Author: David Frier Page 2 of 405

At this point I have tried out a few things and what it looks like I am going to have to resort to is to swap out the #NVidia for something that works better with #Linux.

While Pop!_OS is a very nice OS as a desktop / casual browsing / Libre Office platform, and it seems pretty comfortable around the NVidia, the problem it has now is that it does not work with Virtual Box. Its Linux kernel version, 5.18, is one that Oracle is not yet ready to support in Virtual Box. I have too many VMs already built to throw that out and start over. And the other virtualization platforms seem to be somewhat behind even Oracle in this regard. Not one that I tried would let a VM run for more than a few minutes without glitches in teh applications on the guest.

So I need a Linux distro that will work smoothly supporting Virtual Box while also not barfing on the GPU. At this tender moment in the history of Linux and cutting-edge hardware, that sounds like no more NVidia.

So. I’ve a new desktop machine and it’s being more work than I anticipated. (I am writing this post on a laptop because the desk machine is nowhere near ready to blog.)

The new box has an #NVidia GPU and of course I plan to run #Linux on it. If you google this lovely combo you will get PAGES and PAGES of internet kvetching about the miseries people are going through. I thought I had Ubuntu 22.04 LTS settled down with the 515 version of the nvidia-driver package from the repo… then I did something seemingly unrelated and the displays went bonkers. One dark, the other locked up with the mouse cursor moving but nothing clicking. I logged in via SSH and switched out 515 for 510. That seemed to settle it for a while. Somewhat. Certain things were still hinky. And my noice 1920×1200 monitors kept flicking back to 1920×1080.

At the same time, I noticed the well-reviewed, Ubuntu-based, Pop-OS having a whole flavor dedicated to being compatible with NVidia hardware. Well! This is worth a try, I think. But it did mean I had to install it clean, Although I have the contents of my /home, I now have a lot of config to do!