Intel(r) PineView PCI Accelerated SVGA BIOS Error When Installing Linux From a USB Thumbdrive

Why won't this goddam thing boot. I know I managed to do this a year ago.

Why won’t this goddam thing boot. I know I managed to do this a year ago.

So, you have yourself a netbook or some equally underpowered laptop with an Intel Atom processor, and you are finding your computer getting stuck with a message reading like
Intel(r) PineView PCI Accelerated SVGA BIOS
Build Number:1818 PC 14.34 06/19/2009 01:29:40
DECOMPILATION OR DISASSEMBLY PROHIBITED
Copyright (C) 2000-2003 Intel Corp. All Rights Reserved.

when trying to install Linux. There’s not a whole lot of OSes that these netbooks can run well aside from Windows XP, so it is a good idea to get a suitable flavor of Linux on your netbook to keep that battery life high. They seriously benefit from installations of Crunchbang, Archbang, AntiX, or Manjaro. (These are all great superhero names imho)

The issue is with Syslinux version 4, which is now used in most Linux USB creators. It doesn’t play nice with the BIOS. Grab yourself an older version of LiLi or an older version of UNetBootin, or Win32 Disk Imager if you use Windows (this one worked for me), and put your favorite version of Linux on a thumb drive using that. The legacy version of the very convenient YUMI from pendrivelinux did not work.

Now you can install Linux, and stop wasting your time looking for the answer to this problem by reading the Ubuntu forums which never seems to have the answers for anything.

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