Hey everyone,

I'm trying to boot up from usb flash memory the latest Ubuntu on a Intel Atom based netbook.

After 1min booting up and loading some modules it clears the screen and shows a blinking cursor on the console. Nothing else happens. (waited like 10min)

The system is not hanged up but it won't proceed.

Any recommendations for a different, user-friendly, distro?

Thanks.

you can try your luck with different ubuntu version, like older or development one that may work well, and can try to upgrade after installing that..

Or try Mint. Based on Ubuntu but with a few differences, such as 3rd party software installed by default for flash usage and such.

For an Atom based netbook you might want to try a "lightweight" distro such as AntiX or CrunchBang.

What did you use to put Ubuntu on the flash drive?
Have you tested the flash drive on another computer to see if it boots?

They gave up on a netbook version.

The blinking makes me think there is an issue with the usb or how the system uses it or some driver.

How did you make this usb?

May I ask which version of Ubuntu you use and which Atom CPU is in this machine? Some of the newer Atoms (D2xxx and similar) will have serious problems with older versions of Linux due to their in-built SGS545 videochip, which has very bad Linux support.

I put it on a USB using YUMI.

It will boot normally in a regular PC x86.

this is the net top / mini pc: http://www.zotacusa.com/specsheet/ZBOX-ID15-U.pdf

I gave it up and bought a notebook HDD. Installed Windows 7 x64 on it. Runs 100%

As I suspected, this box uses an Atom D2500 CPU with a very bad supported GPU. Thank Intel for using unsupported third party GPUs.

There's nothing wrong with your computer: it's Ubuntu. That only comes with a driver for one specific Intel chip, so if you have a different model you get the lock-up you experienced. It does have a VESA driver present, which would work, but it doesn't use it. And it's no use forcing it to use it, because the Unity desktop won't work with VESA, so you can't run the installer.

The answer is Linux Mint. When you get the startup menu, choose the option to run in failsafe mode: that will run Mint with VESA. When you install, it will give you a proper driver.

There is no proper driver for the SGS545 (aka GMA3600).

It should still boot. But you might have to rig things to boot to console so you can play around a bit. Uninstalling the display manager is one way to do that. Via chroot or other means. Reinstalling it is relatively painless with a working network. LinuxLite an ubuntu variant uses lightdm, I'm not sure what ubuntu uses these days.

It could also be that the bootloader and/or the fstab file reference the device location by /dev/ instead of UUID. Which is normally my experience when a USB install boots on one box, but not another. Make sure the grub.cfg uses the root=UUID=88888888-4444-4444-4444-cccccccccccc with the correct UUID instead of root=/dev/ as a kernel parameter. Use blkid to get the UUID. Or burg, lilo, whatever you use as a bootloader.

When I use a USB distro across multiple machines, I have to make sure I boot to console mode so I can adjust the xorg.conf to the PCI location and driver appropriate for the machine. Or have no /etc/X11/xorg.conf so the distro will attempt a guess and might succeed. Or gracefully fail.

Mint 15 x64 worked!

Thanks everyone.

The problem now is that it won't allow it to be installed on in a removable media.
I booted it up with 2 usb flash drives:

1: LinuxMint v15 x64
2: 16gb blank media (flash memory)

I thought it was only a Microsoft limitation not to allow the OS to be installed on the removble, but seems that OSes doesn't like the idea to get them installed on removable media.

There should be no problem with installing to removable media on Linux. Please be more specific what exactly does not work, keep in mind that we can't see your machine and to be able to help you have to tell us what is happening.