duckinator

• Name: Ellen Dash
• Email: me@duckie.co
• Website: https://smallest.dog
• Mastodon: @pup@vulpine.club
• GitHub: @duckinator
• AKA: duckie, puppy

I do a lot of work with Python and C. You may know me from my work at Ruby Together, helping maintain RubyGems and Bundler.

mkdir build && cd build && LDFLAGS="-L/usr/local/lib -R/usr/local/lib -lexecinfo -lcompat" cmake .. && make

• There's a signal-desktop package, now. (I previously fixed it with a VM and X-forwarding.)

Install steam-linux-utils, then run this script to set up Discord (in ~/software/Discord):

mkdir -p ~/software && cd ~/software && curl -L 'https://discord.com/api/download?platform=linux&format=tar.gz' | tar xzf -

Then, to run Discord:

/usr/bin/env LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/steam-utils/lib64/fakeudev:/compat/linux/lib64/nss /home/puppy/software/Discord/Discord --no-sandbox --no-zygote --in-process-gpu --v=0

If you want, copy ~/software/Discord/discord.desktop somewhere and change the Exec=... line to specify the above command, and put it… wherever .desktop files go.

NOTE: Only text chat seems to work.

These are some of the notable problems I encountered while settling into using FreeBSD as my main OS for the first time in over a decade.

!!! This has been made a lot more complicated and harder to debug by the fact that apparently PulseAudio got installed anyway and I don't know how or why, and it starts with Firefox for some reason even though Firefox used to work without it.

Initially, I had lots of general audio glitchiness. Intermittent static/buzzing noises. Using virtual_oss allowed me to record desktop audio (with OBS, recordmydesktop, etc). The solution appears to be using an 8ms buffer for virtual_oss and avoiding PulseAudio. (Any time I install PulseAudio, I have trouble keeping it from starting and taking over audio for the whole system – which is a problem, given how poorly it performs on my system.)

NOTE: I am having trouble with intermittent audio glitchiness again. Apparently it wasn't a solution so much as an improvement.

• Tries to drag in PulseAudio by default.
  • PulseAudio has terrible performance on my system, so I'd rather not have it.
  • The OBS binary package pulls in PulseAudio unconditionally.
  • Making sure PulseAudio was not installed, then building OBS from ports with PulseAudio disabled works.
• You can't use OSS with the “Desktop Audio” feature. Use the sndio input client source instead.
• Install mesa-gallium-va and go into Settings → Advanced or something like that and enable ffmpeg encoding to get hardware acceleration.
• Should probably also install mesa-gallium-vdpau although idk what it affects.

Blender is slow, by default. As someone else on the forums discovered, vblank_mode=0 blender or LIBGL_DRI3_DISABLE=1 blender does the trick.

Even if I continue to need one of those kludges, I'd at least like to know what the cause is.

I added a blu-ray drive to my computer, and ran into the following problems:

• I can't play, let alone rip, a blu-ray disc.
• Ripping a *CD* (using abcde) takes upwards of half an hour:idea: for some reason. On my girlfriend's computer, it takes roughly 5 minutes per CD. We swapped disc drives for unrelated reasons, and it still took half an hour on my system and about 5 minutes on her system. (TODO: Try seeing if it's reproducible on other OSes on my system.)

• progress
• ruby-install