It’s been a while since I did a tech update, but nothing like doing OS installs on a Friday night. My nearly 5 year old laptop, a Dell Inspiron 1501, is on its last legs. The only thing I use it for is BOINC, so I figured that installing Ubuntu would give it a bit more breathing room than Windows. However, when I tried to run the install, I got a screen full of crazy colored vertical lines. Doing a BIOS update did not help. However, a forum thread did lead me to the right solution: setting the nomodeset option before install.
So if you want to install Ubuntu on a Dell Inspiron 1501 laptop and you keep running into the crazy colored vertical lines, during the install, hit F6, then select “nomodeset”. Presto!