Sound, input and vulkan issues on Ubuntu Server 18.04

I am having a couple of oddities. I have a fresh install of Ubuntu Server 18.04 (Running on an Intel Atom Z8350, x64) and I am running the most recent stable. I have no desktop interface installed, and this might be part of the problem.

First, from the terminal I run “retroarch” or “retroarch -v” which loads up retroarch without issue. The only problem is, my keyboard, nor USB Xbox 360 controller will work… at all. However I found out how to fix this. if I run “sudo retroarch” everything works fine. Is running retroarch as root the preferred way to run?

Second, I can’t get audio to work at all. I believe this is caused by running a server edition of Ubuntu. I tried doing an “apt-get install pulseaudio” and selecting “pulse” from the audio/driver options, but still no dice. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Lastly, I wanted to try out the new vulkan drivers. But whenever I try to launch a gamecube game, I get a seg fault. Enable Shared Hardware Context is set to “on” and I have downloaded the dolphin_data.zip. Using retroarch -v I see the resolution is getting set to something ridiculously low like 320x240. Also I am not sure if its needed but I also did an "apt-get install libvulkan-dev vulkan-utils but this didn’t really make a difference.

Sorry for the multiple issues, but i am really looking forward to to getting everything working!

  1. probably udev permissions: https://docs.libretro.com/guides/input-joypad-drivers/#setting-up-udev-permissions

  2. not sure there, but you probably need a bunch of stuff, like alsa.

  3. if you’re running without a desktop, there is vulkan’s vk_khr_display, which is sort of like GL’s KMS mode, but apparently KMS has better performance, so YMMV.

Excellent reply. Thank you for the information and for the links!

It sounds like getting start with Lubuntu, or something with a desktop environment might be a bit easier to get started.

In case anyone is interested, I am trying to get this running on an “AtomicPi”.

Just got mine a few days ago, and seeing if I can make a functional emulation box out of it.

Ah, cool. Yeah, a general purpose distro will typically make things much easier on you. You can always uninstall your desktop environment later on if you decide you don’t need it.