PCs on Keldo.uk

BIOS update

Fri, 26 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

For christmas this year I got a 14600k as a upgrade for my cpu. In order to install this new cpu i need to update my bios to gain support for 13th and 14th gen cpus. I began by planing to use the gigabyte app center on windows for the update however after seeing it hang and fail to connect to it servers I lost faith in the ability for it to update safely. So I pivoted to installing it in the bios using a usb drive. I copied the update file to the USB and ran the update in the bios. 5 very nervous minute later the PC booted… into windows? Ok so i go into my BIOS and there is no linux boot entry. OK slightly worried now i grab a arch usb and cryptsetup open my main partition after adding and mounting the lvms. After mounting my fat32 partition at /boot. I have a partition left over one check later and i see that p2 should be /boot and p1 is /boot/EFI. I then ran grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg after rebooting my boot entry showed up.

Random freezes

Fri, 26 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

For a few days i had been noticing my PC randomly freezing this had been happening on and off. However I could see in htop that both RAM and CPU had plenty of head room. My thoughts then moved to storage the only big change i had made to storage was mounting a partition of my hdd. I didn’t understand how this could have been the cause as the only thing using the hdd was a steam library i was using to free up space on my nvme. However my suspicions were confirmed when my pc started freezing during a 170gb ark install. When i check df i was confused to see that the hdd had an extra 150gb of useage. This confirmed that steam was using the hdd for more than storing unused games. So as a temporary fix I have unmounted the hdd until i need it.

EA gaming

Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I started by deciding that i wanted to install the EA games included with xbox game pass on my linux Install. I had used lutrus in the past but after a little investigation I discovered that heroic could also be used. Since I had never tried Heroic I decided to give it a try the install was simple although i would prefer if it did not use flatpack. I found this post which instructed me on how to download and use the EA App installer. I was able to lauch the app with the only issue being a tiny white floating window that if closed closes the EA App. After installing a game I was able to launch it through the EA app or i could set it up through Heroic. The only stipulation being I match the wine prefix.

Ulauncher

Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

For some time I have been looking for an effective system wide search for linux. While windows search has been getting worse for years spotlight on mac has shown that an effective search is possible and can be very beneficial. I was also hoping to replace rofi as the launcher that was installed when i use the ml4w scripts to setup my first arch rice. In this search I found rofi a minimal yet customisation search. After instantly setting up dark mode i setup file indexing and added some custom searches such as my gitea instance. The only downside that I can think of is the setting window really does not like hyprland however since that should be a very rare occurrence I am overall very happy with Ulauncher.

Apparmor

Sun, 26 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I recently realized that I was missing a major security tool on my main desktop. Apparmor this is a utility that limits what apps can access and view. I found this simple guide to follow(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9EoEJXZIfk) and it all went well. I am looking forward to setting up profiles for all apps in the future.

Arch Install

Thu, 26 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

For a range of reasons including getting a new nvme I decided that I wanted to reinstall linux on my PC. While I could have chosen linux mint again I decided to try arch. I knew going into this that it would be a far more bare bones experience and force me to learn more about the desktop stack. I practised on a vm a few times to make sure I knew exactly what I was doing and even wrote it in a txt file. I chose to use lusk encryption and hyprland were the main choices as well as both the current and lts kernel as a back up. I however did not want to make a custom hyprland config so I decided to cheat a bit and use ml4w scripts after I installed hyprland and yay. So far I am very happy and believe I learnt a lot.

Windows does not like HDDs

Sat, 03 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

So my plan when I started this was to move my linux mint install to my nvme ssd. The first thing I tried was shrinking my secondary windows partition but windows only let me do around 200gb when i needed at least 270gb I then moved to shrinking my linux mint install. However I quickly found out that you can’t do this while booted into linux mint. Luckily I still had my linux mint install usb so I booted from that and began a shrink. This took far longer than expected like 4-5 hours.

Dual boot

Thu, 30 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

After microsoft announced their new recall feature I felt this was the last straw. While I know my pc can’t run recall and some of the over new ai features. I just disslike the direction microsoft is heading in.

I had pleanty of room on my hard drive so I just made a bootable linux mint usb and installed to a 1tb partition on my 2tb hdd. I installed most software with the only thing I couldn’t do being due to financial constraintes. This involves me having gamepass rather than buying the games on steam as well as not having minecraft on google play.

Wake On LAN

Wed, 22 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I already had a go at a wol system before but it never worked properly. So I had ended up just setting it to turn on at a set time of day when ever I was away but that had a load of issues. However with some luck I found a video with more information on server protocals with windows 11(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pZu35hTipo).

I managed to set up gpt wol on a docker container and add my device. However the big help I got from this video was realising i needed to edit the group policys which can’t normally be done with windows home edition. So i downloaded a third party editor policy plus and it turned out this was the reason wake on lan had never worked.

Removing Razer

Sun, 28 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

It began with me getting mad with razer more specifically razer synapse. Every few days either my lights or custom lock button would stop working but it wasn’t just changing profile like it had before it was kepping the profile but removing everything in it.

The first function I replaced was the lighting control I downloaded OpenRGB and made a Profile I was happy with. It doesn’t have as many options as Razer but it has all the ones I was using before. However it wasn’t perfect everytime I locked my pc the rgb returned to its onboard profile of cycling rgb. I managed to fix it by creating a task in task schedular. It runs openrgb with the –profile argumnet.

Windows 11

Sat, 03 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

With the announcement of when Windows 10 would come to the end of its support and the rumours of Windows 12 I finally decided to Upgrade to Windows 11. I started by trying to make a full backup of the PC however that was to big even for my NAS so I just decided to risk it and install Windows 11.

The install was very easy all I did was download the upgrade application from microsoft and everything worked fine. I spent around 30 minuets on the background stuff then manually rebooted so I didn’t have to wait another half an hour. After probably around 45 minutes the PC stopped rebooting before giving me a heart attack by not accepting my password before flashing to black and finally working.

PC Build

Sat, 31 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Since the PC build contained a wide range of expensive parts I was unable to build it until my dad was around to help me. This ment that even though I got the parts on Christmas day it took until the 31st of December for me to be able to build it. After all this though my dad was a big help holding multiple screws while I built the PC using this amazing guide from Linus Tech Tips (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BL4DCEp7blY). By the time it got to software my dad had given up and I installed windows 10 on my own. Over all it was a easy build and luckily nothing went wrong.