Ubuntu

T61p failed to startup with liveCD of gusty alpha 5

Asked by Yueyu Lin

I got a new laptop, Lenovo Thinkpad T61p.
The hardware is like below:
CPU : T7500 2.2G
Ram: 2GB
SATA Harddrive: 160GB
WUXGA+ : 1900x1200
Chipset: Intel 965M
Graphic card; Nvidia 570M 256M Video ram
With bluetooth,fingerprint scanner

I downloaded the Gusty tribon 5 and try to install it to my laptop.
Unfortunately, I cannot even start the X.
The LiveCD starts up well and shows me the menu. I select the first option to start livecd.
Then the splash screen appeared and later it switched to the text screen to scan the hardware.
The last log I can see from the screen is to start the gnome manager.
Then it became a blank screen.
I waited for a long time, the machine seems to be quiet.
I cannot even press ctrl+alt+F1 to open another console, so I guess the gnome failed to start up.
Anyone can tell me some clues about it?

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Yueyu Lin
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Dimitrios Psychogios (jinxos) said : 		#1

Hi, I had the same issue with a ThinkPad R51. I managed to boot the LiveCD by booting with the extra kernel options: noapic nolapic acpi=off

To do this when the CD boots press F6 to modify the kernel boot parameters and add the above parameters to the end of the line. You might also try adding the option vga=791 but it wasn't needed for me...

Hope this helps

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Yueyu Lin (popeyelin) said : 		#2

Sorry I forgot to say something detailed.
I can enter the X using the "safe graphics mode" which is using the vesa driver the resolution is the ugly 1280x1024
I can also try to install the latest nvidia driver after my installation.
But I wanna use usb flash drive to install and i've already made a flash install drive for gusty.
In that mode --using flash drive,the selection menu disappeared and I had to input the parameters myself. I will try to use the parameters you provided. Thanks. If there is any problem, I will continue the thread.

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Thanasis (thanasis) said : 		#3

I have almost the same box with you and i use the acpi=off noapic nolapic command but ubuntu doesn't recognizes correctly my cpu t7500 nvidia drivers(8600m) are disable (i use vesa driver) usb doesn't work correctly sound the same .
i believe that your laptop is based with santa rosa chip set .I found a lot of bugs on the net maybe you found the solution with the next kernel

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MountainX (dave-mountain) said : 		#4

Attempting to install Ubuntu 7.10 on ThinkPad T61p

Machine specs:
6459CTO THINKPAD T61 WIDESCREEN-1Y
INTEL CORE 2 DUO
15.4 WUXGA TFT
NVIDIAQUAD FX 570M W/WWAN

Live CD fails to install even in safe graphics mode.

Alternate CD (text install) installs Ubuntu on HDD, but using tips here:
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Install_Ubuntu_Gutsy_Gibbon_on_a_T61p and here:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=4147414#post4147414
I am unable to get a working GUI, even with vesa drivers.

Very bad experiences trying unsuccessfully to install Ubuntu 7.10 on 4 different computers. I thought the ThinkPad T61p would be better. It isn't. I have only had success installing Ubuntu in VMWare so far.

PC-BSD installs on my ThinkPad T61p without any trouble (using vesa driver).

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Yueyu Lin (popeyelin) said : 		#5

I can finnally resolve it by using the usb startup and modify to force the driver as vesa.
Then when it stucks, I can enter another tty to kill the X and modify the xorg.conf. then let X up.
After installation, I have to install the newest driver from nvidia.com.
I think Ubuntu should have some more tests on Thinkpad because it's so popular in Linuxer.

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MountainX (dave-mountain) said : 		#6

I wish Yueyu Lin's solution would work for me.
It sounds like those steps do basically the same thing as the suggestion at http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Install_Ubuntu_Gutsy_Gibbon_on_a_T61p
That doesn't work for me.

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MountainX (dave-mountain) said : 		#7

I finally got Ubuntu installed on my T61p. I wish I could say there was a clear path to success. In reality, it was days of trial and error and I'm not sure what made the difference and allowed me to get Ubuntu working.