Ask Klaus

Which Menu?

Greetings. I recently purchased the Linux Pro Magazine edition for January 2015 sold in Montreal, QC, containing a double-sided DVD with Ubuntu 14.10 and Lubuntu 14.10.

Although I have been able to install and use Ubuntu 14.04 successfully on both my laptops by downloading the image from ubuntu.com (I even tried Mint 17 on one of them, but did not like the interface, so switched back to Ubuntu), I am light years away from being a Linux pro. Nevertheless, I purchased the magazine because of the included disk.

I have tried to install the Lubuntu distro on my Toshiba Satellite C50D-A several – I mean like 5 or 6 – times by doing these two things:

• booting from the DVD and
• booting from a Live USB file.

The problem starts at the Boot Options (Figure 1). If I select number 2 or number 3, the following screen is a message saying Start PXE over IPv4, Press ESC to EXIT.

Figure 1: Opening screen on Toshiba Satellite C50D-A when trying to boot from DVD.

What am I doing wrong?

Carlos

Don't worry about missing Linux expert skills; Linux itself is very easy to install nowadays. The problem is, your Toshiba Satellite C50D-A did not even reach the point where it would boot from the Linux DVD! The boot picture you sent shows the computer's boot menu, not the DVD's boot menu. In that computer's boot menu, the only options are to boot from the internal hard disk (HDD/SSD, from USB (where it is unclear whether it will boot a standard bootable USB flash disk), from the DVD/CD drive (ODD, which is called CDDVDW, probably the product name of the DVD drive), or over the network (LAN) from a computer running a boot server (PXE).

On your computer, the menu entry for a DVD boot would be 3. ODD. When you cursor down with the arrow keys and select that item by pressing Enter, the computer should attempt to boot from the DVD, and the next thing you see should be the DVD's boot menu.

If nothing happens, or if the computer automatically tries PXE network boot in spite of having selected the DVD option (as your question suggests), or if it tries to restart from hard disk, then the computer's BIOS is probably set to disallow booting other operating systems by the so-called "UEFI secure boot" setting. If this is the case, select Enter Setup at the bottom of the boot menu; try to find the UEFI Secure Boot setting and turn this off, or select CSM or Legacy as the Boot Mode – which actually means to allow booting in the normal or traditional way.

After saving the new settings, a preinstalled Windows might not be able to boot from your hard drive anymore if it was installed in "secure" boot mode. If you still need this, you can reinstall Windows in "standard" mode later, switch system setup between "secure" and "standard" modes between each OS switch, or just go with a pure Linux-only installation on that computer.

The Linux Pro Magazine January 2015 DVD should greet you with the interactive graphical screen in Figure 2 or 3 once the computer's setup has been successfully changed to allow booting from DVD. From there, you can install (L/U)buntu on your computer's hard disk or start a Live test run from the DVD.

Figure 2: Ubuntu side of the double-sided disk.

Figure 3: Lubuntu side of the two-sided disk.