Ubuntu – Macbook Pro Ubuntu install freezes after grub menu

2018-11-02 My recent experience installing ubuntu 18.04 on same MacBook Pro mid 2009 ( MBP 5.5 ) that had ubuntu 14.04 and for THOSE WHO HAPPENS TO HAVE A BEAUTIFULL USELESS, WOTHLESS MacBook Pro that sits around doing nothing because Mountain Lion is overpass not suppoorted and dead! My recipe is if you DO NOT GIVE UP AND ARE VERY PERSISTENT. I have to say It is becoming tedious or I am getting older.... First let us be clear, The ''refind'' approach did not work before and not this time again for me on this Mac Book Pro and not on a more recent Mac Boo Pro with intel i5! and not with my older big MacBook Pro 2008 with 2 Zeon cpu totalling 4 cores.
On the MAc BOOk Pro mid-2009 I tried the DVD approach and pressing C key - No success it is always rejeted. I tried pressing the ''alt-option'' key - not much luck it would stop after starting to read the 18.04.iso DVD, then engaged in a reject... and same with a usb flash drive alone.

The approach I used that was succesfull... I got get rid of refind , insert the DVD + the usb flash drive all at same time. Restart pressing ''Alt-option'' key + power on switch. I Held on, cause it takes time. Don't let off the ''alt-option'' until you see the new choice showing ''windows'' and the ''yellow usb drive''. Select the new yellow usb drive. It should go on... with the installaton process.

The first pitfall I had to face was at the time of selecting the city/country. My choice was Montreal,Qc ... but that never stayed selected and it always moved to Toronto, On ... Why? unknown.... After reselecting over 20 times I decided to keep Toronto and go on... Then came another problem with language. In all previous installations since Ubuntu 6.XX (over 10 years or so) I always seleced English US as the language and things would roll on to install. This time, NO it cut off and died out. I had to restart the whole process from the beginning. I found out it was a NO NO.

By luck or chance after 5-6 times, I decide to selected ''English Canadian'',''Canadian Multilingual'' and regional ''Canadian French''. That is the only way it proceeded to install. I selected the minimal, with no downloads while installing. When I rebooted I could connect to update and dist-upgrade + Install all the other apps as I liked to choose. There must be some bugs in this new vesion 18.04-1 and I pass my experience because many may have tried to install a much better OS on these Apple products the company wants us to throw away .Apple want us to Keep up piling the waste on the planet...and give them money

Denis Gaulin

It looks like you've got a flaky EFI that's forgetting its settings. I recommend you look through the firmware's options to see if there's one to reset its options to the factory defaults. (Such an option usually exists.) If so, use it, then try either running Boot Repair again or re-install rEFInd (boot to Ubuntu in any way you can and run sudo refind-install). The idea here is that EFIs sometimes go "out to lunch" when cruft builds up in their NVRAM settings, and resetting them to the defaults sometimes revives them.

If that fails, look at the EFI/Boot directory on the ESP (that is, /boot/efi/EFI/Boot in Ubuntu) in more detail. Your Boot Repair output shows that this directory exists and holds a bootx64.efi file. This program should be launched as a fallback when everything else fails, but clearly you're not getting to GRUB. Other files in the directory might provide a hint about what the bootx64.efi file is -- there may be a configuration file or well-known filename. It could be that EFI/Boot/bootx64.efi a leftover Microsoft program, which could help explain things; deleting it might be in order in that case. You could also try putting either GRUB or rEFInd there -- copy the EFI/ubuntu or EFI/refind directory to EFI/Boot and then rename the boot loader (grubx64.efi or refind_x64.efi) to bootx64.efi. The result should be a system that boots.