Troubleshooting and Whinging

I'm starting this blog to keep track of problems I encounter and I intend to update this with solutions I come up with for them. If you know a solution to a problem I haven't solved yet, I'd appreciate it if you mail me about it.

SteamVR

I've owned a Valve Index for a couple years. For the past 6 months or so, for some reason, some days steamvr just refuses to run. I would either get error 496, or error 497. When 496 happens, I can open plasma systemsettings and under the monitor configuration, the headset display shows up as a monitor. This can be resolved from the steamvr developer settings panel. Near the bottom, use the "Restart headset" option. The description claims 'Restarting your headset may fix USB-related issues,' and it seems it also fixes DisplayPort related issues, if there's even any difference. For error 497, I can work around it by launching steam with the environment variable SDL_VIDEODRIVER=x11. Then with that, some games may need env --unset=SDL_VIDEODRIVER %command% in order to launch properly.

Display Port / HDMI audio broken on kernel 5.19.8

Yesterday I noticed DP audio wasn't working on my system when trying to play using SteamVR. I haven't bothered figuring out whether there's really a change in this kernel that is responsible, but I didn't find the issue to be present in 5.19.7. I went on my merry way after rebooting to that. My GPU is a Radeon RX 5700XT. Running Fedora 36. Pipewire 0.3.57. Mesa 22.1.7

EAC in VRChat

In the past week, Easy Anti-Cheat was added to VRChat. For some reason it does not work out of the box, even after uninstalling and reinstalling the game on Steam. I had to clear SDL_VIDEODRIVER from env to get it to launch correctly. Launch option for this is env --unset=SDL_VIDEODRIVER %command%. They also managed to break SteamVR linux support, so now it can only be played in flat desktop mode.

On the bright side, I was never able to run the mods that I wanted to try anyway because they were Windows only, specifically some graphics optimisation stuff that couldn't work with DXVK. Maybe all the community outrage will force them to implement some of these features in a way that works natively and cross-platform.

Transmission

I've been a little impatient with Transmission development. The latest stable is quite old. It lacks bittorrent v2 support, and it can't handle hybrid torrents. I put together a (poorly written) rpm spec file to build a recent nightly, but it isn't currently working with the latest.

Button Prompts in A Hat in Time

I grew up with Nintendo consoles. When I use a gamepad with my PC today, I use my Switch Pro Controller. It's annoying when I see button prompts in a game in the western XBOX style, with A and B reversed. I haven't seen any Steam Workshop mods to fix this for me yet, and I haven't yet bothered to dig through the game's files to figure out if it's possible to do myself.

IPv6 Networking

I have an OpenWRT router and an XB6-T modem (gateway?) that I rent from Xfinity. I haven't had any luck in the past getting it to work when it's set to Bridge mode, even though that seems like it's meant for what I'm trying to do. I've tried setting OpenWRT's IPv6 WAN config to be DHCPv6 with the delegated prefix from the Xfinity config page, and I've tried setting it with Static addresses. Nothing has worked.

So with Xfinity Bridge mode turned off in the meantime, I have been able to get IPv4 internet working with this server and all by setting the OpenWRT router as a DMZ. I don't have any access to anything IPv6 this way, though.

I just now went back in and set the IPv6 delegated prefix in OpenWRT, then set the Xfinity gateway to Bridge mode. I was suddenly able to get IPv6 access when it came back on. IPv4 wasn't working, so I rebooted both the OpenWRT router and the Xfinity gateway at the same time and everything was working when it came back online.

So for the past few years I've had issues with my Linksys EA6350v3 router running OpenWRT. It would constantly die and have to reboot, with very short uptimes. It turns out this is an issue with having IPv6 enabled on it in the older versions of OpenWRT. As of a few months ago, it was fixed in one of the snapshot releases. So if you want to use IPv6 on your EA6350, or you currently do and are having a bad time, update OpenWRT.