In a fit of desperation in trying not to just reinstall my system from scratch, and maybe hopefully learn a thing or two in the process, figured I'd toss this out here. I've been setting my old ThinkPad T420 back up with Xubuntu as a little project PC for the bedroom; I've got a cute 4:3 monitor on the way for it and to complete the vibe I'm using the Chicago95 theme. Just gonna use it for weather, internet radio, I was gonna get ErsatzTV running on there, and I wanted to keep a GameCube controller plugged in (with the official USB adapter) so I could play some chill retro games on there. That last point brings forth the point of contention I'm now facing. Dolphin detected and could use the GameCube controller fine initially, but I wanted to use it for SNES (bsnes) and N64 (Parallel Launcher) emulation as well. Searching around led me to this page. I installed those packages, rebooted, and it still isn't detected in either of those emulators, and now not even Dolphin will work with it. Checking it out in its controller settings now throws this message when it's plugged in: "Error Opening Adapter: Access Denied (insufficient permissions)". So it's a permissions issue; fair enough. I check out Dolphin (and all the others) with Flatseal, and the toggle for the input permission is completely greyed out. This doesn't seem to be a common issue, couldn't find anyone else dealing with it in my searching. (More research tells me that just because the USB adapter is supported hardware, doesn't mean it'll work with everything, software needs to be written specifically to use it. I don't know if bsnes or Parallel support it, I'm guessing not, so I probably just wasted my time and fucked my set-up up for nothing and have to buy a Mayflash adapter or just use a different controller. ) Long story short, I don't know enough about Linux to dig into it and uninstall those packages that seem to have messed things up, or edit the relevant permissions manually to try and get around Flatseal not letting me. I also don't know enough about it to search more elegantly for relevant answers lol So that's the saga thus far. It wouldn't be the end of the world if I had to reinstall everything and start over but I'd like to avoid it.
The only version of Linux I've used for gaming is the version on my Steam Deck. Have you tried "EmuDeck"? It's an all-in-one installer that was meant for the Steam Deck, but I don't see why it wouldn't work for a more typical Linux setup. Since it does everything in one go and sets up all of the dependencies and everything, it might be worth giving it a try. I'd imagine using a GameCube adapter alongside Dolphin is a common enough thing that it would take something like that into account.
Yeah, Emudeck is great, I've got a Steam Deck too, but it's a little overkill for what I'm doing here. I can count on one hand currently the amount of games I'll wanna play on this system I'm rigging up. I ended up ordering a Mayflash adapter since it's a little more flexible driverwise, and I'll probably just reinstall everything from scratch too. Shouldn't take that long once I get down to it... I know this place isn't exactly hopping with activity but I'm scared to post about my problem anywhere else lol, such is fate. If I still can't play other emulators with the Mayflash adapter I'll just make WADs for the other systems games to run through Dolphin lmao, but I think it'll work.
I did and it still wouldn't access the adapter. I just ended up reinstalling Xubuntu last night and now I'm contending with a different problem getting the Chicago95 theme to the point I had it on the initial install. I have an idea of what's wrong though, gonna try it after work
Hot dog! A fellow Chicago95 User! What error did you get when you ran under 'sudo'? Can you copy and paste the error output here? By the way, if you have an extra USB stick w/ enough space or an external hard drive lying around, I strongly recommend doing a backup of your installation before attempting a reinstall. You can do so by booting into your Ubuntu or Xubuntu installer USB stick (in "Try Ubuntu" mode) and identifying the device name of your SSD/internal hard drive (one of the following: sda, sdb, ... or sdz), and then using the dd command to save a backup to an external drive or USB stick which you can recover from later. I can give you details on how to do that if you're not sure how to identify the device name of the SSD and the mount point of the usb where you will save a backup. Once you know those two things, you can run the following commands to create the backup: Code (Text): sudo touch $usb_mount_point/backup.img sudo dd if=$ssd_device_name of=$usb_mount_point/backup.img bs=$(stat -fc %s $ssd_device_name) And then to recover your drive in case a reinstall went bad, you would boot from your Ubuntu/Xubuntu installer USB, identify the device name of the SSD and the mount point of the USB (may differ from the last time you booted), and then run the following in your terminal: Code (Text): dd if=$usb_mount_point/backup.img of=$ssd_device_name bs=$(stat -fc %s $ssd_device_name) It's possible to backup your SSD without rebooting into the Xubuntu/Ubuntu installer, but I recommend this approach because I am paranoid about trying to remount the root filesystem as read-only and then generating a backup of it. I could experiment with that later just to see what happens, but I am deeply suspicious about the lack of testing that goes into every Linux distribution. Without getting too far off-topic, this is why I prefer FreeBSD and OpenBSD, provided they have the drivers I need and have a port of the software I'm trying to run: much better test coverage and quality control on pull requests.
Awesome, that's good to know! Thanks for sharing. I was thinking about making a backup of some kind at this point before I keep tooling around with it, now that I've got things generally set up again how I'm happy with. I'll hit you up for any further assistance if I run into trouble with that. The problem I was having with Chicago95 is rectified as well; on this latest Xubuntu install I was using the "latest" version of it on Github which is actually from 2022 lol, so it was having some annoying visual hiccups. Downloading the master branch and installing that works perfectly and is what I did in the first place, just forgot to this time around initially. My Mayflash adapter should be arriving tomorrow, we'll see how nice it plays with everything...
I still have a ton of problems running Chicago95 on OpenBSD+xfce, and I need to get off my keister and fix that stuff myself, but it works pretty well on Xubuntu (the only platform it was tested on). I was an xfce user for FreeBSD and OpenBSD long before Chicago95, so it was huge for me when someone made this total conversion kit. I think that aside from nostalgia, the Windows UI is still the best desktop GUI. Windows 7 basically perfected it, but the 9x predecessors still have that Windows familiarity, and look surprisingly good in 2024, especially compared to the Common Desktop Environment and its copycats. The internals of macOS are superlative, but I always found the UI lacking so much functionality compared to Windows, even if there are a lot fewer crashes. I say this, of course posting from my 2020 13" Intel-based MacBook Pro.
