linux

652 Articles

Open Source Hack Lets The Razer Nari Headset Work With Linux

October 21, 2025 by 21 Comments

The Razer Nari is a decent wireless headset, but it’s a little oddball—because it uses a bespoke USB dongle for pairing. This is all well and good if you’re using a supported configuration; plug it into a Windows PC, run the utility, and you’re good to go. If you’re a Linux user, though, you were out of luck—but [JJ] has just solved that problem.

The tool was created by reverse engineering the pairing protocol used by Razer’s own proprietary software. [JJ] figured out the necessary pairing command, and how to send it to both the dongle and the headset. The headset itself must be connected by a USB cable when initiating the pairing process.

[JJ] believes the tool should work with any Razer Nari and dongle variant. However, the Nari Ultimate and Nari Essential models are yet to be tested, with verification still required. However, the pairing commands were extracted from Razer’s own tool and don’t appear to differ so it should probably work across the board. Setup is still a little fussy, particularly to get both the Game Audio and Chat Audio outputs working under Linux. However, [JJ] has helpfully provided the necessary detail to get everything up and running with PulseAudio and PipeWire setups.

Proprietary hardware can be frustrating to work with at times, but that’s never stopped hackers from reverse engineering their way to success before. If you’ve got your own projects in this vein, don’t hesitate to notify the tipsline!

Factorio Running On Mobile

October 15, 2025 by 27 Comments

As a video game, DOOM has achieved cult status not just for its legendary gameplay and milestone developments but also because it’s the piece of software that’s likely been ported to the most number of platforms. Almost everything with a processor can run the 1993 shooter, but as it ages, this becomes less of a challenge. More modern games are starting to move into this position, and Factorio may be taking a leading position. [Point Substantial] has gotten this game to run on a mobile phone.

The minimum system requirements for Factorio are enough to make this a challenge, especially compared to vintage title like DOOM. For Linux systems a dual-core processor and 8 GB of memory are needed, as well as something with at least 1 GB of VRAM. [Point_Substantial]’s Xiaomi Mi 9T almost meets these official minimum requirements, with the notable exception of RAM. This problem was solved by adding 6 GB of swap space to make up for the difference.

The real key to getting this running is that this phone doesn’t run Android, it runs the Linux-only postmarketOS. Since it’s a full-fledged Linux distribution rather than Android, it can run any software any other Linux computer can, including Steam. And it can also easily handle inputs for periphreals including a Switch Pro controller, which is important because this game doesn’t have touch inputs programmed natively.

The other tool that [Point_Substantial] needed was box86/box64, a translation layer to run x86 code on ARM. But with all the pieces in place it’s quite possible to run plenty of games semi-natively on a system like this. In fact, we’d argue it’s a shame that more phones don’t have support for Linux distributions like postmarketOS based on the latest news about Android.

Thanks to [Keith] for the tip!

Ask Hackaday: How Do You Distro Hop?

September 29, 2025 by 36 Comments

If you read “Jenny’s Daily Drivers” or “Linux Fu” here on Hackaday, you know we like Linux. Jenny’s series, especially, always points out things I want to try on different distributions. However, I have a real tendency not to change my distro, especially on my main computer. Yet I know people “distro hop” all the time. My question to you? How do you do it?

The Easy but Often Wrong Answer

Sure, there’s an easy answer. Keep your /home directory on a separate disk and just use it with a new boot image. Sounds easy. But the truth is, it isn’t that easy. I suppose if you don’t do much with your system, that might work. But even if you don’t customize things at the root level, you still have problems if you change desktop environments or even versions of desktop environments. Configuration files change over time. Good luck if you want to switch to and from distros that are philosophically different, like systemd vs old-school init; apparmor vs SELinux. So it isn’t always as simple as just pointing a new distro at your home directory.

One thing I’ve done to try out new things is to use a virtual machine. That’s easy these days. But it isn’t satisfying if your goal is to really switch to a new distro as your daily driver. Continue reading “Ask Hackaday: How Do You Distro Hop?” →

Mini Laptop Needs Custom Kernel

September 29, 2025 by 12 Comments

These days, you rarely have to build your own Linux kernel. You just take what your distribution ships, and it usually works just fine. However, [Andrei] became enamored with a friend’s cyberdeck and decided that he’d prefer to travel with a very small laptop. The problem is, it didn’t work well with a stock kernel. So, time to build the kernel again.

Of course, he tried to simply install Linux. The installer showed a blank screen. You might guess that you need to add ‘nomodeset’ to the kernel options. But the screen was still a bit wacky. [Andrei] likens troubleshooting problems like this to peeling an onion. There are many layers to peel back, and you are probably going to shed some tears.

Continue reading “Mini Laptop Needs Custom Kernel” →

Jenny’s Daily Drivers: KDE Linux

September 22, 2025 by 44 Comments

Over this series test-driving operating systems, we’ve tried to bring you the unusual, the esoteric, or the less mainstream among the world of the desktop OS. It would become very boring very quickly of we simply loaded up a succession of Linux distros, so we’ve avoided simply testing the latest Debian, or Fedora.

That’s not to say that there’s no space for a Linux distro on these pages if it is merited though, as for example we marked its 30th anniversary with a look at Slackware. If a distro has something interesting to offer it’s definitely worth a look, which brings us to today’s subject.

KDE Linux is an eponymous distro produced by the makers of the KDE Plasma desktop environment and associated applications, and it serves as a technical demo of what KDE can be, a reference KDE-based distribution, and an entirely new desktop Linux distribution all in one. As such, it always has the latest in all things KDE, but aside from that perhaps what makes it even more interesting is that as an entirely new distribution it has a much more modern structure than many of the ones we’re used to that have their roots in decades past. Where in a traditional distro the system is built from the ground up on install, KDE Linux is an immutable base distribution, in which successive versions are supplied as prebuilt images  on which the user space is overlaid. This makes it very much worth a look. Continue reading “Jenny’s Daily Drivers: KDE Linux” →

Everything In A Linux Terminal

September 10, 2025 by 49 Comments

Here at Hackaday Central, we fancy that we know a little something about Linux. But if you’d tasked us to run any GUI program inside a Linux terminal, we’d have said that wasn’t possible. But, it turns out, you should have asked [mmulet] who put together term.everything.

You might be thinking that of course, you can launch a GUI program from a terminal. Sure. That’s not what this is. Instead, it hijacks the Wayland protocol and renders the graphics as text. Or, if your terminal supports it, as an image. Performance is probably not your goal if you want to do this. As the old saying goes, “It’s not that the dog can sing well; it’s that the dog can sing at all.”

If, like us, you are more interested in how it works, there’s a write up explaining the nuances of the Wayland protocol. The article points out that Wayland doesn’t actually care what you do with the graphical output. In particular, “… you could print out the graphics and give them to a league of crochet grandmas to individually tie together every single pixel into the afghan of legend!” We expect to see this tested at an upcoming hacker conference. Maybe even Supercon.

We generally don’t like Wayland very much. We use a lot of hacks like xdotool and autokey that Wayland doesn’t like. We also think people didn’t understand X11’s network abilities until it was too late. If you think of it as only a video card driver, then you get what you deserve. But we have to admit, we are humbled by term.everything.

Linux Fu: Windows Virtualization The Hard(ware) Way

August 21, 2025 by 31 Comments

As much as I love Linux, there are always one or two apps that I simply have to run under Windows for whatever reason. Sure, you can use wine, Crossover Office, or run Windows in a virtual machine, but it’s clunky, and I’m always fiddling with it to get it working right. But I recently came across something that — when used improperly — makes life pretty easy. Instead of virtualizing Windows or emulating it, I threw hardware at it, and it works surprisingly well.

Once Upon a Time

First, a story. Someone gave me a Surface Laptop 2 that was apparently dead. It wouldn’t charge, and you can’t remove the keyboard without power. Actually, you can with a paper clip, and I suggested pulling it to see if the screen would charge by itself. They said they had already bought a new computer, so they didn’t care.

Unsurprisingly, once I popped the keyboard off, the computer charged and was fine. You just have to replace the keyboard or use another one. Or use it as a tablet, which it is set up for anyway. But I have plenty of laptops and computers of every description. What was I going to do with this nice but keyboardless computer? Continue reading “Linux Fu: Windows Virtualization The Hard(ware) Way” →