Installing Ubuntu on an HP EliteBook 8560w
18 Jul 2012
I recently acquired my HP EliteBook 8560w. I decided to install Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on it. Installation was not straightforward, but still quite easy. I wrote down my installation steps, maybe it’s useful for someone one day. In my particular case, I wanted a dual boot with Windows 7. The first 2 steps can be disregarded if you’re only installing Ubuntu.
- Install Windows 7
- Make a new partition for Ubuntu. I went with a 100GB NTFS partition for Windows and left all the rest unallocated. For partitioning I used EaseUS. It was the first application I came across and it was free.
- Download Ubuntu 12.04 64bit and install it on a USB stick/CD Rom using the Universal USB Installer.
- Boot from the USB stick.
- Select "Run from USB stick" (or something similar) in the menu and press "TAB". At the freshly opened command line add: nouveau.modeset=0 and start Ubuntu.
- After Ubuntu has started select "Install Ubuntu 12.04 LTS".
- Choose "Install Ubuntu alongside Windows 7".
- Reboot from hard drive. Grub will greet you.
After that go to “System Settings” > “Additional Drivers” and select the most recent Nvidia drivers. The Nvidia driver version I currently have is 295.49.
That did it for me. Since the HP EliteBook 8560w comes in different hardware configurations, I’ll add mine:
- Intel® Core™ i7-2820QM CPU @ 2.30GHz × 8
- 7.8 GiB memory
- Nvidia Quadro 2000M with 2GB of memory