I’m writing this up for my own benefit as it will be faster to find next time I forget.<\/p>\n
I have problems installing Ubuntu on my laptop as it does not provide debian style floppy-based installation media. My CDROM drive is totally shot, so all I have is a floppy drive or network card as my installation options.<\/p>\n
I found my way around this with a combination of a post on a forum (which I was unable to find second time around) and some figuring out of my own. Nothing particularly ground-breaking about anything I’ve done, but it might be of use…<\/p>\n
The method I aimed to use was to get hold of appropriate kernel image and initrd from the netinstall CDROM and then get GRUB to load them.<\/p>\n
Tracking down the images wasn’t too bad, and working out the appropriate appends came down to mounting the iso loopback and having a ferret around.<\/p>\n
Download vmlinuz<\/a> The way I did this method was to do this from an existing installation of Linux. I think it would be possible to do it with only Windows (or other OS) installed and a GRUB boot disk. I may explore that possibility later and write that up, too.<\/p>\n I copied the vmlinuz and initrd.gz to my \/boot partition, adding a “-warty-netinstall” suffix for clarity, and then added the following to my menu.lst for grub.<\/p>\n Then, just reboot (first running `lilo’, if using it) and select “Install Ubuntu” from the menu. That’s all there was to it for me.<\/p>\n Hope it helps someone, even if that’s only me in a few months time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’m writing this up for my own benefit as it will be faster to find next time I forget. I have problems installing Ubuntu on my laptop as it does not provide debian style floppy-based installation media. My CDROM drive is totally shot, so all I have is a floppy drive or network card as\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-71","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geek"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9qMPF-19","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wrigley.me.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wrigley.me.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wrigley.me.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wrigley.me.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wrigley.me.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.wrigley.me.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wrigley.me.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wrigley.me.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wrigley.me.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n and initrd.gz<\/a>.<\/p>\n
\n==# For installing Ubuntu Linux==
\ntitle Install Ubuntu
\nroot (hd0,0) # partition that the vmlinuz and initrd.gz are on
\nkernel \/vmlinuz-warty-netinstall vga=normal ramdisk_size=11057 root=\/dev\/rd\/0 devfs=mount,dall rw --
\ninitrd \/initrd-warty-netinstall.gz
\n<\/code>
\n The equivalent Lilo entry is:
\n
\nlabel \"Install Ubuntu\"
\n kernel vmlinuz-warty-netinstall
\n append vga=normal initrd=initrd-warty-netinstall.gz ramdisk_size=11057 root=\/dev\/rd\/0 devfs=mount,dall rw --
\n<\/code><\/p>\n