CentOS

Hello all, I am a new user of CentOS 8, and it is my first time using Linux. I am using it as a desktop OS (I selected the Workstation version during installation) since CentOS is the only free OS that offers updated drivers for my graphics card (an AMD FirePro S10000 12GB Passive Edition). Web browsing and watching YouTube videos works perfectly fine, but I am having a few major issues that I can't seem to fix:


(Fixed, see next post) 1. For some reason, all-core usage seems to fluctuate unexpectedly. For example, when using Shotcut (a free video editor I installed via FlatPak), exporting a video does not put all CPU cores at 100% like it does in Windows, even when I turn the quality to maximum. It only seems to use a certain amount of cores and then shift the load to a few other cores and then back again. This makes for a rather slow export speed. Not only that, but when I play the video in the editor itself, it only uses one core for rendering. I bought a Xeon E5-2680 V4 specifically for video editing purposes, but how am I supposed to justify that purchase if I can't get a program to use all 14 cores at once? The only other information I have about this is that cpufreq from the GNOME Software Store says "IRQBALANCE Detected," although after doing some research I'm not sure if that would be affecting multicore usage. The only program that seems to work well with multiple cores is Firefox, as when I hold down control + T (new tab), CPU usage goes up pretty high on most cores.

2. I cannot get .mov files to work, and I'm not sure if CentOS even supports .mov files. The issue is that my other computer is a Mac, and if I want to export a video from my Photos Library as a file, it will only export it in .mov format. When I tried using one in CentOS, it would fail to copy itself from the USB drive to the SSD on the computer (it said there was an input/output error), and then when I tried to play it off of the USB drive, all I got was a blank video player and an option to install a GStreamer plugin (which I already did) that supposedly had support for .mov files. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the plugin, but I cannot get .mov files to play in the included media player. The only time the .mov files can run is when I import them into Shotcut, but they are stored on the USB drive instead of the SSD, which is not ideal since the project breaks if I eject the USB drive.

3. I am having trouble fighting with administrator privileges for installing the AMD graphics drivers using the method detailed on this website (what the AMD website told me to go to): https://amdgpu-install.readthedocs.io/en/latest/, as I cannot figure out how to open the folder containing the drivers in a root terminal window. I am the only user of the computer, and it is brand new, so I don't understand why it thinks I am not the root user. I figured out with the "su -" command to turn a "localhost" terminal window into a "root" terminal window, which is great and all, but I cannot figure out how to do the same with a file opened in terminal. When I follow the instructions on how to install the drivers, I believe I have to right-click on the folder containing the drivers and click "Run in Terminal," but it always opens as a localhost window instead of root, and when I try to proceed with installation, it says that I am not in the sudoer's file.

System Specs:
Intel Xeon E5-2680 V4
AMD FirePro S10000 12GB Passive Edition
32GB ECC DDR4 2133 Mhz
Huananzhi X99-8M Motherboard

I know that this is a long thread, but I would really appreciate it if someone could help me fix these issues. Thanks in advance.

****UPDATE****

I was able to fix the Shotcut problem by changing the display method from OpenGL to Mesa. Now when I play a video, it utilizes multiple cores . Perhaps this is related to the fact that I have not been able to install proprietary OpenGL drivers yet.

However, I still cannot get the .mov files to play (or even copy one from a USB to my computer's SSD for that matter) or figure out how to give myself administrator privileges when opening a file in a terminal window (for installing AMD GPU drivers).

To give your account sudo access, run the following as root, then log out and log back in:

usermod -a -G wheel your_username

You likely can’t play a mov food as you don’t have the necessary codecs utilized by the video. Unfortunately, Red Hat doesn’t ship certain proprietary codes due to licensing and patent reasons. Install the RPMFusion repository for CentOS 8 and sudo yum install ffmpeg

Oh, and you might want to use VLC if the default player still throws a fit. It is also in the RPMFusion repos: sudo yum install vlc

https://rpmfusion.org/

Cheers,
Mike

If you have some other reason for going with CentOS and this is the only graphics card you have then carry on. However, if the point is to use the graphics card to the greatest extent possible then you might want to consider installing Ubuntu instead. RedHat/CentOS are targeted more for servers and installing the latest/greatest (or really old for compatibility, as that is a 2012 card) graphics driver can be challenging. Ubuntu is more end user oriented so one generally finds more people there using any particular graphics card, one of whom may have already posted a solution to whichever problem you are currently facing. For instance, I would guess that many more people play .mov files on Ubuntu than on CentOS. (Even on Ubuntu I recently had to update the kernel for an 18.04 LTS system so that it would work properly with a built in AMD GPU.)

All that said, on the AMD driver site one finds both "Radeon™ Pro Software for Enterprise on RHEL 8.1/ CentOS 8.1" and "Radeon™ Pro Software for Enterprise on Ubuntu 18.04.4" listed for your card. So in theory at least there is still an AMD supported driver for CentOS 8. AMD has a zillion Radeon variants, so the link in your post might be instructions for one of the other ones.

It may be considered anathema by sudo fans, but the root account may also be used to install packages. Just don't do your everyday work in it.

Thank you both very much for the information.

Doing the usermod command fixed the user permission issues. I was able to install the GPU drivers, but it only downloaded a 7.4kb package and nothing seemed to change.

I tried installing ffmpeg after installing the RPMFusion repository, but I kept getting this error (bcountryman is my username by the way):

[root@localhost bcountryman]# sudo yum install ffmpeg
Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux Modular 8 - 62 kB/s | 97 kB 00:01
Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 8 - x86_64 1.6 MB/s | 8.0 MB 00:04
RPM Fusion for EL 8 - Free - Updates 157 kB/s | 262 kB 00:01
Error:
Problem: conflicting requests
- nothing provides libSDL2-2.0.so.0()(64bit) needed by ffmpeg-4.2.4-1.el8.x86_64
(try to add '--skip-broken' to skip uninstallable packages or '--nobest' to use not only best candidate packages)
[root@localhost bcountryman]#

Since that didn't work (I tried skipping the broken packages but that didn't do anything), I tried installing whatever codecs I could find on the GNOME Software Store, and I was able to get the video to play. However, I cannot pause it or drag the slider around, which is not ideal.

Since I have barely anything on the computer, I could definitely try installing Ubuntu and seeing how that works. My original logic for choosing CentOS was because it was meant more for servers, so I was thinking that it would best support the S10000 (since its a server GPU, but I was crazy enough to stuff it into a desktop PC with a powerful server fan attached to it) but I had no idea how the card would perform with the "default" drivers installed by the operating system. I do like CentOS, but I realize now that it doesn't exactly suit my needs, as I am also having a few other problems that I didn't mention. For example, I am very curious about the card's gaming performance (I understand that FirePro cards are meant for workstation purposes, but I bought the card for only $50 on Amazon, so I might as well try it), and running the BaseMark GPU benchmark shows that it performs about the same as a GTX 1050 TI. I downloaded a few games from the Software Store and they performed extremely smoothly. I was able to successfully install Steam, but the one game I am trying to play (BeamNG.drive) will not launch. I'm not sure if the issue is the GPU or something else, but then again, I am not aware of any Steam users using CentOS (which makes sense), so I will see if the problem is fixed after switching distros (unless someone has an idea for why the game crashes when I launch it).

Thanks again for the information; you both have been very helpful.

libSDL2 is available in various places:

https://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/sear ... 0()(64bit)

that shows it is in PowerTools which is probably where you should obtain it. Note the name is SDL2, not libSDL2.

When needed packages are not in any of the CentOS 8 repositories they will often still be in Fedora. When that happens just rebuild those from the src.rpm (rpmbuild --rebuild whatever.src.rpm) and then install the resulting RPMs. Typically this can be done easily, although sometimes one falls down a hall of mirrors with package dependencies.

Hello all,

It's been quite a journey experimenting with different Linux distros, but I can happily say that everything is working (albeit not in CentOS).

I tried switching to Ubuntu, but the UI tended to lag, idle CPU usage was relatively high, and the operating system booted into a terminal window when I tried to install proprietary GPU drivers. I wasn't entirely sure what to do, so I downloaded Zorin OS Lite and put that on the computer. It now works much better, with very low RAM and CPU usage at idle. It also turns out that I did not need proprietary drivers after all. After doing some research, I learned that there is a "radeon" driver and an "amdgpu" driver for linux, and the one that was currently in use was the radeon driver, which did not have support for Vulkan. I figured using the amdgpu driver was worth a shot, so I edited the GRUB configuration to use that driver, and now my graphics card is correctly recognized (the OS thinks it's a Radeon Sky 900 instead of a FirePro S10000, but they have the exact same specs aside from TDP). Now BeamNG.drive is able to launch and run properly with Steam Proton! I also tried playing .mov files, and I had the most success so far. The video plays in the media player, and I can pause and skip to various points in the video. The only caveat is that there is a green box at the bottom of the video player, but it does not cut off any part of the video.

Although I no longer use CentOS anymore, I want to thank everyone who gave me input and insightful knowledge on the issues I encountered.

PenguinPower wrote: ↑

2020/10/07 03:18:57

I tried switching to Ubuntu, but the UI tended to lag, idle CPU usage was relatively high, and the operating system booted into a terminal window when I tried to install proprietary GPU drivers. I wasn't entirely sure what to do, so I downloaded Zorin OS Lite and put that on the computer. It now works much better, with very low RAM and CPU usage at idle.

With Linux there are several variables which can be in play when it comes to what you see on the screen. Most of the distros offer all the same options, but which ones you get by default will not be the same. Is it using Wayland or the older X11 server? Which window system is it using - Gnome, Unity, KDE, xfce4, something else? Which graphics driver is the card using? (For AMD there is the older Radeon driver, plus both an open source and a proprietary version of the driver, with the latter usually unlocking some features that the former does not. For really new cards you might also need a newer Kernel version.) On top of that there are options which can be turned on and off in the graphics driver for various visual effects.

I'm glad that you found one which worked. SInce Zorin is a Ubuntu derivative I'm about 99% confident that the difference is in one or more of the factors listed above, as opposed to something else in the OS. In other words, you probably could have got there using Ubuntu too (or even CentOS) had you known which of these variables need which values.