Try New Technology

Suddenly after an about back in November I noticed the monitors no longer going to sleep. After digging around I found that the System Settings > Power Management > Energy Savings was throwing errors (I think the exact error was “kde power management service not running /usr/lib/org_kde_powerdevil”) about the service not running and therefor the panels would not be interacted with and all of the setting were disabled. Searching over a couple weeks finally came up with a solution thanks to a post on the Arch Linux BBS (ref: [SOLVED] KDE plasma power management not working / starting):

• Edit /usr/lib/systemd/user/plasma-powerdevil.service — I used Kate since it will correct sudo when saving
• Find the “TimeoutSec=” variable (line 10) — I changed mine to “10sec“
• Logoff or Reboot
• System Settings > Power Management > Energy Savings should now be working as expected

NOTE: I ended up applying this fix a few times due to an update seeming breaking things again. It has been “holding” fine with all the updates through December though. More details can be found on the Manjaro forums here.

I was able to get The Thaumaturge October 2023 Steam Next Fest working pretty quickly, even though it was throwing “Microsoft Visual C++ runtime” errors at launch on Manjaro KDE Linux.

• Install The Thaumaturge Demo from Steam
• Install protontricks
• Install ProntonUp-Qt
• Launch Protontricks: “Select the default wineprefix” and click OK
• Select “Install a Windows DLL or component” and click OK
• Selected and install “vcrun2022”
• Then you will also want to select and install “mspatcha”
• Close Protontricks
• Launch ProtonUp-Qt: Install for “Steam” and then click “Add version” to installed “GE-Proton8-16”
• Close ProtonUp-Qt
• Within Steam, Rick-click on “The Thaumaturge Demo” and select “Properties…”
• Click on Compatibility > check “Force the use of a specific Steam Play compatibility tool” and then select “GE-Proton8-16” from the list
• Close the Properties window”
• Play The Thaumaturge Demo

NOTE: Some of the tutorial video that come up will display fine, but then when they repeats it has an issue; this doesn’t impact game play.

While doing some PBO tuning in the BIOS I ran into an issue where X died and I forgot all about the CTRL+ALT+F1-9 option to get to a CLI which would then allow me to login and issue a correct “shutdown” command. After this hard shutdown the computer would hang at the boot up stage (the 3 dots on the screen of KDE).

Below are the steps taken to fix this (in short the boot drive needed fsck ran):

• Create a bootable Manjaro Live Image (https://manjaro.org/download/) using something like DD, Rufus, Etcher, etc. (this is why you should always have one laying around)
• Once at the USB Live desktop open a Terminal window and use the “fsck” command (ie “fsck /dev/sda1“); you may need to use “sudo fsck“. NOTE: Make sure to not access any part of the drive needing checked (otherwise you will need to unmount it first).
• You should run fsck on all the different partitions of the drive, and if you get a “Dirty Bit” error on the UEFI partition then I found it best to exit the fsck and then run “fsck -a /dev/sda1“
• Reboot and boot into the computer like normal

NOTE: You may need to use “lsblk -f” from the Terminal to figure out what the correct devices are. For example an NVME boot device UEFI partition should be something like “/dev/nvme0n1p1” and then the file storage something like “dev/nvme0n1p2”

I was getting some blocker errors when running “pamac update chirp-next” (“pamac checkupdates” didn’t show signs of issues) and then I saw “Error: sublime-text.db: sublime-text: signature from “Sublime HQ Pty Ltd support@sublimetext.com” is invalid” near the start of “sudo pacman -Syyu” was ran. A very quick search online found the fix posted on the Sublime Text forums (source linked at the bottom). Below is the fix for this when it happens for anyone:

cd /var/lib/pacman/sync && sudo rm sublime-text.db.sig

NOTE: “sudo flatpak upgrade” obviously isn’t impacted by this.

Source: Sublime-text: signature from “Sublime HQ Pty Ltd is invalid – Sublime Forum

Needing to get details and support for a Solidigm (and Intel) SSD on Manjaro Linux? Install the Solidigm Storage Tool (“…supports firmware upgrades and 4Kn sector size changes for Intel and Solidigm PCIe/NVMe/SATA NAND SSDs”):

1. Enable AUR (Arch User Repository): Add/Remove Software > (three dots/hamburger menu) > Preferences > Third Party (tab) > “Enable AUR support” and “Check for updates” > Close the Add/Remove Software
2. From CLI: pamac build solidigm-sst-storage-tool-cli

Now you have access to commands such as “sudo sst show -all -ssd” to get all the information about your Solidigm or Intel SSD.

Extras:
AUR (en) – solidigm-sst-storage-tool-cli
Solidigm Storage Tool User Guide – CLI Public – sst-cli-user-guide-public-727329-006us.pdf