Revision as of 11:34, 20 February 2009

Installing Ubuntu from Internet with a succesful Linux installation

Sometimes a person is just too lazy to download an image, burn it out and boot on it, with everything in between. But there is help to be found, if you got the patience.

Preparing for Installation

First you need to get a couple of files to make grub boot up on.

The URLs to find these are always subject to change but you can obtain the latest one from here. I will use the ones that are relevant for me today.

Use wget, which is a program that downloads a file from a website. Easy to use.

wget ftp://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/hardy/main/installer-i386/current/images/netboot/ubuntu-installer/i386/linux
wget ftp://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/hardy/main/installer-i386/current/images/netboot/ubuntu-installer/i386/initrd.gz

This will download the fi(les to the current directory you are in. Make sure that you are in a directory that grub or any other external programs can view. So do not put it into an encrypted /home/user directory. /boot/ is a great place to put it.

Now reboot.

Starting the Installation

Press escape to enter the grub menu. Press c in the menu to enter command line for grub. What you basically need to do, is to tell grub what partition to look at and that it got a new kernel and initrd to make use of. You do this by writing:

root (hd0,0)                                     # If you don't know what this means, then just write what it says here.
initrd /where/you/put/initrd.gz
kernel /where/you/put/linux

Obviously change as needed.

Then write:

boot

It will now start a standard installation. Please realize that it will take an extremely long time, depending on bandwidth. It will also be a very stripped down version of Ubuntu being installed.