Suppose you have a laptop which has no CD-ROM, and it does not support USB booting either. It does, however, support network booting. Perhaps you are like me and have had no need for this in the past. Perhaps you installed Ubuntu on this laptop before by swapping harddrives with another laptop, installing it there and swapping them back. Not particularly very graceful, and ended up with some weird problems to sort through on wireless and video.
Further still, you’ve read up a little bit about PXE network booting and found that the information on hand is quite heady and involves more than your attention span or time on hand allows. This is exactly my situation with my “remote control” laptop. Finally, I found a post on Reto’s blog that covered installing Ubuntu via PXE from Windows. So I decided to dive in…
In short it was ridiculously simple.
Download a free TFTP server] for Windows, download one of the Ubuntu distribution’s netboot folders, in my case it was Hardy Heron. i personally downloaded the whole DIR structure because of my lack of experience, I’m sure you only need a handful of files in reality.
Now copy the tftpd32.exe to something like c:\tftp and also copy all your Ubuntu-related files there. Launch the server, and fill out the info in the DHCP section.
I am using the very popular WRT54G router from Linksys, so my settings were as follows:
IP pool starting address: 192.168.1.100 Size of pool: 50 Boot file: pxelinux.0 // boot file path is the relative or absolute // path to pxelinux.0 from the server installation WINS/DNS server: 192.168.1.1 Default router: 192.168.1.1 Subnet mask: 255.255.255.0
Now you can fire up your net booting computer. You may need to specify netboot as your primary boot option in the BIOS. In my case I can select it in a one-time boot menu. This option is available on most Dell computers by pressing F12 at boot.
That was it! It booted just fine* and is now installing as i write this blog.
An important thing to note is that you do not need to download a Ubuntu ISO as the installer will download the appropriate packages for you at install over the net. Another cool thing is that you can install various flavors of Ubuntu from the net installer. So lovers of Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Ubuntu Studio etc. can follow the instructions to the letter and it will prompt you for those flavors later in the installer. Even those who prefer a Ubuntu Server with no graphical interface can install the much leaner CLI-only version of Ubuntu.
* the TFTP server died the first time. I restarted it and tried again and it worked fine. Not sure what the hangup was.
An update: The install went perfectly. Wireless had no problems and video was running with full acceleration out of the box.
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