Preface:
I have an elderly IBM ThinkPad R30 where the optical drive is missing. I would like to load xubuntu onto this machine. But how to go about that?
I tried making a USB-bootable drive but appenrently the BIOS of the ThinkPad is too old to be able to boot on it. It does have the option of booting from a USB floppy but I am using a 4 GB CompactFlash card in a crd reader and that is a no-go. I have also tried a USB DVD-drive with similar results.
I then thought of the netbook-remix. So I loaded that onto the hard drive hoping to recover that area later as Swap. For a little while I though it would work but the installation just dies.
But the idea of copying something on to the harddrive stuck. So my next try was an ordinary xubuntu bootable USB (using FAT as a filesystem) that I copied to the hard drive.
Now at least the installation starts and goes beyond the partition stage! But! When looking for the seed file and package repositories it looks for a CD-ROM drive :-(
So I thought; let's mount the FAT partition and make a symbolic link to /dev/cdrom. But the busybox mount command apparently does not recognise the FAT fs. So it will not let me mount the partition. Back to square one.
By chance I find out, that the kernel does recognise the card reader and assigns /dev/sdb to the CF card. Magically it actually will boot off the hard drive and mount its tmpfs from the compressed file on the harddrive. And with the card reader plugged in at boot time, it is recognised and mounted as a replacement for the CD-ROM. Great! So it actually select packages and starts installing the base system.
The snake in the paradise seems to be that some of the package files are corrupted and it does not complete the install.
So now I have to re-download the ISO image and retry the install this way. As I am on a slow net connection (128 kbit) this takes a little while. I will be back with an account of how I fare on this one, when I get the ISO afresh.
Jan Rasmussen
email: jan@kaddu.dk
web: http://www.kaddu.dk
blogs: http://janholbo.blogspot.com
http://janholbodk.blogspot.com
http://kaddulinux.blogspot.com
