Jan 12

Exploring the World of Linux: My Personal Journey (I don't like this title but the ai gave it)

It all started on a cold January night. With my weird sleep schedule I ended up waking up at midnight, I found myself in the mood to program and decided to tackle a problem that had been bugging me for a while. The day before, I had been running stable diffusion, an open-source project that does the same thing as Dall-E, with custom training data and downloaded models. As I was running them locally on my Windows PC with a 3060 12GB GPU, I was unsatisfied with the overhead and wanted to find a solution. I considered several options, such as trying it in Linux, modifying the code myself, killing background tasks, or overclocking my GPU. After hours of trial and error, I decided to give up for the time being and refresh my Python skills.

 

To challenge myself, I decided to write a program that would give all possible variations of an 8x8 image with only black and white and output it into a video. It was fun but difficult because I had to learn how to multithreaded the task and ensure I didn't use all of my RAM or create too many files. But, I kept at it and enjoyed the process.

 

And then, the time came. I received a package containing a portable USB-C SSD and I knew that this was the perfect opportunity to finally tackle the  Linux solution, or rather Linux problem. I was quite unsure of which distro I wanted to use, but a friend of mine, Sammy, recommended that I try the notoriously difficult-to-use Arch Linux because of its ability to fine-tune settings for its usability. a week earlier he showed me his laptop with arch installed and showed me the promise of functionality even with an Nvidia GPU. I had also been messing around with other distros such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and others, so I decided to give it a try.

 

But, as I began the installation process, I encountered several difficulties with the installer, particularly with the NVMe drive with Windows 10 installed, preventing me from reading my new SSD. I installed Arch, it seemed to work, but there were many graphical issues, including flickering and ghosting. After some troubleshooting, I determined that the problem was with the "nouveau" open-source variant of Nvidia drivers. I tried reinstalling them but couldn't figure out why I was in X mode while using the terminal. even after researching what to do, I caved out of fatigue and frustration, when doing anything on Arch when windows would randomly flicker and not show the words it was supposed to. So, I went for the easier option of reinstalling the whole operating system.

 

The NVMe drive continued to cause me problems, not letting me install the operating system due to difficulties identifying my new drive. I knew there was a way in some BIOS's to temporarily disable nvme drives by assigning that lane to a SATA port but on most modern models it appears that it's no longer necessary to have the nvme drive disabled for the SATA ports to work. Upon realizing there was no way to digitally disconnect my nvme drive, I had to take apart my computer case and physically uninstall the NVMe drive. I reinstalled Arch, but this time I forgot to install the network drivers. However, the proprietary drivers worked significantly better, at least. So, I tried using arch_chroot to reinstall the network drivers via a USB key, and it worked. Upon rebooting to arch I realized oh no I forgot to encrypt the drive, I decided to be crazy for a minute and thought let's reinstall again but this time ill use the cinnamon variant of the desktop from my time with Linux mint my favorite desktop environment. I made sure to use the proprietary drivers this time, and everything went well.

 

It was a long and challenging, perhaps a little tedious, journey, but in the end, it was worth it. I had a fully functional and customizable system, and I learned a lot about Arch Linux along the way. It's always an adventure working with Linux, but that's what makes it all the more satisfying when you finally get it right.

 

Editors note,I used chatgpt3 for help but not as much as I wish I could have, it has become too popular and Open ai has lowered the number of messages per hour due to load balancing.
also i still prefer Devinci to Chatgpt-3 for stories