Revision 18 as of 2006-10-25 17:18:13

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Warning /!\ This is a work in progress, this means that I'm on it right now, it is not finished yet and it may breake your system!

Caveat

As you may already have guessed following this instruction may breake your systme and you are on your own to fix it again.

Partitioning

Use fdisk to partion your hard disk. 

# fdisk /dev/hda

For the rest of this instruction we assume the following partition layout. 

/dev/hda1 (83  Linux)        - for /
/dev/hda2 (82  Linux swap)   - as swap

Lets populate our root partion with a file system. Below is how it's done for ext3. 

# mke2fs -j /dev/hda1

And the same for our swap partion. 

# mkswap /dev/hda2
# sync; sync; sync
# swapon /dev/hda2

Now its time to mount the recently created partion. 

# mkdir /mnt/ubuntu
# mount -t ext3 /dev/hda1 /mnt/ubuntu

Getting debootstrap

Make sure that binutils is installed on your system.

To create the base system, we need an appropriate version of debootstrap in place. On an apt based system we can use dpkg to install it (bellow is what we need for dapper) 

# wget http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/d/debootstrap/debootstrap_0.3.3.0ubuntu2_all.deb
# dpkg -i debootstrap_0.3.3.0ubuntu2_all.deb

If your current system is rpm based, use alien to install it or find a rpm on the web (http://azhrarn.underhanded.org/debootstrap-0.2.23-1.i386.rpm).

Installing the Base System

# /usr/sbin/debootstrap --arch i386 dapper /mnt/ubuntu http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu

(arch may be different for you, e.g. md64, hppa, ia64, powerpc, or sparc)

Basic Configuration

# echo HOSTNAME > /mnt/ubuntu/etc/hostname

Chrooting

mount -t proc none /mnt/ubuntu/proc
mount -o bind /dev /mnt/ubuntu/dev
LANG= chroot /mnt/ubuntu /bin/bash

Installing OpenSSH Server

apt-get install openssh-server

Install a Kernel

apt-get install ....

Installing GRUB

apt-get install grub
mkdir /boot/grub
cp /lib/grub/i386-pc/* /boot/grub
vim /boot/grub/grub.conf

# /boot/grub/grub.conf
default 0
timeout 3

title=Ubuntu
  root (hd0,0)
  kernel /vmlinuz root=/dev/hda1
  initrd /initrd.img

ln -s /boot/grub/grub.conf /boot/grub/menu.lst

# grub

grub> root (hd0,0)
grub> setup (hd0)
grub> quit

Reboot

# exit

# umount /mnt/ubuntu/proc
# umount /mnt/ubuntu/dev
# umount /mnt/ubuntu
# reboot

Finishing

apt-get install ubuntu-standard

References