I’m, or at least my workstation, is functional again.  It’s a bit ugly when I boot because I can’t get Plymouth to work properly no matter what I do.  This is with Ubuntu 14.10, it worked with 14.04 and a 3.13.x kernel, but something broke in 14.10, I tried reverting to a 3.13.x kernel, no good.  I read some others had success with a 3.18.x kernel, I’m running 3.18.9 now, still no good.  I’ve tried pretty much every fix I can find to no avail.  It just spits out a bunch of error messages.

     I would be happy without it and just the normal 4-penge boot and start-up messages, but it seems that lightdm depends upon it, so can’t do that.  For now I guess I just have to live with the error messages.

     On a plus side, I was able to really fine-tune the kernel to the hardware and work-load that I have and, until I run out of memory (I have 4GB on this box) it performs quite well.  Once it goes into swap hell, well it performs like any machine in swap hell.  I’d add RAM if this was an ordinary PC, but being a MacPro 1,1 it requires ECC registered memory which is 8-10x the price.