Installing Ubuntu 12.04 / 13.10 on G505 laptop with AMD A4-5000

Question

I've tried 6 different distros and I can't find anything that's stable with the G505 with AMD's a4-5000 kabini processor.

In BOIS I have disabled secure boot, set OS to other, enabled SVM but left UEFI enabled.

Ubuntu 13.10 throws hwdb not found errors but seems to boot, then goes the screen goes black and only indication that anything is happening is the power button

Any help at all would be greatly appreciated, I've been trying to get some form of distro installed on this Win8 machine for 2 days now. The closest I've gotten is Fedora 20 boots to live usb but freezes after a minute or so.

Answer 1

There are numerous existing "black screen on boot" questions and answers on this site, such as:

• My computer boots to a black screen, what options do I have to fix it?
• Ubuntu 13.04 on UEFI system hangs at black screen
• https://askubuntu.com/questions/260793/uefi-boot-results-in-a-black-screen
• Black screen after GRUB, can't install. UEFI
• Dual boot problem, black screen during the ubuntu boot

Unfortunately, this problem has multiple causes, so a solution for one computer may not work for another. Two particularly common solutions are to add nomodeset as a kernel option (using GRUB or whatever other boot loader you're using) and to hit the screen brightness key to bring up the brightness (which sometimes comes up completely dimmed). FWIW, my new Lenovo has the latter issue, but compiling a 3.12.6 kernel from source code fixed it. (I did this to get Wi-Fi working, but it had the side benefit of fixing the black-screen glitch.)