Episode: 3011
Title: HPR3011: Linux is HARD rant with Intel graphics
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3011/hpr3011.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 15:08:32

---

This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,011 from Monday, 17 February 2020.
Today's show is entitled Linux Is Hard Round with Intel Graphics. It is hosted by Operator
and is about 20 minutes long and carries an explicit flag. The summer is.
I go over my issues around Linux in general, specifically video issues.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by archive.org.
Support universal access to all knowledge by heading over to archive.org forward slash donate.
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Hacker Public Radio. This is going to be pretty short.
What I'm going to do is go over my latest build of a media center.
So I have an old desktop that I use for gaming that's probably, I want to say, 10 years or more old desktop build,
that I had thrown a newer and old board in from a previous gaming rig and used that for a media center.
And we bought a new media center that is kind of slimmer profile and I had the machine behind the desk
or behind the media center and it just kind of was giant and bulky and made a lot of noise and all that stuff.
I kind of go over that build and my struggles with it and I've probably spent a good 18 hours just kind of flutzing with it when I finally realized that my problem was some other things.
So anyways, I'm going to kind of scroll through here and if I have a super clicky keys, I apologize.
Shouldn't be doing a whole lot of typing.
But I've gone over my build before and what I want to add to it is anything for this specific new board.
It's a Intel UHD360 is the graphics card onboard graphics card.
And so I'll go from my transitioning, what I'm doing is transitioning from an Intel board with a GPU all throw away for kick to kick to kick GPU or whatever.
It's an old GPU and Nvidia GPU so I went from Nvidia to a Intel onboard Intel chipset for the graphics.
And that's kind of what monkey up this whole thing.
I did a hot swap because it takes quite some time for me to rip.
I don't have upper doorshaft for anything.
I just backup my configs and I just feel like it would take me actually longer than 18 hours to rebuild all my stuff.
Probably not. It would probably take me around 10 hours to rebuild everything from scratch, from backups.
And that's all on me. I did pretty good documentation, but I don't have very good ways to revert.
And that's the thing with Linux obviously, right, is that as soon as you have a working build,
as soon as that build changes and something is appreciated or something is upgraded.
And you have to go back and must with dependencies and that's just how what the state of Linux and that's part of the game.
So I had for a Intel or an older board is I I five on a big huge case with two or two four terabyte drives and a solid state.
And I swapped that board out and hot swapped it and booted and everything booted fine.
I lost video and I realized that I had to uninstall the Nvidia drivers and I went back and forth and I did some restoring
and I did googling of the Intel stuff and I tried old stuff and I tried new stuff.
And I finally had everything working except for Cody and Cody would crash because of the video drivers and the video drivers were all kind of weird.
I kept having issues and I spent probably a good 10 hours just with the video problems.
And I finally went to Cody board and I said, look, here's my logs, here's everything I have.
And I got back, you know, you're running an unsupported version blah, blah, blah.
I was running Debian at the time, still running Debian rather than Ubuntu.
And I thought I'm not sure they were sure what the guidance was on that answer.
But I said, you know what, you know, let me just try and update.
And I did an app get update and rebooted and everything just worked.
So I'm thinking what happened is that all the dependency issues got fixed.
Maybe it recognized that some drivers were out of sync or something.
I have no idea what fixed it.
I think what happened is that it ended up refreshing some of my configuration files in the process for X and X work.
Because I've always kind of struggled with that stuff, even though everything is still blank.
So I don't know exactly what happened.
Maybe some kernel modules got loaded or unloaded that were causing me issues.
But it was just an app get update.
And that's what fixed all my or dist upgrade.
And that's what fixed all my problems.
So I'm running the latest Debian 9 as of today.
And that fixed my problems.
So what I didn't notice is that now in, I think it's using OpenGL with,
with matcha or I want to say meta or something's that effect to do the video stuff for Intel to do the video drivers.
And I'm probably butchering at all.
And I apologize to the community for not getting into that stuff right.
But my main my brain started melting out there about 10 hours of messing with it.
So I've always struggled with video and troubleshooting video within Linux.
Is it, is it the drivers?
Is it the configuration of Xorg?
Is it, you know, my window manager?
Is it something else?
Having to do a video?
Is it a kernel driver?
And when you look at errors in Linux, it's always just like one giant error log.
And there's all kinds of issues around trying to troubleshoot something when there's never been a problem before.
And now you look at the logs and there's all these errors in there.
And you're trying to correlate, okay, well, I have an error.
Now I'm going to figure out why this error.
Oh, well, it's a benign thing and it's not an actual error.
Or the error you're researching is only coming up with posts from 2013.
And it's not relevant to your build.
And so I've always kind of struggled with video.
But the way I was able to fix it again is a distub grade.
I'll also talk about the build.
It was a, it's a micro mini ATX board with a regular ATX slim case.
So about a third of the case, I'm not actually utilizing.
That is so if I do run into a cheap GPU, I can do object recognition real time with YOLO and all that stuff.
But I'm right now optimizing my power usage with all this stuff.
What I did find out is I fixed my audio issues around hard drive stuff.
And I found some posts online about people getting an O-ring, a two inch or three inch O-ring that goes fused for PVC and stuff.
And they would put two of those around there, two of those around a hard drive and then suspend it with tie reps and tie that to the board of the case or whatever.
I tried a similar thing. I couldn't find any O-rings. I tried it with other bands.
Basically anything that touched this case, it turned it into a reverberation chamber.
And then because there was no feet on the case, it was sitting directly on the entertainment center.
It would reverberate in the entertainment center.
So every time I got a buffer and a quiet part of the movie, I hear clunk and it would just be awful.
So I ended up actually suspending the hard drives in a very jank way with rubber bands and tie reps.
And they're virtually silent. The cloudest thing on the hard drive on this case right now is still the hard drives when they're that you can hear the slight clicking.
But you don't hear nearly the clunking when there's when it's churning, you all you hear is the click, click, click, click, click.
And that's kind of what you want to hear. You want to hear the clicking of the heads.
But when you hear the low thump and the clunking, that's when you got the vibration sound, the drive hitting up against something in the case.
And then it just reverberates and turns into a giant speaker.
So if you have these low, very low frequency noises when hard drive access time, that's all vibrations within the case.
And stuff like that. I've looked at several options around like, you know, the little rubber nubs that go in between the mounting things.
And I was like, look, I don't really have a lot of time this. I don't particularly care that the case has hard drives just dangling in it.
It's what worked for me.
It's essentially just rubber bands and tie wraps and, you know, just kind of keep an eye on it, you know, every couple of years and maybe swap out the rubber bands when they start kind of deteriorating.
I don't I don't really know the use case, but that's what worked for me on the case case.
And since I have a big slim case, I had plenty of room to hang our drives in in there kind of kind of have hazardly.
So both drives are in there, completely silent, the case or the slim power supply that I got for it is like a 240 and it doesn't even turn on.
It had something to set up, you know, if the load is under a certain amount of fan won't even turn on.
I got a fancy CPU case or CPU fan for it that's, you know, some kind of ridiculous CPU fan and it came with a couple of case fans.
What I did notice is when I first put it in there, I didn't have any fans running and the hard drives got to about, you know, it's like 63 and like a 67 degrees Celsius, which is not ideal.
So all I did was turn on one of the case fans.
It's a nice, not Peltier, but whatever the decent brand of fans is that's in there.
When I turned on one of those, it's completely silent fan for case fan and that fixed my temperature issues.
What I did find is that there's something called, man, I wish I knew the name of it.
Basically, there's audio, there's settings, at least within a Windows UI I found that you can change the audio of the hard drive.
And apparently newer hard drives have this feature that you can adjust the quietness of the drives.
And I didn't mess with any of this because I was able to suspend the drives and kind of animation and I didn't know of any links tools to do that.
But apparently there's some settings you can turn on which will obviously affect performance because if the heads having to move slower or more delicately across the disk or whatever, you're going to have performance hit.
But that's definitely something to look at. If you have a media box, you're not concerned about IO input output.
You just want the thing to be quiet. You can look at this audio settings tweaking or whatever for your hard drives.
And you can change the actual software firmware to tell it to be quiet or when it's doing, you know, read write functions and stuff.
So some other stuff I learned is some obvious stuff that a lot of people wouldn't even understand is there's standard ATX.
There's many ATX and there's micro ATX.
And one would think that micro ATX is the smaller one, but actually many ATX is the smaller one.
So you've got ATX standard micro ATX and mini ATX in general.
And I purchased a mini ATX and I could have fitted in a smaller case, but I probably wouldn't have been able to suspend the drives in the manner that I had to.
And I would have to have ordered a like a that kit for the like a three inch kit or some kind of rubber kit to put them in.
And that's something to keep in mind. Mine was slim. It fits. It's scalable.
So if I want to throw or rate some ray drives in there and make a little software rate, I'm keeping an eye on the, you know, 10 terabyte around 10-pyat terabyte size drives and see if they go down.
And I'll probably buy a couple of those and throw them in there and swap them out with the four terabyte drives.
So that's something to keep in mind. There's PC part billers, a decent website.
But again, if you're not familiar with building custom builds, you know, you want to get sinister out to a friend and get it kind of checked off before you start buying parts.
Because in hindsight, I probably would have been more happy with a smaller slim case because that was the whole point of buying the micro ATX.
I paid more for the, I mean, I'm sorry, the mini ATX, yeah, I screwed that up.
So I paid more for the mini ATX setup and the board just that I could have that slim or profile case.
And I ended up with a slim ATX case, which is a pretty big, pretty big guide.
But it fits under there and that's what's important. I double check the measurements.
And that's really all you need to do is check your measurements. If it's the size that you're comfortable with, that's fine.
If it fits under my entertainment system, it allows me to scale. So if I can dig up a video card or get a video card from a friend somewhere relatively cheap, then I can throw a video card in there and do some some pretty interesting stuff that I've been wanting to do with and with dark neck and object recognition stuff and and all that.
But I'll say, you know, I don't know if there's any options out there for silent hard drives.
I did a little bit of googling and just rigged up my own thing because I've always struggled with that thing myself.
So if you guys know any tips, any things you could pick up at the hardware store to make hard drives be really quiet.
Let me know, do a quick episode about it because I'm interested in my next build.
How can I put these drives in here that these disk based drives in here and and have lots of storage and have that quiet relatively quiet, you know.
And if I need to do some Dremel tool and take a Dremel tool to my micro, you know, my mini ATX case, I'll do that.
But other than what I've seen online is these little three inch O-rings that they'll wrap around the drive and any other little standy.
You know, you buy this little fancy thing and it's got rubber feet on it and it suspends your driving with a rubber feet.
I've seen corkscrew stuff with a cork, cork type of builds.
I don't even know what's actually practical.
So I'd like to get an idea if you guys have any ideas for quiet for quiet drives for my next build, which will be in 20 years and hopefully it'll just be the internet.
But anyways, let me know.
That's a quick, quick shout out.
You know, I had to do some tweaking.
Let me scroll through my GPU notes.
I'll send the I'll put notes in the show notes for this.
So that way they're not lost if Google Drive goes down.
I know that's a concern.
But Chrome, Cohen, Fortslash, Fortslash, GPU will give you information about the GPU and what Chrome is using to drive.
That'll give you an indication of whether or not your GPU is being utilized for Chrome at least.
And that'll give you an idea of saying, okay, well, if I don't have utilization of GPU and Chrome, then I know my drivers aren't install properly.
I'm not using the right driver set.
Forronics Test Suite has a really cool thing that'll dump out all kinds of cool information about your hard drive or about your system.
It'll tell you your board, it'll tell you your resolution, it does all kinds of cool stuff.
It's a great project.
I have yet to donate, but I'm going to donate to that project.
It's awesome.
Awesome little utility, even if I just didn't really add a whole lot of value to my project.
HDD temp will tell you the temperature of your hard drives because when I pulled them out of the case, it was really hot.
And that's how I actually knew to check the temp.
VA info will give you information about the VA API driver for your system if you're using those those drivers.
The i965 driver for Intel had or had issues with having to set that up.
Obviously LSPCI if you guys haven't looked at that.
It's a great one.
LSHW is a LS hardware.
It'll give you that same type of information to give you like a cross check.
GLX info will give you some information about GL and GLX implementations running on whatever display x displays going on.
DMI decode will tell you I think your information about the motherboard.
Mainly the product which will tell you the information about your motherboard if you want to do some updates to your BIOS.
I didn't do anything to the BIOS but except update it.
I left all the fancy boot stuff.
My brain is kind of leaky today.
The fancy boot stuff.
I didn't mess with any of that.
It just straight up booted in.
I put the drives in the order of when they were used to be set up using the motherboard thing.
GPU usage on Intel.
There's actually Intel dash GPU dash tools part WN.
We'll give you Intel GPU top.
And it'll tell you the usage of the GPU.
We had some sluggish video.
It looks like it appears to be buffering or indexing the video the way the player works inside of Cody.
Maybe it's using like software to buffer and then using GPU to actually play the video.
I don't understand why there's a bit of a delay in the playback for Cody.
But if I load for example a 1080p video, it kind of does this weird buffering of a gray progress bar.
And once the buffering is done, it appears to play OK.
So maybe it's doing some weird indexing or something like that.
That I haven't noticed with the faster GPU.
There's base apps here.
XFCE stuff I've already talked about.
I think that's pretty much it.
There's not really any new stuff in here.
From the last stuff I did.
So this Debian Pixie Cody notes is a bit of Nvidia issues in troubleshooting and a bit of Intel troubleshooting.
There's also a section in here I updated about the section about audio, which is called audio compression.
And this guy posted some stuff about audio compression.
And then he changed it to stereo compressor stereo, which is not necessarily what I want.
So I went back and checked his other revisions and I did some more YouTube searching on Internet.
And found some other switches for the compression options for LADSPA sync,
which is a module for helping a sync name compressor plug-in SCC-1425.
Anyways, it helps with audio compression, which is also known as night mode.
So if you google around, you'll find LADSPA sync.
So if you're watching and you have your receiver doesn't have a night mode,
this will essentially give you that night mode within pulse audio driver stuff.
So it's really really cool fun stuff.
And messing with the values in there, I haven't done any of that, but you probably want to do that.
Pretty much it.
Hope this helps somebody out.
Again, if you have any recommendations around silent hard drives, please do a quick episode.
Help me make these hard drives quieter.
And if you can do it within a slim forum, then I might even switch my case over and spend another 60 bucks by a new case.
And by another mini APX case.
So I can have a nice little tiny box, but I'm not going to sweat it.
Anyways, appreciate it. Thanks for having me.
You've been listening to HECCA Public Radio at HECCA Public Radio.org.
We are a community podcast network that releases shows every weekday, Monday through Friday.
Today's show, like all our shows, was contributed by an HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast, then click on our contribute link to find out how easy it really is.
HECCA Public Radio was founded by the Digital Dog Pound and the Infonomicom Computer Club,
and is part of the binary revolution at binrev.com.
If you have comments on today's show, please email the host directly, leave a comment on the website or record a follow-up episode yourself.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released on the Creative Commons, Attribution, Share a Light, 3.0 license.
Thanks for watching.
