Hardware mismatch (part one)
My big problem is that I’m sweating my old AM3 board. It’s a really good mobo (Asus M4A89GTD-Pro) - I started off with an Athlon CPU and unlocked cores on it, and then got am AM3+ CPU (FX 6300) running after I upgraded the BIOS. Works fine for Win10 (but can’t do Win11), but that AM3/3+ business caused a bunch of issues in itself.
Before my 3060 card arrived, I wanted to prep the ground by installing Linux. I know I can’t boot from my NVME (tried that before…), so I was okay with getting Linux onto the sada ssd, with the intention of putting ext4 into my nvme for /data. All good.
I knew I was going to use an nvidia card, and initial reading suggested Pop! would be perhaps better than plain Ubuntu, so downloaded the .iso for that and created a USB boot drive using Rufus.
Boot from USB(1) - fail
Using the USB key as boot device worked, but I found it stopped after the ISOLINUX line. Don’t recall all the things I tried, but eventually gave up - Gemini suggested using Ventoy, so took that path insead of Rufus.
Boot from USB(2) - working through the issues
With Ventoy I could boot from the USB … almost. Ended up with a blank screen, but that’s better than a plain stop at ISOLINUX.
Used left-shift to enter grub console, so I could change the boot params. Got rid of quiet splash so I can see what’s happening, added nomodeset vga-791 and things got better. A little.
Still wouldn’t boot all the way. Much fiddling with bios, boot params and removal of bits of hardware (pcie cards, usb dongles) got Pop to boot and though the installer, but ended up with nomodeset pci-nomsi nolapic in my grub config. These work, but… well, not as I really want.
They big thing was that yes - Pop worked, finally. It’s snappy, the UI is nice (once I moved from Gnome to Cosmic). Got wifi working, ran updates, installed a few small packages. Actually quite like it.
The issue is that the nolapic meant that only one of my six cores was visible. Noticed top didn’t look right and nproc and looking in /proc showed that the OS only had one core. Which sucked.
So… WSL
Played with so many grub options, but the boot could never get past the sata drives unless I used the core-disabling nolapic. Further reading suggested this is because I’m using this AM3+ cpu in a AM3 board, using the latest BIOS. Linux is sadly just less forgiving of that hardware oddity than Windows, so I reluctantly worked out I’m not going to use native Linux here, and will need to use WSL on Win10 instead.
This is actually very easy, my issue is that:
- I need to have no GPU issues
- I need to have no nvme slowdown
- I have limited RAM (8GB initually, now 16GB) so need to be ruthless about Windows use of resources
I did get there though….