I’m trying to get “back into” Linux, and one of the things I’m doing is that I’ve installed a home machine with some budget hardware ( AMD Ryzen 3200G CPU, AMD RX 570 GPU, some RAM and storage etc ) and I’m trying to get a good working installation of X-Plane 11 on that machine, preferably the new beta version using the Vulkan API. My question is however separate form that flight simulator.
When reading up on what people are doing and how e.g. graphics drivers are installed, I find it really hard to get “systems knowledge” from snippets of knowledge on forums and in articles. Of course I can follow a tutorial directing me to what apt-command to write at the prompt, but I really want to understand, get knowledge of the underlying structure - to know what I’m doing.
What am I installing? How did I know that that piece of software was needed? How do I troubleshoot? How do I know what I have already installed (manually or by the system installer).
It also seems to me that googling gives me a lot of old pages, where it’s hard for me to judge which parts that are still relevant.
So… I guess my question is for Linux in general and at the moment for graphics drivers in particular - how can I acquire this knowledge? Any great resources out there? Text-based is better than video-based if possible.
(at the moment, it’s AMD GPU drivers under Ubuntu and Manjaro I’ve looked at but … that’s just the first step I guess, next month it will be something else).
Also, try a distribution like Slackware, set it up with your preferences, and learn about the packages you install on the way( it doesn’t handle automatic dependencies-except if you use sbotools). Man page is your friend. Set a virtual machine and Make errors!
As I understand it the drivers for the 570 are fairly mature, there should be no need to do anything with them at all. the open drivers are the recommended and are included in distributions by default.
AMD drivers are included by default, the drivers are open source now and have been for years. theres a binary component but thats for opencl users primarily.
You’re only consideration is you have two GPUs, hopefully its smart enough to pick the right one.
Other than that, you might need to be a bit more specific about what you want to know.
I have two resources to suggest. First one, is the Try Stuff mentality. Just roll your sleeves up and go to town on things. Always try to understand what the commands you’re entering from any tutorials actually do.
Second, if you’re down to spend some time reading, is the UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook. I think they’re on the 5th edition now? It doesn’t dive deep into any specific topics, but after reading through it you’ll have a much wider base of understanding for what’s going on with a *nix system.
Yeah, but I think he’s looking for something a little lower level:
So maybe starting from the basics and building up is a better idea. Learning what a package actually is before just flinging apt commands around is a better practice. Anyone can follow instructions on a wiki, but to actually grok what’s going on takes intentional learning.
Ah, this takes me back to the pre-web discussion boards in the early 1990-ies when Linux was the new kid on the block that the REAL unix beards looked down upon.
Thanks all for the replies. I’ll do my homework and might come back with more questions.
