Tag: lenovo t400

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I have a librebooted Lenovo T400 laptop which I picked up on Ebay a few years ago. I went to turn it on for the first time in a few weeks and, to my great disappointment, the screen did not turn on. I did some research and determined that the culprit could be the RAM. The laptop came to me with a spinning hard drive and 4 GB of RAM (2×2). I replaced the hard drive with a solid state drive and doubled the RAM to 8 GB (4×4). The laptop’s screen powered on when I removed one of the new RAM sticks. I got rid of the broken RAM and re-inserted one of the original 2 GB sticks of RAM (so we now have 6 GB total) while waiting for a new order of two 4 GB sticks. I also ordered new case screws since I have a few missing screws and two of the screws that were holding the palm rest seem to not fit correctly. At least it works, I suppose.

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I have a Librebooted Lenovo Thinkpad T400. After swapping its spinning hard drive for a solid state drive (big improvement), I needed to install a new operating system. I went with the LXDE version of GNU Trisquel (in the spirit of it being a Librebooted Thinkpad T400 and all). However, when I tried to boot from my live USB, I ran into the following error:

graphics initialization failled
Error setting up gfxboot
boot:

I vaguely recalled having run into this problem before (maybe even on the T400), but I did not remember the solution. I performed a quick search and found a proposed solution posted by user utapyngo on February 8, 2014, on the Ask Ubuntu forum: “Just type help and press Enter. It will continue to boot normally.”

The solution looked vaguely familiar. I tried it and it worked without a hitch. I was able to boot from the live USB and install Trisquel from the live session. Talk about an evergreen 10-year old fix.