The easiest route for most people will be to use an Ubuntu CD. If you have a CD, and if your machine supports booting directly off the CD, great! Simply configure your system for booting off a CD as described in Section 3.6.2, “Boot Device Selection”, insert your CD, reboot, and proceed to the next chapter.
Note that certain CD drives may require special drivers, and thus be inaccessible in the early installation stages. If it turns out the standard way of booting off a CD doesn't work for your hardware, revisit this chapter and read about alternate kernels and installation methods which may work for you.
If you have problems booting, see Section 5.3, “Troubleshooting the Installation Process”.
To boot the installer from hard disk, you must first download and place the needed files as described in Section 4.4, “Preparing Files for Hard Disk Booting”.
If you intend to use the hard drive only for booting and then
download everything over the network, you should download the
netboot/ubuntu-installer/i386/initrd.gz file and its
corresponding kernel. This will allow you to repartition the hard disk
from which you boot the installer, although you should do so with care.
For LILO, you will need to configure two
essential things in /etc/lilo.conf:
to load the initrd.gz installer at boot time;
have the vmlinuz kernel use a RAM disk as
its root partition.
Here is a /etc/lilo.conf example:
image=/boot/newinstall/vmlinuz
label=newinstall
initrd=/boot/newinstall/initrd.gz
root=/dev/ram0
append="ramdisk_size=12000"
For more details, refer to the
initrd(4) and
lilo.conf(5) man pages. Now run
lilo and reboot.
The procedure for GRUB is quite similar. Locate your
menu.lst in the /boot/grub/
directory (sometimes in the /boot/boot/grub/),
add the following lines:
title New Install kernel (hd0,0)/boot/newinstall/vmlinuz root=/dev/ram0 ramdisk_size=12000 initrd (hd0,0)/boot/newinstall/initrd.gz
and reboot.
Note that the value of the ramdisk_size may need to be
adjusted for the size of the initrd image.
From here on, there should be no difference between GRUB
or LILO.
Let's assume you have prepared everything from Section 3.6.2, “Boot Device Selection” and Section 4.3, “Preparing Files for USB Memory Stick Booting”. Now
just plug your USB stick into some free USB connector and reboot the
computer. The system should boot up, and you should be presented with
the boot: prompt. Here you can enter optional boot
arguments, or just hit Enter.
Booting from the network requires that you have a network connection and a TFTP network boot server (DHCP, RARP, or BOOTP).
The installation method to support network booting is described in Section 4.5, “Preparing Files for TFTP Net Booting”.
There are various ways to do a TFTP boot on i386.
It could be that your Network Interface Card or Motherboard provides PXE boot functionality. This is a Intel™ re-implementation of TFTP boot. If so you may be able to configure your BIOS to boot from the network.
It could be that your Network Interface Card provides TFTP boot functionality.
The etherboot project provides bootdiskettes and even bootroms that do a TFTPboot.
When the installer boots, you should be presented with a friendly graphical screen showing the Ubuntu logo and the boot prompt:
Press F1 for help, or ENTER to boot:
At the boot prompt you can either just press Enter to boot the installer with default options or enter a specific boot method and, optionally, boot parameters.
Information on available boot methods and on boot parameters which might
be useful can be found by pressing F2 through
F8. If you add any parameters to
the boot command line, be sure to type the boot method (the default is
linux) and a space before the first parameter (e.g.,
linux fb=false).
If you are installing the system via a remote management device that
provides a text interface to the VGA console, you may not be able to
see the initial graphical splash screen upon booting the installer;
you may even not see the boot prompt. Examples of these devices include
the text console of Compaq's “integrated Lights Out” (iLO)
and HP's “Integrated Remote Assistant” (IRA).
You can blindly press F1[3] to bypass this screen and view the help text. Once you are
past the splash screen and at the help text your keystrokes will be echoed
at the prompt as expected. To prevent the installer from using the
framebuffer for the rest of the installation, you will also want to add
fb=false to the boot prompt,
as described in the help text.
[3] In some cases these devices will require special escape sequences to enact this keypress, for example the IRA uses Ctrl-F, 1.