Thursday 21 April 2022

How to create a custom "CPU temperature" widget that doesn't cause instability in KDE plasma

 


The offerings in the KDE store for cpu temperature widgets are old and outdated, and they seemed to cause instability in plasma over time for me. Luckily there is a way to make your own that's stable! Download the "Command Output" widget by Zren from here or in "get new widgets"

https://store.kde.org/p/1166510

Add the widget to your panel, and in the command in the widget settings, put:

"sensors | grep -A 0 'CPU' | cut -c16-21"

Note: You may have to adjust the command if the sensors output on your system is different, so experiment in the terminal first.

Enjoy!



Sunday 3 April 2022

How to fix Killing Floor (native Linux version) issues due to outdated SDL library

 

Killing Floor has a native Linux version, which is great, but the problem with it is the fact that it uses the very old SDL 1.2, and that has problems when alt+tabbing and has problems with wayland. So we'll fix this by replacing the SDL library.

Why not use the windows version in proton, you might ask? Well, for some people, it works great. However, on the laptop I use (Thinkpad with Intel HD Graphics) the proton version stutters a LOT.

This guide is for Fedora, so if you use another distro you'll have to use the correct package names.

Simply put, the fix is you install sdl12-compat.i686 with dnf or whatever package manager you use. It has to be the 32-bit version of sdl12-compat.

Then you replace "libSDL-1.2.so.0" in the game's "System" directory with the version from the package you just installed.

In my case on Fedora 36, it's:

$ cp /usr/lib/libSDL-1.2.so.1.2.50 steamapps/common/KillingFloor/System/libSDL-1.2.so.0

Done!

Edit: Also, maybe set "SDL_VIDEODRIVER=x11" %command% in launch options if using wayland.

Edit 2: Another option is to use Proton 5.13 with OpenGL instead of DirectX 9 (because OpenGL has messed up gamma on newer Proton versions)