gleedadswell
January 19th, 2012, 10:08 PM
Hi everyone,
I've successfully installed 11.10 on an HP Compaq 8200 Elite all-in-one. There is a known bug:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-intel/+bug/887756
which makes this nontrivial. The comments on the bug report page helped me to figure out how to do it, but there were enough steps that I thought it would be helpful to document it a bit.
The crux of the problem is that the LiveCD (I actually used the LiveCD image written to a usb key) boots to a blank screen. To fix it you need to mess with grub, which if you're a total n00b like me is a little scary.
So I did my grub setup on my install USB key manually. There's a good step-by-step set of instructions for doing this at:
http://www.pendrivelinux.com/boot-multiple-iso-from-usb-via-grub2-using-linux/
I then put my ubuntu LiveCD .iso and edited the /boot/grub/grub.cfg on the usb key. The key, as the bug report says, is that we need "nosplash nomodeset" as boot options. So here is the grub.cfg (make sure the file name of the .iso matches the file name in grub.cfg). You shouldn't normally manually edit a grub.cfg, but this is just on a temporary filesystem that will never have grub-update run on it, so it's OK.
set timeout=10
set default=0
menuentry "Run Ubuntu Live ISO" {
loopback loop /ubuntu.iso
linux (loop)/casper/vmlinuz boot=casper iso-scan/filename=/ubuntu.iso nosplash nomodeset
initrd (loop)/casper/initrd.lz
}
So far so good. This should bring up the grub menu, you hit enter to start up the .iso, and the LiveCD .iso runs flawlessly. BUT...
If you reboot after the install you boot to a blank screen! This is because now the grub.cfg on your hard drive also needs the "nosplash nomodeset" options. The easiest way is probably to boot from the LiveCD .iso again. Once booted, mount the hard drive partition where Ubuntu is installed (easiest using Disk Utility). Open a terminal and invoke superuser privileges (I just do sudo -i but others seem to prefer prefixing every command with sudo).
Navigate to where the hard drive partition is mounted. It will be in /media with a name that is likely just a big string of random looking characters.
The difficulty is that editing grub.cfg directly is a bad idea. Partly because we could really mess up the system if we make a mistake and partly because our grub.cfg could be overwritten during an upgrade. Instead we have to tell grub-update how to write grub.cfg the way we want it. This turns out to be easy. We have to set an environment variable called GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT. This is done in
/etc/default/grub
So just open that to edit it in your favourite text editor. It is probably set to
"quiet splash"
Replace this with
"quiet nosplash nomodeset"
Save and exit. Now from the command line run grub-update.
Voila! We're done.
Now if I can just get Unity 3D working on it...
I've successfully installed 11.10 on an HP Compaq 8200 Elite all-in-one. There is a known bug:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-intel/+bug/887756
which makes this nontrivial. The comments on the bug report page helped me to figure out how to do it, but there were enough steps that I thought it would be helpful to document it a bit.
The crux of the problem is that the LiveCD (I actually used the LiveCD image written to a usb key) boots to a blank screen. To fix it you need to mess with grub, which if you're a total n00b like me is a little scary.
So I did my grub setup on my install USB key manually. There's a good step-by-step set of instructions for doing this at:
http://www.pendrivelinux.com/boot-multiple-iso-from-usb-via-grub2-using-linux/
I then put my ubuntu LiveCD .iso and edited the /boot/grub/grub.cfg on the usb key. The key, as the bug report says, is that we need "nosplash nomodeset" as boot options. So here is the grub.cfg (make sure the file name of the .iso matches the file name in grub.cfg). You shouldn't normally manually edit a grub.cfg, but this is just on a temporary filesystem that will never have grub-update run on it, so it's OK.
set timeout=10
set default=0
menuentry "Run Ubuntu Live ISO" {
loopback loop /ubuntu.iso
linux (loop)/casper/vmlinuz boot=casper iso-scan/filename=/ubuntu.iso nosplash nomodeset
initrd (loop)/casper/initrd.lz
}
So far so good. This should bring up the grub menu, you hit enter to start up the .iso, and the LiveCD .iso runs flawlessly. BUT...
If you reboot after the install you boot to a blank screen! This is because now the grub.cfg on your hard drive also needs the "nosplash nomodeset" options. The easiest way is probably to boot from the LiveCD .iso again. Once booted, mount the hard drive partition where Ubuntu is installed (easiest using Disk Utility). Open a terminal and invoke superuser privileges (I just do sudo -i but others seem to prefer prefixing every command with sudo).
Navigate to where the hard drive partition is mounted. It will be in /media with a name that is likely just a big string of random looking characters.
The difficulty is that editing grub.cfg directly is a bad idea. Partly because we could really mess up the system if we make a mistake and partly because our grub.cfg could be overwritten during an upgrade. Instead we have to tell grub-update how to write grub.cfg the way we want it. This turns out to be easy. We have to set an environment variable called GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT. This is done in
/etc/default/grub
So just open that to edit it in your favourite text editor. It is probably set to
"quiet splash"
Replace this with
"quiet nosplash nomodeset"
Save and exit. Now from the command line run grub-update.
Voila! We're done.
Now if I can just get Unity 3D working on it...