So I got a Live CD of Ubuntu (actually three of them). I have Vista Home Premium and have been wanting to try out Ubuntu for a while.
My friend let me borrow two of his Live CDs (he's a heavy Linux user) and I burned one of my own- but every time I boot up with it. It asks if I want to boot from the CD/DVD drive and so I okay that. Then it starts to load and a bunch of different things load- there are a couple of errors, but then it finishes the loading screen.
Then it pops up to what looks me like a desktop. It's blackish with horizontal lines going across and a few color variations and eventually it turns into just a grey and white background. And then I can't do anything at all- no mouse, no commands I've seen from the keyboard.
What do I need to do to get this to work?
If it makes a difference I have Vista Home Premium, with 1 Gb of RAM, a 100 GB hard drive (with about 60-65 gbs full), and it's a laptop.
Posted by lem (Member # 6914) on :
Hmm..what version of Ubuntu is it? I have tried ALl of their versions and have had no problems. Actually I did have a video driver problem once and it forced me to accept the (VESA?) driver..or vega. It got me into linux with 800x600 resolution.
Actually...I think it did that with Ophcrack. I never had a problem with Ubuntu.
Posted by xnera (Member # 187) on :
I was wondering what version of Ubuntu it is, too. Also, what kind of laptop? Sounds like a driver issue. Ubuntu's pretty good about finding the right drivers, but if you have an older machine or an uncommon chipset it might have difficulties.
Posted by Shawshank (Member # 8453) on :
I'm fairly certain I got the AMD64 one. Since I have a Turion that's 64bit compatible.
Posted by xnera (Member # 187) on :
This page says you have to pass a kernel flag in order to get the CD to boot. It's for an older version of Ubuntu, but I'd try that first.
Posted by airmanfour (Member # 6111) on :
I couldn't get it. I ended up setting up the dual boot with the alternate cd.
Posted by Sergeant (Member # 8749) on :
I'm not sure about Live CD but the standard distro's of Ubuntu have different releases depending on whether you are running a 32bit or 64bit machine. I don't know if using the wrong one would cause your problem though.
I dual boot between Ubuntu and Vista Business with little to no problems and run Ubuntu server as well off of an external drive.
Sergeant
Posted by adfectio (Member # 11070) on :
I tried an older version of Ubuntu on my HP laptop and had a similar problem. Which version of Ubuntu is it? If it's the newest one then I'm not sure what to tell you. If it's an older version, Try downloading and burning the newest version. The newest version introduces some interesting new stuff too.
Posted by Morbo (Member # 5309) on :
I have an old Damn Small Linux CD, and a Knoppix CD, and I remember mention that they have problems recognizing hardware on some laptops. I think it was mainly related to video.
I thought that problem was overcome, but perhaps not. You may have to use a custom script or a command line tag to run Linux on your laptop, like forcing a certain vid resolution. Or something related to your mouse and/or keyboard. Good luck.