I am running Fedora 40 when I load Ultima V and go to create characters I get a black screen and that's it. Any way to fix this? I have actually downloaded save files and when Journey Onwards it loads the file and plays. I have uninstalled and reinstalled but still doesn't work.

Did you use innoextract to unpack the game data? If yes, there will be a directory named __support/save and inside are two files named INIT.GAM and SAVED.GAM. You must move these to the top directory, i.e. next to ULTIMA.EXE. Then character creation should work as usual.