On 26/02/07, Rob Malpass <rob@???> wrote:
> Can anyone point me to a few links on booting a laptop to a Linux distro
> (Ubuntu I think) without any sort of optical drive?
I can think of three ways off the top of my head:
1) Boot from a USB device (Ubuntu instuctions at [1]). You can either
use a minimal install image and load packages from the Internet, or
copy an ISO onto the disk.
2) Boot from the network (Ubuntu instructions at [2]). This is more
complex to set up, involving the configuration of two daemons on
another unix machine, and is probably not worth the pain for a single
install.
3) Boot from floppy (not supported by Ubuntu, but is by other
distros). This works fine if you just use the floppy images required
to load the kernel and bring up the network. The rest can be loaded
from the Internet.
> I'm thinking of buying a used laptop and I've found one for £200. It's an
> IBM thinkpad of sorts (the vendor hasn't supplied the full details yet).
> Apparently it has an install of XP on a built in flash drive, but (with
> apparently only 256Mv RAM - I thought Windows XP Professional - nada) what I
> want to do is install some sort of Linux distro on it.
>
> Am I correct in thinking this is the way to go:
>
> 1) Hook up the USB HDD to any PC with a CD drive
> 2) Boot PC from Ubuntu disk
> 3) Install Ubuntu to the USB drive making very sure not to wipe that PC's
> HDD.
> 4) Make sure it's bootable i.e. boot the PC from the USB HDD I've just
> installed it to.
> 5) Disconnect USB HDD and connect to laptop.
> 6) Boot laptop from USB.
Yes, that plan should work fine if you follow the instructions I
linked to. However, be aware that the USB HDD will be wiped by the
installation procedure. It's usually just as easy to use a small UDB
pen drive which doesn't contain any data you care about and then tell
the system to load the rest of the packages from the Internet.
G
[1]
https://help.ubuntu.com/6.10/ubuntu/installation-guide/i386/boot-usb-files.html
[2]
https://help.ubuntu.com/6.10/ubuntu/installation-guide/i386/install-tftp.html
