General, Popular Culture, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Merry Christmas To All

26 Comments

Sorry for the radio silence, but my computer was down, and most of the day was spent sorting it out. Some may recall that my second monitor stopped displaying a while ago, and I finally decided that there must have been some software change in a Fedora kernel that was causing the problem in an admittedly old video card. So I broke down and ordered a new one for about a hundred bucks.

So I replace the card, and on first starting the machine, I get three long beeps, which on MSI motherboards indicates a memory issue. I unseated and reseated the memory sticks, and that problem went away. But the machine wouldn’t boot, or even POST. I know there was power to the card because the fans were spinning, but no signal was going to the monitors. I tried removing and reseating the card, but no joy.

So I decided to put the old card back in and see if I’d done something new to the machine to make it not POST, but it booted fine. And not only that, but it woke up with both monitors. So I seem to have somehow unknowingly solved the problem, but now I’ll have to RMA the new card. Which is somewhat disappointing, because I was looking forward to a video upgrade. Though, to be honest, I’m not sure I would have seen any difference for anything I do, which is mostly write, spreadsheet, and web surf.

And of course, in the process of doing that, I’ve developed a new problem, in VirtualBox, which I need to run Windows for running my trading platform. When I try to boot Windows, I get:

“VirtualBox can’t enable the AMD-V extension. Please disable the KVM kernel extension, recompile your kernel and reboot (VERR_SVM_IN_USE).”

I did a search, but none of the offered solutions seem to do anything (No, I haven’t tried a complete uninstall/reinstall, or kernel recompile, because I was hoping for something that was less of a PITA).

We’re doing a rib roast with lobster tails for Christmas dinner, and I’m getting fatigued from the Christmas music, but it’s the only thing we can agree on to watch. There is a “A Christmas Story” marathon on one channel, and a “Die Hard” marathon on another one, so we may break down and watch one or both of them. Anyway, plenty of Christmas fare over at Glenn’s place.

[Thursday-afternoon update]

Interesting discussion in comments. The only reason I’m running a Windows virtual machine is to run ThinkorSwim. If I can do that on Fedora proper, that would be a vastly superior solution, so I wouldn’t have to mess with either VirtualBox or Windows. And according to this, it can be done. So maybe I’ll shift my efforts from fixing Vbox and instead making that happen.

[Update a few minutes later]

Wow, that was almost painless. I just installed it with flatpak, and it’s running on my second monitor. Bye bye VirtualBox and Windows.

26 thoughts on “Merry Christmas To All”

  1. Merry Christmas!

    I think you made the wrong choice regarding the computer and roast Christmas dinner; you could have put the computer in the oven instead of the roast and thereby had a unique dinner, plus solved your computer problem. 🙂

    Reply

    1. Seriously though, best of luck fixing your system. I had slightly similar issue over a decade ago; the computer began having intermittent problems booting; sometimes, it’d boot fine, other times, I’d get error beeps and the screen stayed blank. I tried swapping out darn near everything, but it made no difference – and the failure to even get so far as loading BIOS got more and more often, then all the time.

      A friend of mine thinks it was a “tin whiskers” failure in the CPU or motherboard. Replacing those would have cost more that the system (already years old) was worth, so I built a fully new system instead. I sincerely wish you better luck than I had.

      Reply

  3. Speaking of computers, October 14, 2025 is looming.

    Yeah, yeah and yeah, one should be running Linux by now and all of that, but the predominant OS out there is Windows 10, and I lot of people and institutions are faced with not only the expense but also the inconvenience of purchasing and installing the software they need on a new computer in the new year.

    Are people and their institutions just going to take this? Is Elon Musk going to shame Microsoft for wasting the Federal government a lot of money? Is the EU going to push back on this? Will Microsoft blink?

    Reply

  4. The end of support for a Windows edition is meaningless, so long as you use something else for security. Even Norton will do, for most people. My Windows XP laptops still do their jobs. Even the Windows Vista one is still working fine. I replace computers when they break, or when I have a new specific task set that deserves its own machine. This Win10 unit I’m using at the moment was bought to support a 22″ XP-Pen unit. I expect it to continue doing so. My big complaint is about crappy Chinese laptop batteries.

    Reply

    1. Win7 still going on one ancient Lenovo ThinkPad. The other ThinkPad’s SSD has failed. Someday I’ll get around to fixing it and re-installing Win7.

      Reply

  5. One interesting thing is Musk’s support for anything but iOS and Android is shrinking. I tried to create an X account using Google verification and the Windows 10 web app via Chrome failed pretty badly. Fortunately, I bought an Android tablet to support the Starlink app! This seems pretty stupid to me, but it’s the way of the world. I remember how Mac users would rant and hate on “WinTel” until their brains melted…

    Reply

  6. Schwab, which bought the oddly named TDAmeritrade (think of what TD stands for) got rid of StreetsmartEdge (which my wife preferred) and now runs thinkorswim. It runs in something called Zulu Java and is supposedly OS agnostic, with the ability to run in Linux. Not sure if this will satisfy your needs but here’s the link:

    https://www.schwab.com/trading/thinkorswim/download

    Re the VB problem, nothing comes to mind (sorry).

    For an unusual Xmas movie, see if you can find “A Christmas Without Snow”. Great ensemble cast and John Houseman is stellar as a cranky old choir director brought in to whip a choir into shape so they can “Handel” the Messiah. Unappreciated gem of a movie.

    Reply

    1. I was able to get thinkorswim running in Ubuntu 24.04 (Noble Numbat). This needed Zulu17-jdk Java runtime to work, but it installed and ran fine. Was even able to import my wife’s watchlist (she’s our finance wizard, but she runs it in Win11).

      Reply

  8. Here’s a site that has some interesting suggestions re your VB problem:

    https://askubuntu.com/questions/403591/amd-v-is-being-used-by-another-hypervisor-verr-svm-in-use

    The basic strategy revolves around the idea that you can either have KVM virtualization, or VB, but not both at the same time. KVM and the VB kernel modules can be loaded/unloaded under script control. If you have nothing that uses KVM, you should be able to unload it at startup with a script. If you do have an app (Docker?) that uses it, you’ll have to kill that and unload KVM before running VB. Then you load the VB modules and run VB. This would likely be done using a script. So it may be that you don’t have to do a full recompile.

    Reply

  9. Merry Christmas everyone.

    There are lots of options for windows machines that are quite affordable as long as you don’t want to play top tier video games. Desktops are cheaper but I am sure there are suitable laptops as well.

    This one is “renewed” but also under $300. Probably not very upgradeable, especially the GPU, but can run multiple monitors, has a fair amount of storage and RAM, and the processor is an i7 that isn’t too old. Dell Optiplex 7050 SFF Desktop PC Intel i7-7700 4-Cores 3.60GHz 32GB DDR4 1TB SSD WiFi BT HDMI Duel Monitor Support Windows 10 Pro Excellent Condition(Renewed)

    Reply

  10. Wow, that was almost painless. I just installed it with flatpak, and it’s running on my second monitor. Bye bye VirtualBox and Windows.

    There now, don’t you feel better?*

    *First post with new iPad.

    Reply

  11. “Wow, that was almost painless. I just installed it with flatpak, and it’s running on my second monitor. Bye bye VirtualBox and Windows.”

    Didn’t you use the flathub site? It tells you how to install Zulu17-jdk, then install the Java version. If there’s a flatpak, that would be great, but it would probably just be a containerized JRE and thinkorswim.

    Reply

      1. No problem. I had solved the problem starting at Schwab, which pointed to the method I used, which did not involve a flatpak. Trying out the flatpak approach, I get the message:

        ‘app/com.tdameritrade.ThinkOrSwim/x86_64/stable’ in remote ‘flathub’ (system)

        Is this the current Schwab supported version, since TDAmeritrade has been subsumed?

        Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *