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I have Win7 x64 installed on the primary drive and I intend to keep it there. Been trying (and failing) to simply install Ubuntu on a separate drive. But I cannot even get that far. I am experiencing the apparently famous black screen during install problem. When booting from DVD I initially get that purple starting screen where I can F6 and set nomodo??? whatever it was called. Didn't work. I tried many other things shy of connecting a an HDMI monitor and see if that works. I am very very close to giving up but thought I'd try on last shot and see if the linux experts have gotten it work on this particular laptop. NVidia 680M and integrated graphics on the Alienware mx18 R2.

I have Ubuntu running in VirtualBox in Win7 just fine. The problem is I am doing some modern OpenGL training videos and was hoping to show the linux folks how to run the samples on their systems, at least Ubuntu. So I need the real Nvidia graphics driver to run and I believe only OGL 2.x is supported in VBox.

-Steve

user2941878
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  • I am going to try the unplug the NVidia video card alternative and see if it recognizes the integrated graphics chip for install. Easy enough to pull the card, install, re-install the card and install NVidia graphics driver. This assumes I don't get that black screen during boot to Ubuntu. Google searching is revealing lots of things to try but I was hoping for that "silver bullet" fix where someone with a similar machine had some advice that works. – user2941878 Jun 02 '15 at 20:23

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I never did unplug the video card as I re-thought that this was a silly approach for something that wasn't so important to me that I would change hardware. However I did find the solution that worked and it did not require dismantling my hard ware. In another thread (I wish I could find again to give them credit) they suggested adding these commands to the command line before the -- at the install menu that first comes up.

vga=normal nomodeset

No other options needed to be set, only these. I was then able to see the following screens until eventually Ubuntu started (in demo mode or whatever it is called without actually being installed).

Steve Jones
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