Installing Budgie on a very old machine

Installation
1

Hi All! I’ve been trying to install the latest Budgie on a very old machine with no real success. Here are the specs:

  • AMD Athlon II X2 245
  • 4Gb RAM
  • no extra GPU
  • motherboard: PCWARE APM80-D3 (Chipset Northbridge: AMD® RS740 /Southbridge: SB710)

Very modest, I know. I was able to install the latest Lubuntu 24.04.3, and it runs ok. But I really wanted to put Budgie on this machine. I already had a hint that it wouldn’t be easy, because my pendrive with the distro’s ISO uses Ventoy, and many distros would load correctly on this machine, but not Budgie.

So I’ve put the ISO on another pendrive, by itself, using Ubuntu’s boot disk creator. Still no success.

Then I’ve decided for an easier path. Put the HD on another machine, also old, but that one is my failsafe one. Booted Budgie Live from the Ventoy’s pendrive, and installed it successfully on the HD.

Put the HD back on the target machine, and it seems to boot. I see the “Ubuntu Budgie 24.04” with 4 points below, then a brief sight of the login shell, but when the desktop was supposed to show, there’s only the mouse pointer on a blank screen.

After that, I’ve tried a few different things, with no success. And I was almost giving up, since that same behaviour occurred with other GNOME distros, when I tried to boot in recovery mode.

All went fine and the recovery menu showed up. I just hit resume, just to try out, and it finished booting fine to GNOME session. No problem at all. Installed a few apps, again, just to try, and used for a couple of hours. So far, so good.

The problem is: it still doesn’t boot through the regular boot, only if I do this recovery mode/resume path.

Does anybody has a hint?

Thanks a lot!

2

The black screen smacks of a GPU issue. Basically it’s too old for the more modern dri3 type graphics that is needed.

Recovery mode is probably booting without kms support - likely you can see this by using nomodeset in your grub … I.e. immediately on boot hold and press shift to display grub. Edit your grub boot line and add nomodeset after quiet splash.

3

Thanks a lot! That worked. Now I’ve learned nomodeset.