For other Linux gamers wishing GOG Galaxy had a client for Linux, there’s an open source project that provides most of the critical features, namely easy download install and updating. It’s called Minigalaxy and available for most distros.
It even allows you to install Windows-only games via Wine, and assuming you have DXVK configured for your Wine instance, I’ve found many games play reasonably well out of the box.
To install it on Fedora, simply enter: sudo dnf install minigalaxy Then launch it, enter your account credentials, and you’re ready to go.
For the AMD Radeon R9 390, Fedora will, by default, use the open source driver ‘radeon’ – which is generally sufficient for average workloads, but if you want to game, or want to use Vulkan, you probably want the AMD-written open source driver ‘amdgpu’. It is not just a matter of installing the driver, and some extra configuration will be required to utilize this driver for graphics cards in the Southern Islands and Sea Islands family of AMD cards, since support for these models is considered experimental.
The solution also varies depending on whether your card is Southern Islands or Sea Islands.
First, determine which kernel driver is currently in use: lspci -k | grep -EA3 'VGA|3D|Display'
If your Kernel driver in use result says amdgpu you’re working, there’s nothing for you to do except install Vulkan (if that’s your goal). If your result says radeon, read on.
Install the amdgpu driver, along with Vulkan (both x64 and x86): sudo dnf install xorg-x11-drv-amdgpu mesa-vulkan-drivers.x86_64 mesa-vulkan-drivers.i686 vulkan-loader.x86_64 vulkan-loader.i686 vulkan-tools
If you plan to use Vulkan with Wine: sudo dnf install wine-dvxk.x86_64 wine-dvxk.i686
The GRUB Bootloader needs to be modified to (a) disable the ‘radeon’ driver for your card and (b) enable the module parameter for amdgpu. Edit /etc/default/grub append one of the following inside the quotes on the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX line:
For Southern Island cards: radeon.si_support=0 amdgpu.si_support=1
For Sea Island cards: radeon.cik_support=0 amdgpu.cik_support=1
Build the GRUB config:
For EFI systems: sudo grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg
For BIOS systems: sudo grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg
Reboot.
If everything went according to plan, after reboot you should be able to login and run vulkaninfo without errors. Now you can install Lutris, use Proton on Steam, or do any of the other things that Vulkan allows. If your GUI doesn’t load after reboot, you can restore your machine back to the previous configuration by pressing CTRL+ALT+F2, logging in, editing /etc/default/grub to remove the added text, and running grub2-mkconfig like before.
These instructions are intended for Fedora Linux, but with some minor modification to the grub2-mkconfig command, and substituting your package manager for dnf, you can probably adapt them to other Linux distributions.
For additional information, refer to the Arch or Gentoo wikis.
You know the new version of a package is a buggy mess and you don’t want to update, or you manually install an rpm that exists in the repos but you really want to keep the version you installed. There’s an easy way to do that!
Edit (as root) /etc/dnf/dnf.conf and add this line:
exclude = packagename1
exclude = packagename2
Save it. The next time DNF updates, your package won’t be updated! This will work with any distribution that uses DNF (Mageia, future versions of CentOS).
When attempting to upgrade my Fedora 27 to Fedora 28 running the Cinnamon desktop, I received the following error:
dnf system-upgrade download --releasever=28
Before you continue ensure that your system is fully upgraded by running "dnf --refresh upgrade". Do you want to continue [y/N]: y
Last metadata expiration check: 0:00:00 ago on Wed 02 May 2018 11:19:35 PM CDT.
Error:
Problem: package gstreamer1-plugins-bad-1:1.12.4-3.fc27.x86_64 requires libchromaprint.so.0()(64bit), but none of the providers can be installed
- libchromaprint-1.2-8.fc27.x86_64 does not belong to a distupgrade repository
- problem with installed package gstreamer1-plugins-bad-1:1.12.4-3.fc27.x86_64
It turns out the name for this gstreamer plugins package has changed names, and it’s goofing up the dependencies path for libchromaprint. Minor issue, but it stops my upgrade cold.
I came up with this workaround: upgrade libchromaprint and gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free before trying to update the entire distro. So:
Recently, VLC Media Player on my Fedora 27 installation running the Cinnamon desktop has been missing the title bar and window decorations, resulting in VLC not being a proper window and only a full-screen application. For me, this behavior is undesirable.
VLC without title bar
To restore normal functionality it’s easiest to simply delete the VLC configuration:
rm -r ~/.config/vlc
Now, VLC will function normally. Preferences will have to be recreated, but if you’re like me, you don’t need much more than the ability to play media.
My x11vnc on Fedora has recently started crashing with the following error:
*** stack smashing detected ***: terminated
This issue seems to come and go for a lot of people with x11vnc. Bugs have been reported, but nobody seems to be able to pin it down. One workaround is to recompile it from source with some memory protections disabled, but that is a lot of work .
This workaround takes care of it: launch x11vnc with -noxrecord on the end. That’s it!
