Thought I'd share my experiences with you as I had a LOT of trouble installing Mint 13 and finally have it up and running. This is how I did it.
NOTE: this is based on the setup I have which is an i7 2700k processor in a ASUS Maximus Gene-Z IV mobo with an nVidia GTX570 graphics card.
My first problem was booting from the live CD (in my case from a USB stick) - I couldn't get it to work.
The first thing to do is reboot your computer and make sure your BIOS is setup so booting from USB is higher priority than booting from your hard drive. In my BIOS I have boot override options so I can just click to boot from USB.
Then I got the grey Linux Mint 13 splash screen with a countdown from 10 till boot. At the point it tried to boot, I was just getting a blank grey screen with the cursor flashing in the corner. The trick to make the live CD boot is as follows:
As soon as you see the splash screen with the countdown from 10, hit F6. This will open a menu with other boot options.
Highlight the default boot option and press TAB to edit the boot parameters.
Where it says "quiet splash", add nomodeset to the end so it says "quiet splash nomodeset"
Apparently, nomodeset is needed for Mint 13 to work with nVidia graphics cards.
Then you should be able to boot the live CD and install Linux Mint 13.
BUT, here's where more problems start. I had removed Windows so Linux was the only operating system installed on my PC.
Once it had successfully installed and I tried to boot from my HDD where Linux was now installed, it didn't work, it just froze on a black screen.
I had no way of changing the boot parameters to add nomodeset as now I couldn't even get as far as the splash screen with the countdown!
To get round this I had to avoid using my nVidia graphics card and use my onboard graphics (luckily I had the i7 and ASUS mobo!)
To do this, I booted into my BIOS and changed my settings so the graphics was iGPU (onboard graphics) instead of PCIE (the nVidia graphics card)
Then I plugged my monitors HD lead into the onboard HDMI out (instead of the nVidia HDMI out) and rebooted.
Now Linux 13 booted successfully.
The first thing to do is set the boot parameters to always use nomodeset. To do this, open a terminal and type
Code: Select all
sudo gedit /etc/default/grubGRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splah"
to
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splah nomodeset"
as we did when getting it to boot from the live CD.
Save and exit the file and in the terminal type:
Code: Select all
sudo update-grubChange the graphics back to use you nVidia graphics card.
Plug your HDMI lead back into your nVidia graphics card and reboot.
Now you should be able to successfully boot Linux Mint 13 using your nVidia graphics card instead of the onboard graphics.
If you have problems one you're up & running in Linux, you may need to install the latest nVidia drivers (I needed to do this to get things working properly)
I appreciate this guide will be useless to most however this is just the problems that I had and this was how I got things working.
If it helps at least one person out there then it was worth it.