so 2002-era QA machine boots off of the hard disk but
* doesn't seem to go into grub (LOL) and just boots the first thing right away
* ie tries to run ubuntu 25.10 gnome which, LOL doesn't work. go...
* had to add 'single' to the command line to boot in single-user mode.
single-user mode didn't have network so i couldn't install new things but i could uninstall gnome, which is all i needed to boot successfully to a functioning system that wasn't just stuck trying to run gnome.
after left to itself for awhile it *did* actually load/run gnome but it was so utterly slow that the system was unresponsive and it was faster to just restart the machine, uninstall gnome and make sure docker was working after that.
single-user mode didn't have network so i couldn't install new things but i could uninstall gnome, which is all i needed to boot successfully to a functioning system that wasn't just stuck trying to run gnome.
after left to itself for awhile it *did* actually load/run gnome but it was so utterly slow that the system was unresponsive and it was faster to just restart the machine, uninstall gnome and make sure docker was working after that.