Anyone have trouble installing Ubuntu with GUI on HP Proliants G6's? Upon boot I get a frozen purple screen. Only Ubuntu headless seems to work...Tried nomodeset but didn't seem to work
I also have a G6 and if I remember correctly I had at one point also installed Ubuntu with GUI (16.04 LTS). Never heard of this problem before (but I haven't used GUI Ubuntu for a long time now...). Do you NEED the GUI? If so, you could try installing it afterwards (from the headless version) by apt install unity (or ubuntu-unity-desktop or something like that).
BTW: you can always switch between GUI and headless via
sudo systemctl set-default multi-user.target
sudo systemctl set-default graphical.target
(but then even in the headless version you of course have all the "crap" from the GUI environment^^.