Status of ASUS X550ZE laptop

I updated a status report for aiming a full out of box experience for ASUS X550 family laptop. It is a AMD Kaveri powered laptop featuring Dual Radeon GPU. Known issues are missing functional hotkeys (Fn), broken webcam support and lack of optimized power management.

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Using AMD RX Vega driver OpenCL on Fedora 29

The Raven Ridge APU is very capable processor to handle OpenCL inside some applications like Blender, Darktable and Gimp. Unfortunately, the current implementation from Mesa, clover, stuck to 1.3, is not supported. AMD released their driver 18.40 with OpenCL2.0+ targeting only Red Hat Enterprise Linux/Cent OS 6.10 and 7.5 in addition of Ubuntu LTS. The good new is the former rpm format can be used on Fedora.

The graphical part of Raven Ridge is Vega 8, basically a cut-down of Vega56 or Vega64 meaning choosing either driver for RX Vega.
The instruction is provided for extracting the rpm files but here is
some requirements for OpenCL:
kernel-devel (provided by Fedora repository)amdgpu-dkmsdkmslibopencl-amdgpu-proopencl-amdgpu-pro-icd Once done, applications needing OpenCL will automatically detect the driver located on /opt/amdgpu/lib64. Blender will list as unknown AMD GPU and Darktable will enable it.

There is a ROCm version but it currently does not support the graphical side of Rav…

Detailing the installation of AMD OpenCL rpm for Fedora

Revisiting the previous blog and freshly reinstalling Fedora Design Suite due to a busted boot, I look at the official guideline from AMD Driver for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.2 and write a way to improve the process of installing on Fedora 29 in this example.

Extracting the tarball contains the following:
amdgpu-installamdgpu-pro-install symlink to amdgpudoc folderrepodata folderRPMS folder containing rpm package
Executing the command ./amdgpu-install -opencl=pal --headless sadly failed on Fedora on that line:

./amdgpu-install -y --opencl=pal --headless
Last metadata expiration check: 0:30:51 ago on Mon 19 Nov 2018 07:13:43 PM PST.
No match for argument: amdgpu

Upon closer look, the script failed to created a temporary repository on /var/opt/amdgpu-pro-local probably explaining why amdgpu metapackage name failed to display. Someone should investigate and provide a fix. At least, we find out Fedora support is available but unofficial.

Due to its design, Gnome Software only allows one cli…

Drawing hair with Inkscape

My very first online tutorial is an adaption from Chris Design Drawing Hairs article using both Path and Path Editor tools which requires Inkscape 0.47 or newer. Start-up Inkscape application which should open a new blank page and set the document into landscape.
Create a pathSelect the bezier tool or press either Shift+F6 or B on the keyboard. Draw a line to approximately 800px or more. You can also use rectangle tool (R or F4 as shortcut key) as a thin line illustrated in grey.While the line is selected, convert into path from the menu Path -> Stroke to Path or press Ctrl+Alt+C on the keyboard. For the rectangle, Path -> Object to Path or Ctrl+Shift+C. The result will show grey diamonds on each corner.

Create a patternOn the menu, Extensions -> Modify Paths -> Add Nodes. Set the Max Segments Length to 5px.
On the menu Extension -> Modify Paths -> Jitter Nodes. Leave the default settings and apply effects.
You will have about thousands nodes which can be reduced wi…

The Final Zone project

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