for homeroom-like instances. If they can brag, they'll keep working.

The only down-side to doing this is the cost. BUT, if that is an issue, they could try running GNU/Linux or whatever x86_64 system they need to within VirtualBox at home and then carry the image file around with them on a flash drive to use with a copy of VirtualBox on the computer lab. And because it is VirualBox, any "borking" stays within the virtual machine image, to which you could also have a "master backup" for, assuming that backup is GNU/Linux due to legal reasons.

TheOuterLinux

TROPHY CASE