Installing Gutsy Over The LAN

Today, I finally made a really clean install of my ubuntu system. Most times, I have been upgrading from one release to another. This chain of upgrades caused my system to be horribly slow to the extend that, I really couldn’t do anything with my machine.I also had issues with sound so I therefore I decided to give my machine a fresh install to clean up all the riffraffs my chain of upgrades have been leaving behind.

This time, I decided to experiement a bit, not only that, in fact I had no CD writer available to burn the downloaded iso, so I decided to do the installation over the LAN. Few googling got me all I needed to do such stuff and I’m going to share with you the step by step of what I did.

Requirements:.

Procedure:

  1. Install apache if its not installed by issueing

    sudo aptitude install apache2

  2. Download the netboot installer image for gutsy by issueing

    w g e t -c –tries=0 <URL>

    I downloaded i386 because that is my architecture type. If yours is a 64bit go for that instead.

  3. Download gutsy alternate iso and not the desktop, that is if you don’t have it downloaded already, by issueing

    w g e t -c –tries=0 <URL>

  4. Now mount the downloaded iso to a directory. I mounted my to /mnt by issueing

    sudo mount -o loop /path/where/iso/is/saved /mnt

  5. Create a symbolic link so that the content of /mnt can be browsed over http. This can be achieved by issueing

    sudo ln -s /mnt /var/www/ubuntu

    When you go to http://ip.address.of.machine/ubuntu with your browser, it should display the content of /mnt.

  6. Prepare the pendrive as a bootable pendrive by issueing

    gunzip /path/to/boot.img.gz
    dd if=boot.img of=/dev/sdb

    Now pendrive is ready for booting. Note my pendrive was detected as sdb. To check how yours was detected, use the dmesg command

  7. Stick pendrive into the machine you want to install gutsy, then reboot. Change boot sequence so it boots from pendrive. Remember the machine should be on the network.
  8. Remove pendrive when language selection options show up. For saftey.
  9. Follow wizard till you get to the option to select a mirror of ubuntu archive. At that page, scroll up untill you see “enter information manually”, select that, then enter the ip address of the machine which the iso has been mounted.
  10. Follow the rest of the wizard and that should get gutsy installed on your system

Remember to edit /etc/apt/source.list and change all the ip address entries to a mirror archive near you after a successful install. I in particular used gh.archive.ubuntu.com because that is for my country Ghana

Benefit of doing such installation. You don’t get to burn any CD or DVD so you don’t get to waste money. You’re also some how guaranteed a trouble free installation provided you get a continues network connection. No bad CD or DVD issues which may halt installation at some point. No CD or DVD ROM reading noise. You get a silent install provided you don’t have a noisy HDD.

Of course there is a draw back. You must start installation again when you loose connectivity between the installation machine and the hosting machine.

That is all the nerves behind installing gutsy over the network. Isn’t that trival.

One Comment

Yosvany Estévez  on February 21st, 2008

Dear Henry, I’ve read your post and I would like you to tell me if usin my pen drive (running Slax) the results are the same, I mean, removing the pen drive in “some” point of the system while loading, will prompt me for a source to read from. In case there is no other way, how can I make my pen drive bootable without linux (I mean, from windows)?
Thanks a lot.
Yosvany.

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