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tomreid
January 3rd, 2019, 07:08 PM
Hi all, hoping someone can help me.

I have a Macbook pro I have now been using since November 2007. I always wanted to replace Mac OSX with Ubuntu when the time came that the OSX version it would take was no longer supported.

However I have got stuck today. When booting from the bootable USB stick I made of the latest 64bit Ubuntu LTS, I get as far as "try ubuntu without installing it" at the first GRUB menu. When I select this option, the screen goes blank and nothing else ever happens. I can hear the system's fan working quite hard whilst I'm looking at the blank screen, which makes me think that maybe it's doing something I can't see which maybe points to a Graphics card compatibility issue? it's running a Nvidia card, and i tried this workaround I found here but to no avail: https://www.lifewire.com/dual-boot-linux-and-mac-os-4125733

Modifying the GRUB Boot Loader Command

Shut down your Mac by pressing and holding the Power button.
Once your Mac shuts down, restart and return to the GRUB boot loader screen using the instructions above.
Select Try Ubuntu without installing, but do not press the Enter or Return key. Instead press the 'e' key to enter an editor that will allow you to make changes to the boot loader commands.
The editor will contain a few lines of text. You need to modify the line that reads:
linux/casper/vmlinuz.efi file=/cdrom/preseed/Ubuntu.seed boot=casper quiet splash ---
Between the words 'splash' and '---' you need to insert the following:nomodeset
The line should end up looking like this:
linux /casper/vmlinuz.efi file=/cdrom/preseed/Ubuntu.seed boot=casper quiet splash nomodeset ---
To make the edit, use the arrow keys to move the cursor to the location just after the word splash, then type 'nomodeset' without the quotes. There should be a space between splash and nomodeset as well as a space between nomodeset and ---.
Once the line looks correct, press F10 to boot with the new settings.


The system spec is:

2.6 GHZ Intel Core Duo
4 GB RAM
around 100 GB Spare SSD Space

I did (in around 2009) get Ubuntu working well on a very similar system. But now am completely stuck. Hope someone can help.

Thanks

Tom.

mwei19
January 3rd, 2019, 08:12 PM
The nomodeset worked for me when I was installing the OS on my mid 2010 macbook pro.
Another thing you can try is to remove the quite splash in the grub menu and just have that nomodeset there so that way the screen should show you what it is doing/what it is failing on?
I actually just removed the quite splash all together after I got the OS up and running as well, just so I can kind of sort of see what is going on during the boot up.

something like this:
linux /casper/vmlinuz.efi file=/cdrom/preseed/Ubuntu.seed boot=casper nomodeset ---