drinkypoo's Journal: Modern Ubuntu on 990FX

Normally I'd post an article like this to my own blog, but since I've not bothered to bring it back up since my web host died this is, sadly, the most reasonable place for me to post. In the past I've done detailed howtos and this will not be that, because all I really need it to be is just a record of more or less what I did. To wit, I got Ubuntu installed and working correctly on my antique potatoe, an FX-8350, 990FX-based system with nvidia graphics, NVMe storage, and UEFI with BIOS compat.

I installed from vmware on Windows. Created my VM with 3 out of my 8 cores and 8GB RAM. I added the physical NVMe disk to the VM config as an NVMe disk specifically. Install went off smoothly. But after updating my Firefox snap was already broken, so I decided to blow away snap and install normal firefox. I also installed kde-plasma-desktop and kde-full in order to get away from Unity, and because gnome is in a snap too. I could have just installed kubuntu, but I wanted to see what the process would be like with the normal Ubuntu CD.

Unfortunately, after the install, the USB3 doesn't work. This turns out to be a problem with IOMMU settings. It also causes the boot to be extended while things fail. Short form, in /etc/default/grub: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash amd_iommu=on iommu=pt"

On boot I was using Nouveau and needed to install nvidia drivers (sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstall). Sadly these driver versions only support "Mosaic" "SLI", which is where your display spans monitors. I may try an older driver to get SLI working again. Getting nvidia-settings working required running nvidia-xconfig (as root) in order to produce a working xorg.conf, and also fixing a polkit permissions issue (sudo chmod u+x /usr/share/screen-resolution-extra/nvidia-polkit). Even worse, the screen stays dark after resume from suspend. This is of course because of systemd.

sudo systemctl stop nvidia-suspend.service
sudo systemctl stop nvidia-hibernate.service
sudo systemctl stop nvidia-resume.service
sudo systemctl disable nvidia-suspend.service
sudo systemctl disable nvidia-hibernate.service
sudo systemctl disable nvidia-resume.service
sudo rm /lib/systemd/system-sleep/nvidia

Finally, part of the use case is being able to boot Windows from Linux and Linux from Windows, both in vmware player. The Windows stuff is trivial, clicky clicky. The Linux stuff isn't because vmware doesn't bother to keep their vmnet and vmmon modules updated for modern kernels. After installing vmware but before launching vmplayer, install the right version from the above repo for your vmware and kernel versions. You have to be root in order to use physical devices on Linux (or maybe you can solve it with group perms? Haven't tried this yet.) Windows is on SATA on my system so I added the SATA full disk as a SATA disk and it works fine.