I have been working at this for the better part of the day.

i can get booted into installation by modifying grub.conf on the installation USB i am using. (see https://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-2157775.html) this allows me to install. And side-stepping the lack of wifi support was easy with a Cisco WirelessN usb dongle, so i now have updated kernel and the like as well as the BCM wireless chipset.

the issue i am still running into is a graceful way to get the hybrid graphics running.

the system is 100% linux Ubuntu 16.04 64 bit. but i have no screen because of the weird hybrid graphics issues. the challenge is i cannot dig up and modify a grub.conf in this scenario because the system is set up to boot via UEFI and it does this well.

How can i get a command line long enough to configure graphics? I would assume passing args to UEFI is key, but what am i modifying?

supplimental: