So, it just froze on me about 10 minutes ago. I can drop to the console. The vm manager icon did not disappear from the menu bar, so I was wrong about that. Everything freezes. I cannot interact with any browser or any app. The mouse pointer did change from a pointer to hand over a link or something at one point, but never changed back. After dropping to the console, I eventually just had to reboot and restart everything. The best way to describe it is, someone replaced my desktop with an image, and the only thing that still works is moving the mouse around.

I'm thinking it's been about a week or so since it did this last. Oh, and I was poking around on a web page when it did it. Web browsers are always involved, but not specifically any one browser.

Have you checked dmesg (or historical system boot logs) and also ran memtest86+ to make sure your RAM isn’t faulty? Even if it’s brand new it can still happen. If you have another system nearby (or even just a phone) you could try to SSH (make sure to enable/start the daemon before it freezes) into the machine and see if it’s still responsive.

I have poked around in logs a little. Nothing has jumped out at me. I'll test the memory and turn SSH on. I used Ubuntu on the desktop for about 8 - 10 years, and then swapped back to Windows ~2018 for work. I used to mess with hardware a lot, but I've fried my brain programming for too many years now.

I do see reports of Linux Mint hanging with nothing but the mouse working, but nothing has jumped out at me as a fix. The reports are going back a while, too. A lot of comments say it is something with the graphics card.

My new pc is a: HP OmniDesk Desktop Computer PC, AMD Ryzen 7 8700G, 32GB DDR5 Memory, 1TB NVMe SSD, Radeon 780M Graphics

Outside of this one issue, it's a beast with Linux on it (I'm not a gamer, though). I bought it right before RAM prices jacked the prices of everything up.

Have you checked dmesg (or historical system boot logs) and also ran memtest86+ to make sure your RAM isn't faulty? Even if it's brand new it can still happen. If you have another system nearby (or even just a phone) you could try to SSH (make sure to enable/start the daemon before it freezes) into the machine and see if it's still responsive.

I had a similar issue where I'd get a full system freeze every few weeks (not even the mouse worked), and that one turned out to be a faulty cpu, it was the infamous Raptor Lake "Vmin shift instability" bug, which I got replaced under warranty and that fixed the issue.

But since your mouse still works, we know your CPU is still functioning.

Have you tried to switch to the console with Ctrl+Alt+F1 (or F2 etc.) when the freeze happens? It could just be a software bug with your graphical environment (either Xorg/wayland or your particular window manager/desktop environment like KDE/Gnome/etc.) since the kernel itself doesn't appear to be locked up if the mouse still works.

I have a pc that's only a few months old, wiped, and with a pretty much default install of LM. I have 32 gig of ram. Unless there is something about Stacer I don't understand, it always shows half of the ram used (when I have the vm running). The graph never moves. I pretty much always have the vm running, because I absolutely have to have Windows with an IIS server on it (work related).

The entire system hangs. The only way I can recover is to reboot. The screen freezes, but the mouse pointer still moves around. I can click on things, but it does nothing. The keyboard does nothing.

I'm pretty bad about keeping a lot of tabs open in a couple of browsers. Almost every time it hangs involves opening a new tab in Firefox or Chromium. Sometimes youtube is involved, but I don't think every single time does.

Like I said, the last time it hung, I just happened to notice that the vm manager icon had disappeared from the menu bar, like it had exited when it hung. I'm going to check for that the next time it hangs.

Luckily, it only hangs about once every week or so. Lately, it has been going almost two weeks. It's really not that big a deal, but it would suck if it was doing it every few days.

Thanks,

If I allocated 16 gig of ram to the kvm, shouldn’t my memory usage be over 16 gig or ram with other Linux programs running?

Normally yes, in my experience.

I open a new tab on a browser and it hangs my system

Hangs the host or the VM guest?

If it's the host, does it ever happen when the VM isn't running?

If it's the guest, are you sure the VM itself isn't just paused? One thing I have noticed is that the VM will pause when either I run out of disk space, or (if using -snapshot) run out of RAM (because it's using RAM as an always-expanding disk image).

Hmm... I guess this is the best answer after all (Dual-booting). I just installed Windows 10 from my USB using Ventoy and I just realised that by dropping ISOs I could have a selection of distros that I could Live Boot. So I guess this also opens up a lot more possibilities!

It's even easier on Linux, unpack each winamp skin you want into its own folder in usr/share/audacious/Skins, start audacious, select winamp classic mode, then choose the skin in the general tab of the appearance setting.

If your user doesn't have right permission to the Skins folder, don't forget you can always use sudo, even though it might be better practice to add your user to a group that has right permissions for that directory. I'm a bad Linux user and run my file manager with sudo way too often.

https://skins.webamp.org/

.. amongus and winamp were not contemporaneous... right?!

I'm on linux though. I'll try downloading some skins when I get home though.

First, download from here https://skins.webamp.org/

An article I found through search says the following:

• Windows version needs some massaging to use them. Download the skin, then rename the file so the extension is .ZIP instead of .WSZ. Unzip the file and drag the folder to C:UsersUSERNAMEAppDataLocalaudaciousSkins, replacing “USERNAME” with your Windows username. The skin will show up in the Audacious settings, though you may need to restart the application first.

Good luck.

To be honest, I've not used it. I've just seen it posted on here a time or two. Your summation sounds about right if I had to guess 👍

You're going to need to get windows, trust me on this.

just want to add that VM pass through won’t work unless you have two GPUs, an integrated and dedicated GPU. It also requires a bit of technical knowledge to setup.

Does you school library lend out laptops for this sort of thing? Or, can you remote into a library/lab computer for this?

I would definitely opt for a dedicated machine, running the recommended OS, no VM, as others in this thread have said. It's one thing if it's for a homelab, but for coursework...not what I'd be comfortable with.

If you explore a bit on the site, I reckon it is. I especially love the directory view

it's just a fancy VM with less options for GPU passthrough right?

really depends on how well GPU passthrough works though

I'd start with installing VirtualBox and create a Windows 10 VM on it (you can get the official ISOs from the Microsoft site itself). Sometimes you can even get it to activate if your laptop has a license on its firmware. Windows cannot touch your partitions from inside the VM, and if you can't get AutoCAD to work on it you can just delete the VM and try other methods.

This is the answer. It's annoying and sucks, but the truth.

A VM would work in a lot of other cases but with CAD I wouldn't trust it without extensive testing of all the features, testing OP doesn't really have time for. GPU passthrough and full feature support can be wonky in VMs.

As much as i hate my own answer, when using a computer for work or school you should adapt to using the operating system and sofware supported by that school.

The last thing you want is to, in middle of class get instructed to download and use x, and then have to go into a rabbithole of trying to be compliant, missing the class.

I would not trust a vm for cad software because i don't know how heavy the stuff is that you would be doing. You might need that dedicated gpu. dualboot is probably a better option.

Another interesting idea, based on the fact that Linux can read and use from windows disks is to make it windows and school appropriate with 2 partitions, then install your preferred linux on a fast bootable usb.

This way you can take and run your linux wherever you want, and when you plug it in the laptop you just access the partition from the windows disk to put heavy programs and files.

I am doing sm similar on desktop where my old windows drive is still there and functional but is also used as game install drive from linux.

VMware is the best. Hope it is still free.

VirtualBox is open source and free. Works fine but not as well as VMware to me.

Both let you have a shared folder with the OS you are using.

Both very easy to use.

This can help : https://www.ubuntufree.com/best-virtual-machine-vm-software-for-linux/

winboat might be worth looking into.

AutoCAD barely works on Windows. I don't have any recommendations other than a VM. In a VM everything is sandboxed, unless you go out of your way to expose real hardware to it. Give it a shot. Don't use an unofficial lightweight version of windows, AutoCAD uses niche features that might have been removed. You don't need a license

VMs should be a safe option if they work with autocad. Unless you do something really wrong, a VM has no write access to the host linux system and therefore poses no danger to it.

Idk if autocad works in a VM, but i dont see why it wouldnt.

I do have QoS on my router. I want it explicitly on OS level (as well).