Installing Trisquel 7 on HP DV 5000 (many issues?)

That's how you upgrade to a newer development release in Ubuntu, so I thought it would work in Trisquel. I never tested it though.

I'm pretty sure this is probably an issue with the nouveau graphics driver and booting without it will 'fix' the problem (you won't have 3d accelerated graphics, but you will be able to boot the system if the directions are applied below to disable it).

Please note that this is largely off the top of my head and I didn't check this thoroughly for potential errors in the steps or changes over time...

That said to install do the following:

1. During boot hold down the left shift key to get the GRUB boot menu to show

2. Press the 'e' key to edit the boot parameters. Using the cursor keys of your keyboard scroll down to the line that starts with "linux" and go to the end of that line.

3. Add the boot parameters "nomodeset xforcevesa" without the quotes. As you type, it will wrap to the next line on the screen and show a backslash character at the end of the previous line. That's fine. Press Ctrl+X or F10 to continue to boot.

After installing it the system won't boot, but you can use a live cd with chroot to fix this. Use the above directions to boot from the Trisquel live cd again.

Then from the live CD open a terminal and run:

sudo mkdir -p /mnt/chroot

Then mount the partition you installed Trisquel to:

sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/chroot

Next we need to bind hardware with new chroot environment. The next commands will make sure that connected hardware works otherwise update-grub may not function properly.

Run:

sudo mount -o bind /proc /mnt/chroot/proc
sudo mount -o bind /proc /mnt/chroot/dev

Now enter the chroot environment:

sudo chroot /mnt/chroot

Assuming your not booting in UEFI mode you can put "nomodeset xforcevesa" into /etc/default/grub. To open the file for editing, run:

gksudo gedit /etc/default/grub

locate the following line and put xforcevesa between the quotes:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="nomodeset xforcevesa"

save and exit when done, then run the following for the change to take effect:

sudo update-grub

If everything worked right you should be able to reboot now and the system will boot without the 3d accelerated graphics driver. In theory that is probably what is causing the problem between the two releases.

If anybody else has another idea as to what might be causing the problem speak up!

Also: All of this said HP, Lenovo, Dell, Sony, Toshiba, and Apple should be avoided. They are worse than most utilizing digital restrictions on the wifi card slots in laptops (or proprietary parts).

It is also best to avoid NVIDIA graphics usually. Few NVIDIA chips are going to work 'good enough' with a free software operating system. There are a few exceptions, but unless you really need it, just don't. The same goes for AMD ATI graphics.

There are still potential issues with other companies, but just avoiding those things can help to avoid a world of suffering.