My ISO CD Won't Load

I don't own any USB sticks big enough or empty.

Anybody out there who can help?

Did that too.

If the md5 hash doesn't match when you do md5sum file.iso and compare it against the contents of the md5 file than it means that the download is corrupt. You could try downloading it again. It might be that you have an unreliable internet connection and it may not be easy or possible to get a reliable connection

You could try restarting the modem/router/computer and downloading it again. You might also want to try a different mirror. Sometimes ISO images do get corrupted on the mirrors unfortunately.

The other possibility is just download it somewhere else (like a library or take your computer to a place with a more reliable internet connection).

I think your looking at md5's for individual files contained on the disc. Those will only match the files on the disc image itself. It won't match the whole ISO file.

I'm not sure what the problem is specifically that your having (given I'm not there so I can't try different things) although it may be an issue with the type of USB support the system has. Particularly older systems may not have support for some installation types.

There may be some bug preventing your system from loading too. It's really hard to tell.

Trisquel and GNU/Linux really work best (or in many cases at all) with particular chipsets. This is because those chipsets have free drivers and firmware available. That means the drivers can be updated, fixed, and improved upon by the community.

It may be that there is some non-free component that your system was/is dependent on that is preventing it from loading. It may be Ubuntu 10.04 included this component and newer versions of GNU/Linux do not.

Trisquel never included this component so it may never have worked.

Most of the the time the systems boot OK in a fallback mode. This is basically where at least some hardware works although it may not be fully utilizable. Maybe that means there is no 3d acceleration or there is no wifi. But you can still use ethernet, and generally utilize the system so long as you don't need to connect wireless/or play games/watch movies/etc that need 3d acceleration. Other times the system may just not perform as well. Meaning watching a video without 3d may slow the system down significantly. You may not be able to watch it and also check your email at the same time. Or if you can it'll be much slower. Or other negative impacts it might cause are a faster drain on the battery.

The easiest thing to do down the road is buy GNU/Linux- and specifically free software friendly hardware.

The Free Software Foundation has a certification program that has been started:

http://fsf.org/ryf

A company I founded and run was the first to get PC hardware certified. It's at the moment the only company. There is a 2nd company which is specific to 3d printers that also has one product certified.

However you can be confident all our hardware is free software compatible even if it isn't yet certified. By that I mean it'll work with 100% free distributions. There may be a few things that can't be certified due to strict FSF requirements. For instance our laptops don't have a free software BIOS. It's one of those things that'll take a significant number of users opting to purchase mostly free software friendly laptops to change. There are no good free software friendly laptops that exist right now. There is some work being done to change that although it's unfortunately a significant effort that has to be undertaken. Right now we would probably have to see laptop sales increase 30x.

I think this number is doable with increased awareness of the importance of free software. Particularly where hardware is concerned. Even those who are not using a 100% free software distribution aught to be concerned about these issues. There are both ethical and practical implications of using hardware with dependencies on non-free components.

As an example AMD announced discontinuation of support for older graphics cards that are dependent on a non-free driver/firmware. There are other graphics cards from NVIDIA too which are unsupported. Then there are other types of devices like printers, sounds cards, etc. There are numerous other chipsets / device classes that don't have any support for free software operating systems or GNU/Linux in general (free or non-free in other words).

I feel that the most important thing to do is move yourself away from the non-free dependencies regardless of the distribution you end up using. Even if you end up using a distribution that includes non-free software you can still make a conscious decisions to do things like not install proprietary plug-ins like Adobe Flash, Oracle's Sun Java, and buy only free software friendly hardware.

I'm the CEO of ThinkPenguin and our policy is not to sell hardware dependant on non-free drivers/firmware (not including the BIOS/microcode). So there is a way to avoid it even if your not terribly technical. If you use http://libre.thinkpenguin.com/ we give 25% of the profits to the Trisquel project too. There are other ways to find hardware although it's a bit of a hit and miss situation even once you've found the hardware others have said worked for them. There are a number of issues. But one of the big ones is changing chipsets. A device that was sold with one chipset yesterday may use a different chipset today. The chipset is what determines compatibility (to a large degree). There are other issues like bad info (unfortunately a lot of users don't understand what free software is and report stuff as working or don't realize that only half the hardware is free software friendly). But basically h-node.org is one place to look.

I usually would recommend just asking on the forums. Sometimes users can at least point people in the right direction. I pointed one user the other day to the right hardware where laser printers were concerned (even though my company doesn't sell them).

The problem they had was they were on an older discontinued release of GNU/Linux from years ago. They needed to upgrade for many different reasons. Even after upgrading though it isn't all that easy to get the right hardware. But I narrowed down the list to the currently available laser printers under $1000 USD that had a good chance of working and what versions of the distribution it would probably work with (there was still a decent chance the hardware wouldn't work though, because, again, model numbers don't always equal chipsets, etc but at least it would reduce the likelihood of stuff not working).

You boot from the USB just like you boot from the CD.

Try going to the BIOS setup and changing the boot order there. (Need to hit some key early in the boot to get there, the key depends on your hardware, could be F10 or F1 or del or... It's likely advertised for a short while on screen.) You might have a buggy BIOS, those are 13 in a dozen. Then save the settings and reboot with the CD or USB inserted.

Some people find the transition to Trisquel to be very easy, some might find it hard. I would guess it largely depends on one's experience and motivation. This weirdness you're currently enjoying with booting has nothing to do with Trisquel since you haven't even booted it yet.