I have a “niu-one” fanless PC from “NiuGuy”, one of those fanless PCs for firewall (OPNsense or pfsense), with 4 Ethernet ports. Probably useless information, these “firewall appliances” are in abundance, and the name means nothing (I guess).
The bottom line is that it comes with an “Intel(R) Pentium(R) CPU N3540“, which has an integrated “Intel® HD Graphics for Intel Atom® Processor Z3700 Series” GPU.
I can install OPNsense, pfsense, or freeBSD with no problem by dd-ing the installation img file on a USB stick, so I figured I could try to install Ubuntu, too, by loading the installation iso image with balenaEtcher. But it didn’t work. And I am quite sure it is not the USB stick, it looks OK. Just for full disclosure, I also created the USB stick with dd, Rufus, and Ubuntu’s own Startup Disk Creator. The same happens.
And what happens is that after getting the usual grub menu, I select “Try or Install Ubuntu” (or “Install” when trying debian), and the screen goes blank, and the monitor reports “No Video”. I tried various installation media, including netinstall, desktop, server, and I also tried debian, even Rocky linux. The same, every time. Like none of the installation processes (ultimately the kernel, I think) could recognize the integrated graphics in the CPU.
I experimented with various kernel and grub options, including “quiet”, “vga=normal”, “fb=off”, but nothing worked.
Any help is greatly appreciated.