OpenBits Labs!

I've purchased an nvidia 1030 card to give some extra life to my old desktop (a 10 years old equipment that today belongs to my son, an 8 years old kid), I was surprised about the fact that the card was fully compatible with my hardware!

The problems came when my friends, the ones with whom I made my engineering career, wanted to remember the old times, when we made groups to study and get our first jobs (and instead of that were spent playing video games).

Some of those beloved friends (all were GNU/Linux users when they were young), now are using Mac, and for playing, Windows (except the aBatar, who still remain in the right path, and plays in a GNU/Linux box with an ati card).

One of them, asked us to move the Friday's match of Risk of Rain, to the brand new Risk of Rain 2, and guess what, I found no excuses, today is possible to play Windows games on GNU/Linux, wine has evolved a lot, and with the Steam's Proton everything should work out of the box... until you try it!

The problems started to appear, I was not even close to have the game working, and it were Thursday! I started to duckduckgo everything, but no clues were appearing.... until I read someone asking to someone else to run a vkcube, I tried at my system, and what I had was....

$ vkcube 
failed to initialize wayland, falling back to xcb
No Vulkan devices found.

Going a little dipper into the problem, someone pointed to someone else to check if vulkan files were in place, I made and ls and I got:

$ ls -l /usr/share/vulkan/icd.d/
total 12
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 126 ago  7 10:11 amd_icd32.json
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 124 ago  7 09:55 amd_icd64.json
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 140 jul  9 13:06 nvidia_icd.json

I have another friend, that once told me that computers are not deterministic systems, besides his joke, what I think is that is because the variables that make a system to be deterministic, should be set up...

So, trying to kill the entropy of this old box, I found the missed variable:

export VK_ICD_FILENAMES=/usr/share/vulkan/icd.d/nvidia_icd.json

And yes, the precious cube is at my screen! And it's not sucking at all!

So, time to load the configuration into the Steam's client has arrived:

My Fridays will be fun once again!