Installation of Ubuntu on DELL PRESISION Tower 7910

Same problem here with both Ubuntu 14.10.3 and 15.10.

Did you find out how to get around this?

Just add "nomodeset" to the boot options and it would work. At least that worked on my Dell 7910

Hi thanks. Yes, nomodeset did the trick.

On some hardware configurations, you need to set some kernel parameters for ubuntu to boot or work properly.  A common one is nomodeset, which is needed for some graphic cards that otherwise boot in to a black screen or corrupted splash, acpi_osi= to fix lcd backlight and other problems, and noapic and nolapic to work around various ACPI BIOS issues.

What are these options?

nomodeset


 this option is sometimes needed for nVidia cards when using the default "nouveau" drivers. The newest kernels have moved the video mode setting into the kernel. So all the programming of the hardware specific clock rates and registers on the video card happen in the kernel rather than in the X driver when the X server starts.. This makes it possible to have high resolution nice looking splash (boot) screens and flicker free transitions from boot splash to login screen. Unfortunately, on some cards this doesnt work properly and you end up with a black screen. Adding the nomodeset parameter instructs the kernel to not load video drivers and use BIOS modes instead until X is loaded.

If you boot ubuntu from a livecd (or USB stick), right after the bios splash screen you will get a purple screen with a keyboard logo at the bottom:


Press any key at that moment to access a menu. Select your language with the arrow keys, press enter and you will see a menu:


If you press the F6 key, a menu at the bottom will open allowing you to set kernel options with the space bar or enter key. You can close the menu with escape key and resume booting by selecting the option “try ubuntu without installing” (please note that session does allow you to install ubuntu once you found the kernel options cured your problem).

If you need to add kernel options not provided by the F6 menu, you can just type them in at the end of the boot options line.

Important: if you select a kernel boot option from the F6 menu and proceed to boot and later install ubuntu, those boot options will NOT be applied to your installation. If you needed nomodeset to get the livecd to boot, you will almost certainly need it again once you reboot in to your fresh install. See below how to set those options on an installed ubuntu. And perhaps click the “affects me too” on this bug report where I request these settings be applied (semi) automatically.

To permanently change the default kernel boot options, press ALT+F2 or open a terminal from system > accessories > terminal. Type in the following command:

gksudo gedit /etc/default/grub

add your custom boot options to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT line, so for instance:

GRUB_DEFAULT=0
#GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=0
GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT_QUIET=true
GRUB_TIMEOUT=10
GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR=`lsb_release -i -s 2> /dev/null || echo Debian`

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash nomodeset"
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=""

Save the file and exit gedit. If you have to add kernel options that contain quotation marks, add them as such:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash nomodeset acpi_osi= \" Linux \" "


Now in the terminal, run the following command to update your grub configuration with the new default settings:


sudo update-grub