I was starring at a blank screen and asking myself “why is it blank?”. Then the sound of drums came out of the speakers. It hit me: the video card is the problem. I’ve been trying to install Ubuntu Desktop 10.10 on my new HP EliteBook 8440w for a a day, without success. Then I switched to Ubuntu Server 10.10 and the installation worked. Let me guide you through the process.

Installation

The first thing I’ve done was resizing the Windows Vista partition to make space to Ubuntu. This can be done using the tutorial on How-To geek: Resize a Partition for Free in Windows 7 or Vista. I still need Windows since the corporate world is plagued with this beast. If you don’t need to use it, you can get rid of it.

Next, you should download and burn the Ubuntu Server Edition 10.10 and reboot your computer with the disk on the tray (or the pen drive connected, if you choose to install with a pen drive.) After selecting the installation language, hit F6 and select nomodeset. Then proceed the installation. I chose not to use guided partitioning, and make the partition setup myself.

When the install process is completed, reboot your system into Ubuntu and login. To install the Ubuntu Desktop, issue the following commands:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop

Now go get a mug of coffee. The desktop install will take a while.

Installing and configuring the NVidia Quadro FX 380m driver

Don’t reboot the computer yet. First you need to install and configure your video driver. To do this, run the following command:

sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx-180 && sudo nvidia-xconfig

Networking

I use network-manager to auto-configure my networks. The default Ubuntu Server installation comes without this tool, and the network is configured using the old debian scripts. To disable this, you’ll need to edit the configuration file, /etc/network/interfaces, commenting all lines except

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

which means that your file will look something like this:

# This file describes the network interfaces available on your system
# and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5).
# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
# The primary network interface
#auto eth0
#iface eth0 inet dhcp

This should do the trick.

Now reboot your notebook and you should have the desktop installed and running.

Good luck, and YMMV.