The Linux Thread!

[AML225]

Hmmm, AML225 what are your graphics settings? Your pics look like the window was expanded from a lower resolution than your screen can handle.

As micha noted, the open source driver is better for AMD these days, it should be fairly up to date.

Hmm, I think that's just the image hosting or something, the graphics settings in KSP are set exactly to my monitor's native resolution.

[Superfluous J]

Installing now on my new Linux Mint install on my 2nd (actually mounted first, in its proper place) hard drive!

[Motokid600]

So its steady as she goes with my Linux install. Im a bit overwhelmed at how raw everything is. Im sure im to have many problems down the line, but so far I have only two concerns.

No sound. I see the correct playback device in settings, but it refuses to work. I take it theres some driver I need? I run my whole system through a surround sound tuner so I don't know if that might complicate things.

Text is too small. I can inflate most of the fonts it seems in system settings>app appearances>fonts, but it doesn't seem to cover everything.

Oh and what's a good way to go about unpacking mods and installing them? I take it WinRar is no longer an option.

Edited February 21, 2015 by Motokid600

[Yski]

No sound.

I recall having a similar issue, and I solved it by enabling some setting that was disabled by default in alsamixer. Try opening the terminal and typing in alsamixer and see if you can find something that fixes it - I'd love to give you the exact setting I changed, but I'm currently stuck with my laptop, and it doesn't seem to have the options I'm looking for. It definitely was some enabled/disabled type of thing though.

As for unpacking mods, I don't think I specifically installed anything to do it, so you're probably good with the default program that ships with ubuntu unless you want something fancier.

[Superfluous J]

I don't know about the sound thing, though I've had similar issues.

Text is too small. I can inflate most of the fonts it seems in system settings>app appearances>fonts, but it doesn't seem to cover everything.

Sometimes I think Linux developers all have 48 inch monitors or 20/.00001 vision. Though the only real problem I have is in browsers. All the good browsers (Read: Firefox and Chromium) allow you to scroll-wheel up/down with ctrl to change the font, and then they remember what you had it on for each site. I use that gratuitously.

Oh and what's a good way to go about unpacking mods and installing them? I take it WinRar is no longer an option.

First, you'll want to learn the terminal. Second, "unzip" is really all you need. Get the mod's zip into your gamedata folder, get there in your terminal. Third, "unzip [modname]." You can shortcut that by just typing the first few letters and hitting tab.

I learned a TON of stuff from a great "beginner to linux" podcast entitled Linux Reality. Even almost a decade later, I suggest you listen to the first few episodes and if they help, download them all.

[sal_vager]

So its steady as she goes with my Linux install. Im a bit overwhelmed at how raw everything is. Im sure im to have many problems down the line, but so far I have only two concerns.

Raw in what way, what are you using?

No sound. I see the correct playback device in settings, but it refuses to work. I take it theres some driver I need? I run my whole system through a surround sound tuner so I don't know if that might complicate things.

This is strange, most distros use pulseaudio these which KSP/Unity works with without any messing around, it may be that KSP is trying to send the sound to an unplugged device or to headphones, look for "FMOD Ex App" in your sound settings while KSP is running, there is a selector box to the right of it.

Alternatively if you start KSP with "padsp ./KSP.x86" it'll make pulseaudio fool KSP into thinking it has direct access to the soundcard.

Text is too small. I can inflate most of the fonts it seems in system settings>app appearances>fonts, but it doesn't seem to cover everything.

This is an issue with KSP on all platforms, there's a UI scaler in Settings but no built-in text scaling yet.

Oh and what's a good way to go about unpacking mods and installing them? I take it WinRar is no longer an option.

Most distros have built-in unzip support, rightclick a zip and "Extract Here" or open with whatever archive manager is installed, you can always install more from the repositories, 7zip support is very useful, RAR is available and there's plenty more

[Motokid600]

Thanks everyone this gives me alot of stuff to try. As for what distribution I'm using its Kubuntu ( if there's a better one let me know and I'll switch ) and ive yet to actually download KSP. Haven't gotten that far. But because I can't get any sound out of anything ( YouTube for instance ) I figure it wont work with ksp as well. Also concerned the font issue could carry over into ksp, but ill cross that bridge then.

[micha]

Oh and what's a good way to go about unpacking mods and installing them? I take it WinRar is no longer an option.

If you're not keen on the command line, Ark is a WinRar/7-Zzip equivalent in KDE (you said you're using Kubuntu). File Roller if you're using Gnome. The respective one should have been automatically installed, and double-clicking an archive in Dolphin (KDE's file browser) should open it.

alternative.to is a good website to use to find the Linux equivalents to Windows software.

I've pretty much switched over to using CKAN for mod management. It covers the biggest/most used mods, and you can still manually install any other mods.

[Motokid600]

I'm inching closer and closer to get this working. At this point my main issue is no sound and trouble shooting is driving me mad. I have an nvidia card which is feed into a 5.1 surround sound tuner then goes to the tv. I've tried searching for specific drivers. Nothing that I could find that was the least bit relevant. AlsaMixer is what KSP is using while running, but I can't make heads or tails of that program. I THINK everything is unmuted ( I'm guessing MM means muted? )Ive tried every setting variation possible. Both with the built in audio and this GK101 ( which im assuming is my gpu? I don't have a sound card )

I feel like I'm goin in circles here. I've got no indication that the sound is even trying to work. Ive got nothing to go by in order to fix it. Finding information is so difficult between all the versions and different distros everyone uses.

I am just shooting in the dark here. Completely crippled by what I would normally think would be an easy fix, but... Holy crap. I don't know how to even properly ask for help.

Oh and btw this isn't just ksp. I have no sound what so ever.

Edited February 24, 2015 by Motokid600

[sal_vager]

It's probably Pulse audio, the drivers should already be available in Linux but Pulse needs to be using the card.

Open PulseAudio Volume Control and check your configuration tab, if you have multiple sound devices they all will be listed, you can disable unused devices so the sound can only come from the Nvidia.

While an application with sound is running you can check your Output Devices and Playback tabs, ensure your volume is not zero.

You should see the application listed in the playback tab.

If there is still no sound I recommend checking the connectors on your soundcard.

[Motokid600]

I have sound in Windows. PulseAudio..I keep hearing that when searching the issue. Some said to even remove it. But when I go to search for it I get nothing. So perhaps I don't have it. I'll try downloading it asap. In the meantime could that be the issue maybe? Something to try I suppose.

Edited February 24, 2015 by Motokid600

[cantab]

So you have speakers in your display that's connected to your graphics card, and you want the sound from those?

I'll grant that the following might already have been covered:

Is the display connected by HDMI? DVI doesn't do sound. DisplayPort can but it might not work.

Have you installed the proprietary nVidia drivers? If not, do so. You'll want them for KSP to run well anyway.

Then, it's been a while since I used KDE but there should be a detailed volume control available from the system tray icon, similar to in windows. If you can find that, see if there are any useful options there.

And incidentally, I'll be the first to admit that sound in Linux is a right mess.

[Motokid600]

Yea I've messed with every sound settings I can find. No luck. Yea the display is connected via hdmi. And I'm using the "recommended" nvidia driver.

I've got two options in KDE under playback devices. GK 104 HDMI audio controller 5.1. Then next to it is the Built-in Audio Analog Surround 5.1. Both do nothing. I'm guess built in is my motherboards sound card and the GK is my gpu. What this means? No idea.

What's a backend?

Edited February 24, 2015 by Motokid600

[cantab]

In the realm of stating the bleeding obvious: you *do* have the volume turned up on the display/speakers/whatever?

[Motokid600]

And it works! I got sound! I had to download and install Pulse Audio. I fiddled with some more fidalables and now it works. Well... I'm sure I'll be back in a little bit with a new problem. Until then!

Ok still no sounds in ksp, but I can see it's using that FMOD Ex APP Sal_Vager mentioned. Sliders are up, but.. no audio.

Edit: Right clicked FMOD. Switched to GK104. Damn near blew my speakers out. Works though.

Okay I am getting closer and closer. I actually was able to sit down and play the 64bit version of KSP on Linux. Few questions.

----------

Is Linux purely openGL? Can I expect the same degraded performance as in Windows with OpenGL? Because I can tell ya right now the anti aliasing override I specified in nvidia settings actually works. I've got smooth edges it's amazing. But something is still not quite right.

I don't know if maybe it's the contrast. But the color of the picture looks off from what I'm used too in Windows. The image looks darker and not as sharp.

For instance I'm sitting at the launch pad right now at noon. Looking at the VAB its.. nearly blacked out. I also seem to be getting some mild artifacts and there is still a considerable amount of aliasing.

----------

So i messed around with the color settings in the nvidia software. Better, but.. still not right. And im not sure if its the product of a little bit of extra gamma, but the lighting in KSP seems to be suffering from poor gradients. When you look up at the sun and when in orbit you can see instead of a smooth color change im getting leveled/blocky gradients.

And i dare say thats the only fly in my oitment right now. I could use a little more AA, but what i have now is much better then what i had in Windows OpenGL. Just this strange coloring/gradient issue.

Oh and yea.. my sound is not too good turns out. Exposions sound like a skipping CDs. Is there any remedy for that? Maybe the Normalizer/Responsivness options in KSP? ( whatever the heck they do. Ive never figured that out. )

Edited February 24, 2015 by Motokid600

[cantab]

nVidia's proprietary drivers on Linux are very good, and I've come across claims that OpenGL performs better on them than on the Windows drivers.

Picture colour might be monitor gamma settings or similar?

[sal_vager]

Glad you got sound working, not sure about the colour though, and yeah openGL is the only option but it's better on Linux

You might have to check colour balance settings in the Nvidia settings.

[Motokid600]

Yea openGL seems much smoother here on Linux. As for the coloring unfortunately it seems there's only so much I can do in the nvidia settings. Gamma, brightness and contasy is all I can really change. I got it looking better color wise, but now these poor gradients are sticking out like a sore thumb. I'll take a screenshot if need be once I sit down and figure that out. I see Kununtu has a screen capture app i hope works simple enough.

Anything I can do about the skipping explosion sounds?

Edit: Just had KSP open in Windows to compare the look. Yea for some reason KSP on Linux is much darker and the colors don't seem as sharp. Can't really adjust anything beyond what I already did or things start to look even worse.

-------

So I compared it on a stock install... And go figure it looked the same in Windows. The gradient is there, the skipping explosions are there ( wish they weren't ) and the .. darker coloring. Im not used to seeing this ugly white line across the horizon. So that must've been giving me this contrast I wasn't used too. I have one more question before I dive into this. Just so I know for the future. How do I run batch files? Such as the ones that come with Ven's Revamp to prune the stock parts. Same as always? ... click?

Other then that I want to thank everyone who helped me here to get this up and running. I cannot wait to go nuts in Addon Releases. Like a kid in a candy store.

-------

Where can I find the Output_log? The KSP_64 Data ( something like that ) folder is missing from the directory.

Edited February 25, 2015 by Motokid600

[Eleven]

I haven't posted much or played much since 0.90. Right after installing 0.90 my laptops HD died, while playing the game. It went into non-stop HD activity and killed it. I got a new HD and reinstalled Mint 17 and now it seems that 0.90 constantly accesses the HD while playing, even locking up sometimes. Also sometimes after shutting the game down, the laptop is unresponsive for minutes while the HD cranks and cranks.

I don't know what's up, or why 0.90 would cause so much HD accessing but it's really a bummer. Not to mention one HD died in the middle of the game trying to do whatever it was doing and now it's almost out of control with how much activity goes on.

[sal_vager]

Motokid600, there's no KSP_64_Data file that I am aware of with stock, the only x64 files are really just the KSP.x86_64 and launcher.x86_64, so please use the output_log.txt in the KSP_Data folder.

I guess I got so used to the truncated sky I just don't see it anymore :/ And I guess I never really noticed the colour mismatch either, though on my old laptop I get green seas due to shader issues, don't use the fallback shaders, they are bad.

The skipping is a very old problem that seems to be caused by Unity itself, not everyone gets it and it doesn't happen in the Unity editor so the devs were unable to track it down, see here and here.

I guess it's physics based, a high delta time may exacerbate it.

Eleven, I have no idea what to say to that, all that happens here is higher cpu fan activity, can you provide some more info?

[linuxgurugamer]

I use a number of different systems over the course of a week. My normal gaming machine is a Windows 7 system, my laptop is a Mac running OS X, I have another system which dual-boots into Linux, and I use others at times.

I have been having problems with KSP running out of memory, both on Windows (32 bit) and OS X, and wanted to start playing the game in Linux.

For this, I used Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. I don’t like the Unity desktop, so I install XFCE4. For those who are interested, the way you do this is to log in and sudo to root, then run the following command:

apt-get install xfce4

So I first installed KSP to the dual-boot system, which is running Ubuntu 14.04, with the propriety nVidia drivers. It works well, but this system only has 4 gig of memory, and I wanted/needed more. So I set up a virtual machine on my laptop.

This is using VMWare Fusion 7, and I have an Ubuntu 14.04 system installed. Using this, I am able to change the memory available and CPUs available simply by changing a setting and restarting the VM. I normally run with Fusion set to 4 CPUs, 6 gig of memory, and 1 gig for the video memory.

I kept having crashes with the game loading everything, and then crashing the entire VM (virtual machine) when it tried to load the main menu of the game. After extensive research, I traced it down to the anti-alias setting.

When I disabled the antialias in the settings.cfg, the game works nicely. However, there seems to be two “quirks†or “bugs†in the game related to this:

1. When I first go into the game, I can’t go to the Graphics page of the Settings, it is a blank window with no way to exit. However, just proceeding to selecting a game and getting the the space center seems to fix this, at least for that particular run

2. When I do manage to get into the graphics page, the Anti-Alias is set to 2x. Even if I set it to Off, the game will ALWAYS save it in the settings.cfg file as set to 1, which would cause a crash the next time I would run the game.

I wrote the following script to solve this problem. It is currently set to have the game in a directory on the desktop, if it is somewhere else then just change the line KSPDIR= to wherever it is.

Read the script for instructions, it is fairly self-explanatory.

Copy the script to a file on the system. Set the options you want, and don't forget to make it executable. Then just double-click and enjoy.

#!/bin/bash


# Set the following to the directory where the game executable is in
KSPDIR=“~/Desktop/KSP_linuxâ€Â


# Set the following to 1 to disable antialiasing in the file before running the game.  0 to leave the
# setting as is
FORCE_DISABLE_ANTIALIASES=1


# If set to 1, try to run the 64 bit version, if not set to 1, will run the 32 bit version
TRY_64_BIT=1


# The following will enable the patch the 64 bit binary as needed for 0.90 
# See this URL for information:
#   http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/92231-The-Linux-Thread?p=1608655&viewfull=1#post1608655
#
PATCH_090=1


### Don't change anything below here ###


exe=KSP.x86


uname -a | grep x86_64 >/dev/null
rc=$?
[ $rc -eq 0 -a $TRY_64_BIT -eq 1 ] && exe=${exe}_64
cd $KSPDIR
[ $FORCE_DISABLE_ANTIALIASES -eq 1 ] && sed -i '/^ANTI_ALIASING/c ANTI_ALIASING = False' settings.cfg


# The following two lines may not be needed with 0.90
export LC_ALL=C
export LC_LANG=C




if [ $PATCH_090 -eq 1 ]; then
    echo "0099e747: 00" | xxd -r - KSP.x86_64
    echo "0099e74c: 00" | xxd -r - KSP.x86_64
fi


./${exe}

[Eleven]

Eleven, I have no idea what to say to that, all that happens here is higher cpu fan activity, can you provide some more info?

I always got the high fan usage as well, but I can't explain the CPU (EDIT...HDD, not CPU!) activity with 0.90

I did however find something interesting that seemed to help a little. Swapiness. I started looking into the swap area and if that could have anything to do with it, although nothing about a linux install would explain why this only started with 0.90 for me. I found that by default on a scale of 0-100 linux is configured at 60 for 'swapiness'. So if 0 means linux would only access the swap in extreme cases and 100 would mean that linux would always use the swap area, by default it's set at a pretty high number. You can change this easily so I set mine down to 10.

After that, the excess hard drive access while playing did go down, but it did not go away.

I can never get 'system monitor' to stay running while playing the game, it always shuts itself off. But I did just try the 'free' command in a terminal while playing the game and my memory usage tops out over 7gigs used, and of course some stuff does still get put into swap, about another gig worth.

I really don't have *that* many mods running, but for some reason KSP is using virtually all 8 gigs of RAM I have.

It's better now that I changed the swapiness and tweaked some settings a little just in case they had anything to do with it, turned off anti-aliasing, turned down physics timing, etc etc....but all in all it's much more sluggish than it ever was before 0.90. I checked my new HD stats and it's the exact same speed and even has a bigger cache than the old one so I don't think it's the issue. I even thought maybe I screwed up the filesystem settings while installing Mint on the new HD but I'm using EXT4 for the filesystem, I'm pretty sure that's what I've used for all of my Mint installs over the years. I did make an extra large swap partition this time (16gigs) but the issues with 0.90 and hard drive usage started on the old hard drive with only an 8 gig partition.

I'll keep looking and tweaking, I'm thinking of trying swapiness at 0 to see if that helps any, since I can always change it back

Edited February 28, 2015 by Eleven

[micha]

Hi Eleven,

Unless you have a misbehaving app, pretty much the primary reason for excessive HDD access it swapping.

Be aware that KSP0.90 does have a few memory leaks - so if you play with a lot of mods, or for extended sessions you may see your memory usage climb until you're swapping. I generally run "htop" in a terminal window and monitor memory usage, if it gets too high, I restart KSP. Annoying, but hopefully the devs will fix it for 1.0.

My KSP tends to top out just shy of 4GB, around 3.7 or so, and that's with quite a reasonable collection of mods.

Another thing to try is to use a leaner desktop and close all non-essential programs. My system only has 4GB of RAM installed and I manage just fine, swap stays under 1GB and only hits the HDD when I switch programs (as it should be). As well as KSP I run 1-2 instances of MonoDevelop, and a bunch of browser windows. I do use WindowMaker as my desktop (it's -very- minimal, try XFCE for a lean but more familiar UI).

[Eleven]

Be aware that KSP0.90 does have a few memory leaks - so if you play with a lot of mods, or for extended sessions you may see your memory usage climb until you're swapping. I generally run "htop" in a terminal window and monitor memory usage, if it gets too high, I restart KSP. Annoying, but hopefully the devs will fix it for 1.0.

Another thing to try is to use a leaner desktop and close all non-essential programs. My system only has 4GB of RAM installed and I manage just fine, swap stays under 1GB and only hits the HDD when I switch programs (as it should be). As well as KSP I run 1-2 instances of MonoDevelop, and a bunch of browser windows. I do use WindowMaker as my desktop (it's -very- minimal, try XFCE for a lean but more familiar UI).

htop is great, thanks for that heads-up!

0 swapiness did not help, in fact things got worse. I checked things with htop and the only other thing running was dropbox...I don't use it that often so I killed it and went back to 10 swapiness. Things have run well (well enough) since then, and with only htop and KSP running (I use Cinnamon, never liked XFCE!) I'm topping out at around 2.8gigs used.

One thing I forgot to mention but now that I think about it, could be significant is because I'm on a laptop with built in graphics I always had to tweak KSP.x86_64 to get re-entry effects to show. I've always used the little hack to edit the file and delete the intel.intel string. What I had been doing was finding three instances of that string and just entering zeros in their places. I thought maybe that was giving me issues so I started with a new file and only changed the very first instance of intel.intel and that by itself did give me the effects I always expect, so maybe changing those other strings adversely affected the known memory leaks?

All in all, I'm now getting slightly better performance and with an hour or two of testing it seems that it's not trying to write non-stop to HD like it was before. I do have a smaller laptop HD I'm going to try a new linux install with and see how that works there. Maybe I will try XFCE (I do use it, but not on my main laptop, I have it on a real old laptop that I keep in my workshop for streaming pandora, I just don't like it's look)

BTW, all these issues I've had with 0.90 are on a Lenovo G580 with 8gigs of ram, running Mint 17.1 with Cinnamon.

Thanks for the help, I'll do more testing and whine about it here

Edited February 26, 2015 by Eleven

[micha]

htop is great, thanks for that heads-up!

...

Maybe I will try XFCE (I do use it, but not on my main laptop, I have it on a real old laptop that I keep in my workshop for streaming pandora, I just don't like it's look)

...

Thanks for the help, I'll do more testing and whine about it here

Glad things are working better for you now!

Btw, you don't have to replace Cinnamon to install XFCE - you can install both and then select which one you want for a particular session from the login screen. That's what I do - WindowMaker when I want to play KSP, and KDE when I want to do standard desktop stuff.

Can't wait for my 8GB of RAM to arrive next week, and a "new" CPU - a Phenom II X4 965BE. I know, ridiculously slow by modern standards, but should be a nice boost from my current X2 240. Might stay in KDE after that, although tbh I've always had a soft spot for WindowMaker..