I'm not sure what the problem is specifically that your having (given I'm not
there so I can't try different things) although it may be an issue with the
type of USB support the system has. Particularly older systems may not have
support for some installation types.
There may be some bug preventing your system from loading too. It's really
hard to tell.
Trisquel and GNU/Linux really need work best (or in many cases at all) with
particular chipsets. This is because those chipsets have free drivers and
firmware available. That means the drivers can be updated, fixed, and
improved upon by the community.
It may be that there is some non-free component that your system was/is
dependent on that is preventing it from loading. It may Ubuntu 10.04 included
this component and newer versions of GNU/Linux do not.
Trisquel never included this component so it may never have worked.
Most of the the time the systems boot OK in a fallback mode. This is
basically where at least some hardware works although it may not be fully
utilizable. Maybe that means there is no 3d acceleration or there is no wifi.
But you can still use ethernet, and generally utilize the system so long as
you don't need to connect wireless/or play games/watch movies/etc that need
3d acceleration. Other times the system may just not perform as well.
Meaning watching a video without 3d may slow the system down significantly.
You may not be able to watch it and also check your email at the same time.
Or if you can it'll be much slower. Or other negative impacts it might cause
are a faster drain on the battery.
The easiest thing to do down the road is buy GNU/Linux- and specifically free
software friendly hardware.
The Free Software Foundation has a certification program that has been
started:
http://fsf.org/ryf
A company I founded and run was the first to get PC hardware certified. It's
at the moment the only company. There is a 2nd company which is specific to
3d printers.
However you can be confident all our hardware is free software compatible
even if it isn't yet certified. By that I mean it'll work with 100% free
distributions. There may be a few things that can't be certified due to
strict FSF requirements. For instance our laptops don't have a free software
BIOS. It's one of those things that'll take a significant number of users
opting to purchase mostly free software friendly laptops to change. There are
no good free software friendly laptops that exist right now. There is some
work being done to change that although it's unfortunately a significant
effort that has to be undertaken. Right now we would probably have to see
laptop sales increase 30x.
I think this number is doable with increased awareness of the importance of
free software. Particularly where hardware is concerned. Even those who are
not using a 100% free software distribution aught to be concerned about these
issues. There are both ethical and practical implications of using hardware
with dependencies on non-free components.
As an example AMD announced discontinuation of support for older graphics
cards that are dependent on a non-free driver/firmware. There are other
graphics cards from NVIDIA too which are unsupported. Then there are other
types of devices like printers, sounds cards, etc. There are numerous other
chipsets / device classes that don't have any support for free software
operating systems or GNU/Linux in general (free or non-free in other words).
I feel that the most important thing to do is move yourself away from the
non-free dependencies regardless of the distribution you end up using. Even
if you end up using a distribution that includes non-free software you can
still make a conscious decisions to do things like not install proprietary
plug-ins like Adobe Flash, Oracle's Sun Java, and buy only free software
friendly hardware.
I'm the CEO of ThinkPenguin and our policy is not to sell hardware dependant
on non-free drivers/firmware (not including the BIOS/microcode). So there is
a way to avoid it even if your not terribly technical. If you use
http://libre.thinkpenguin.com/ we give 25% of the profits to the Trisquel
project too. There are other ways to find hardware although it's a bit of a
hit and miss situation even once you've found the hardware others have said
worked for them. There are a number of issues. But one of the big ones is
changing chipsets. A device that was sold with one chipset yesterday may use
a different chipset today. The chipset is what determines compatibility (to a
large degree). There are other issues like bad info (unfortunately a lot of
users don't understand what free software is and report stuff as working or
don't realize that only half the hardware is free software friendly). But
basically h-node.org is one place to look.
I usually would recommend just asking on the forums. Sometimes users can at
least point people in the right direction. I pointed one user the other day
to the right hardware where laser printers were concerned (even though my
company doesn't sell them).
The problem they had was they were on an older discontinued release of
GNU/Linux from years ago. They needed to upgrade for many different reasons.
Even after upgrading though it isn't all that easy to get the right hardware.
But I narrowed down the list to the currently available laser printers under
$1000 USD that had a good chance of working and what versions of the
distribution it would probably work with (there was still a decent chance the
hardware wouldn't work though, because, again, model numbers don't always
equal chipsets, etc but at least it would reduce the likelihood of stuff not
working).
