technonaturalist

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linux

July Progblog #1: everything but the thing

New hardware!

I finally got a new cpu and logic board…and some unexpected new ram as J accidentally bought a logic board that required ddr5 ram instead of ddr4 which was what I had.

The upside of that was I got a massive upgrade (as I asked him to double the ram when he was buying new ram and he actually did) and we accumulated enough parts to put together a machine from the leftover parts for middle child.

Kludgy OBS scene switcher for linux

Edited 2017 Jan 7: made the scripts slightly more reliable (not relying on window ids) but they will now get extremely confused if there’s more than one instance of Blender open

Because I’m not smart enough to get the MacOS version of the Automatic Scene Switching plugin for OBS Studio, I gumbied an easy manual one with bash scripts.

So there’s some scenes set up in OBS like so:

OBS scenes

Set shortcuts for the scenes in OBS settings like so:

Wacom Cintiq Companion Hybrid/13HD and associated app settings on Ubuntu Studio 16.04LTS

Downloading all the things

Add the repository for Gnome Pie Menu:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:simonschneegans/testing 
sudo apt-get update

Download helper utilities:

sudo apt-get install easystroke wmctrl xdotool gnome-pie

Download apps:

3d Coat is a proprietary product. Ubuntu Studio ships with a version of Blender and Krita but they lag at least a version behind. The shipped versions may well do the job (and be easier to upgrade) unless you specifically need something in a newer version or just like being on the latest version of everything. I stashed all of these in /usr/local as that’s on its own partition on the ssd. My home directory is on a 2Tb not-ssd. I don’t know if that’s “right and proper” for Linux but everything works, I know where it is and it theoretically shouldn’t get hosed if Ubuntu explodes and requires a complete reinstall so I don’t care.

Setting up Wacom Cintiq 12WX on Ubuntu Studio 14.04

And on goes the love/hate relationship with Linux. Setting up my Cintiq is one of the things that makes me really loathe it and want to go jumping back onto my iMac and ignore the possibility of art on Linux forever. My first attempt was an abysmal fail (I blew up Unity and had to spend a bit of time fixing it and it never completely recovered, and due to the nature of the child who owned that particular machine it ended up with Win7 on it). If I didn’t need a Linux server for web dev (which is why I got the laptop) I would have just bought a MacBook.