Revision 10 as of 2008-03-15 17:23:28

Clear message

Live CD

The Live CD is also known as the "Desktop Installer". It is the default Ubuntu installation CD. The ISO you downloaded has the name "desktop" in its name, these are the instructions to use. If your ISO has "alternate" in its name, you are using an alternate installation CD and should see the next section.

UNetbootin is an installer that can do the following automatically. It is available for download at http://lubi.sourceforge.net/unetbootin.html.

If you already have a working linux system, installing without external media is easy. You need to create a new partition, copy the CD contents over to it, boot from the new partition, and proceed as if you were installing from a CD. Note that you can't use what will be the root partition for the CD contents, as the installer is stubborn on formatting it (it will fail).

The benefits of installing without external media are that it can save you time if you are already familiar with the process, and you get a very usable system upon booting into the installer because it is running from a hard drive rather than a CD.

Step 1. Anchor(step1) Use gparted to create a new primary partition and format it to ext3. You need slightly more than 700MB of free space on it. 750MB should be sufficient. Let's say the name of the partition is /dev/sda1. If your new ubuntu install is going to coexist with your old system, you might find it convenient to create space for your new system as well at this point using gparted.

Step 2. Copy CD contents over to the new partition using the command 

 mkdir /tmp/install_cd
 mount ubuntu-7.04-desktop-i386.iso -o loop /tmp/install_cd
 mkdir /mnt/installer
 mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/installer
 cp -r /tmp/install_cd/* /mnt/installer
 cp -r /tmp/install_cd/.disk /mnt/installer
 umount /tmp/install_cd

Replace the name of the iso to whatever you downloaded and /dev/sda1 with whatever your new partition is.

Step 3. Edit your grub configuration file (typically /etc/grub.conf or /boot/grub/menu.lst) to boot from the new partition by adding the lines 

title installer
        root (hd0,0)
        kernel /casper/vmlinuz boot=casper root=/dev/ram ramdisk_size=1048576 rw
        initrd /casper/initrd.gz

The first line after the title tells grub which partition contains the installer. hd0 stands for "first hard disk," and the 0 following it standards for first partition. You will need to change this if your installer partition is different from /dev/sda1. sdaN becomes (hd0, N-1), sdbN becomes (hd1,N-1) and so on. As you can see, grub starts counting from 0, which can be confusing.

Step 4. Reboot, and choose "installer" from the grub boot menu, and continue as if you were installing from CD.

Alternate CD

As of December 29th 2007, the instructions above do not apply to the alternate CD provided for Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon). Significant changes are required. I ([https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LouisDominiqueDubeau LouisDominiqueDubeau]) tried to use the procedure above and boot using the vmlinuz and initrd.gz files provided on the alternate ISO but that would result in the installer always asking for a CD. Perhaps if the machine has no CD drive the installer does not ask for the CD but if the machine has a CD drive which for whatever reason is not usable for installing Ubuntu, then the installer keeps asking for the CD. On the internet there are places where people suggest using the INSTALL_MEDIA_DEV boot parameter but that did not help. The way I fixed this problem was to use the following procedure:

Step 1. See [#step1 step 1] above.

Step 2. Copy your alternate ISO to the root of the partition you created in step 1. You need to copy the ISO itself rather than the contents of the ISO.

Step 3. Grab the initrd.gz and vmlinuz files found in the following subdirectory of a Ubuntu mirror: 

dists/gutsy/main/installer-i386/current/images/hd-media/

Some clarification as to how to get these files would be greatly appreciatedKyleFrankoBR Re: The vmlinuz/initrd.gz files are in the install directory of cdrom at least for the server-edition otherwise you have to look for a web-mirror (get ubuntu).GunnarThielebein

Step 4. Edit your grub configuration file (typically /etc/grub.conf or /boot/grub/menu.lst) to boot from the new partition by adding the lines 

title installer
root (hd0,0)
kernel          /install/vmlinuz root=/dev/ram ramdisk_size=1048576 rw
initrd          /install/initrd.gz

The first line after the title tells grub which partition contains the installer. hd0 stands for "first hard disk," and the 0 following it standards for first partition. You will need to change this if your installer partition is different from /dev/sda1. sdaN becomes (hd0, N-1), sdbN becomes (hd1,N-1) and so on. As you can see, grub starts counting from 0, which can be confusing. The paths for the kernel and the initrd were set to start with /install/ in my setup but you could put those files in the root of the install partition and have them be /vmlinuz and /initrd.gz if you so wish.

Step 5. Reboot, and choose "installer" from the grub boot menu, and continue as normal.

Caveats

The above instructions for the alternate CD do not include the use of a preseed file. I ([https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LouisDominiqueDubeau LouisDominiqueDubeau]) was rushed and gave up trying to figure out where the preseed file would end up after the ISO is mounted by the installer but if somebody figures it out, please edit the page.