Today I started getting my desktop ready for Linux development. As was pointed out by my mentors, some of the issues I will be fixing will require a GPU in order to diagnose. A linux VM is unable to access the GPU directly.

I created a USB Ubuntu 18.04 installation image and tried to get it set up. However, my desktop is quite old. It was powerful in its day but it’s almost 10 years old at this point.

It turns out, USB booting is not supported on my old motherboard. Even after updating the BIOS, I was unable to select anything other than ‘Floppy Disk’ as the removable boot media. It was a bit irritating to find out after all that diagnosing.

I’m going to get some CDs to create a new boot image that my desktop can use.