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.