02-26-2016, 05:27 PM
Thanks again for all the replies. At the end of the day the solution was right in front of me. I spent the last few days since my original posting trying assorted distros running the gamut from Manjaro to Fedora, Debian, and a bunch of others along the way. I've been using vmware player for years for those few programs I need to run Windows for (tax return software, mainly). Some would not run, some would not be able to install the vmware kernel pieces, some would barf on something else. Most took issue with the nouveau driver for the video card, either not coming up at all, or only running it in 1024 * 768.
Then I realized that the Ubuntu 15.10 that the vendor had installed on the 2nd hard disk had been working perfectly. So I put it on the primary HD, turned of Unity and turned on xfce and now everything is going. So, here I've got two versions of Ubuntu going, one on each hard disk, but then, if one craps out on me I can still boot the other. Insurance. Loaded the native Nvidia driver for the card so the system is cooking with gas. I'll miss Linux Lite and I wish you all the best, but I'm finally happy to get a stable, working system.
Then I realized that the Ubuntu 15.10 that the vendor had installed on the 2nd hard disk had been working perfectly. So I put it on the primary HD, turned of Unity and turned on xfce and now everything is going. So, here I've got two versions of Ubuntu going, one on each hard disk, but then, if one craps out on me I can still boot the other. Insurance. Loaded the native Nvidia driver for the card so the system is cooking with gas. I'll miss Linux Lite and I wish you all the best, but I'm finally happy to get a stable, working system.