I’ve been having quite a bit of trouble booting up an Ubuntu 11.04 installer CD on a Macbook Pro.
Problems:
-
Booting from CD/DVD fails, with “Select CD Boot Type” prompt that does nothing.
-
The machine seemingly hangs; the graphics output is broken
Solution
- Boot from CD/DVD
To boot from the DVD, hold down Option whilst starting up (not ‘C’ - this will attempt to boot the old DOS style way). When asked between “Windows” (the old DOS style way that PC’s use) or “EFI Boot”, choose the latter.
- Edit grub options
You will land at a grub menu. Before you can boot the machine, you have to blacklist the nouveau driver/module. Edit the first menu item (by pressing ‘E’). At the end of the kernel line (before the “--”, after “quiet splash”), add
nouveau.disable=1
This will disable the dastardly broken nouveau driver.
Hurray! Now you have a workable bash command line!