Installing Ubuntu 12.04 On Asus U46E – Resolving Boot Issue
I recently installed Ubuntu 12.04 on my Asus u46E laptop, and ran into a minor issue on install, and upon first reboot. In order to resolve the issue I had to make some modifications to boot options.
Changing Live CD Boot Options
First, here is what the initial issue was. Upon attempting to boot from the Ubuntu live CD the boot would stop, and I would never even get to the desktop. After a couple of searches I found that I need to change my boot options. Here is a link to the official Ubuntu documentation on boot options.
The initial change that I had to make was located on the “Other Options” menu, and was the noapic option. You can read more about how to make these changes by clicking on the following link.
Setting the noapic option disables the Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller. While I can’t speak to what this does in plain English, what I can tell you that is that in my experience, all features of my laptop function without issue.
This change allowed for the install to complete.
Changing Boot Options Once Installed
With Ubuntu installed, now we need to change the boot options for our system permanently. We can do this by performing the following.
Open a terminal, and enter the following.
gksu gedit /etc/default/grub
Enter your password when prompted
With the gedit window open, you will want to find the line that begins with GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=. A value of ”quiet splash” should be visible. we will add our noapic boot option after the word splash(see example below). Make sure to include a space after the word splash.
Now we just need to save the gedit file, by clicking on File -> Save
The final step is to update Grub with our new settings. You can do this by running the following command in the terminal.
sudo update-grub
The next time you reboot, you should boot into Ubuntu with no issues on your Asus U46E.