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.