(superseeded) Linuxcnc on Linux Mint 19.3 quick and easy installation

I think this might be my problem. UEFI. Yeah - you just UEFI'd up your computer! I'll try re-installing with this stuff disabled.

Never had such an issue, on over 30 installs with 19.1 and 19.2 and 19.3.
I know for sure the Cinnamon version crashes X but upon restarting it, it does work. It does this automatically, but it was an annoyance waiting for 15 seconds on every boot.
Check if you got the right versions of kona, the image and headers, and both are installed.
Otherwise i can not think of anything that would cause that...............wait, UEFI ???
Also check that uefi is disabled, and also that RAID is not active, in the BIOS.

My hardware includes 2 drives, one of which was formatted with a copy of CentOS 7 from an old server farm machine. Pretty sure is was pre-UEFI. That seems to cause all sorts of havoc, so I just removed all of those partitions & reinstalled Linux Mint. My HP 6300 SFF doesn't allow disabling of UEFI and, insanely, I already had this system functioning completely using your guide. Had to reinstall due to a fried motherboard & main drive. I used a new SSD and a WD caviar from that rack server. I'll let you know if this fixes it.

Why do I always seem to be the guinee pig?

pmconsulting wrote: I already had this system functioning completely using your guide. Had to reinstall due to a fried motherboard & main drive.

Why oh why ???
This is not windows, there is no need to reinstall a working Linux, never ever ! Well only in case the drive has failed.
I randomly and very often pull a drive from one of my laptops, put it in a USB to SATA adapter and plug it to a PC or another laptop and vice versa, it never fails to boot.

You are right, but., like an idiot, I broke off the sata plug on my drive when I was swapping the motherboard....

I did manage to find a cheap Chinese replacement for the drive part with that plug, but it has to get here from China, and I probably need to fumigate all that COVID-19 off of it when it gets here.

Also - because of the weirdness, I kept ending up at the grub prompt on reboot and needed to use the bios selector to get Linux to come up. That drove me to just vaporize everything off of all drives and let the default install do the right thing.

I do use this same box for Fusion 360 as a secondary machine when needed at my mill & lathe, so, for that, I plan to install Win 10 on the other drive and use the bios boot order to pick the system I need. I don't plan on using any boot loader because it really doesn't save any time over the bios interface & likely will cause confusion & consternation.

Is there any advantage to using the proceedure at gnispel.com/linuxcnc/ where you are actually compiling the kernel?