Hello, My tale is similar but I ended up moving away from Ubuntu to Linux Mint. I did find a nice workaround for booting however that might be of help.
I have a similarly old laptop, non-PAE, and doesn't boot from USB directly. It is a whitebox Compal CL-50, Centrino 1.6ghz, 1GB RAM. I found a solution to the booting issue, and not wanting to burn through a bunch of CDs/DVDs, by using PLOP boot manager[1] on CD, and then using that to boot from USB, and so I could then more easily change what I was actually booting with on the USB flash drive. I read up on some of the solutions to try to boot Ubuntu with a non-PAE kernel, and tried a few different ways, which is one of the main reasons I wanted to do this boot method with USB flash. I was unable to get Ubuntu to work though, although the PLOP boot CD then booting from flash did work well. I decided to just go with Mint 13 LTS, which is the last version with non-PAE kernel (by default anyway), and since it is LTS will continue to get updates for 5 years. As for your issue of having installed Xubuntu, and wanting to just install the Ubuntu gnome packages- my first question would be, have you made sure your sources.list is updated to pull from the internet servers and not just the install CD? This is running from a full installed Xubuntu system right, not just the install CD? HTH [1]- http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager/index.html ---------- Matt M. LinuxKnight On Fri, May 23, 2014 at 9:32 AM, Dick Steffens <[email protected]>wrote: > Has anyone tried to install Ubuntu 12.04 on a non-pae machine lately? I > just downloaded ubuntu-12.04.4-desktop-i386.iso and ran into two problems. > > 1. The dang thing is 766.5 MB. My stash of CD-Rs are 700 MB. > > 2. After wasting most of a DVD and trying to use it to install 12.04 on > my laptop I find that the kernel on the DVD is compiled for pae, and > won't run on my laptop. > > I found a page telling me that the mini.iso would solve both of these > problems. > > I happened to already have that burned to a cd, and I can get all the > way through the initial setup phase (the last entry was to tell it that > my HTTP proxy is none), but then I got the dreaded purple screen of > death. (Yes, that is meant to be a frustrated dig.) > > The PhoenixBIOS says that it will boot from a CD-ROM/DVD Drive, Hard > Drive, or Floppy Devices. (This laptop is from somewhere around 2006, I > think.) So I don't have the option of installing from a memory stick. > > After a bunch of searching I discovered that there is an install CD for > xubuntu alternate. I installed that, and it runs. But I want to have the > same desktop on all of my machines. So, I went looking for how to switch > from xubuntu to ubuntu and found an instruction that says to run: > > sudo apt-get install ubuntu-gnome-desktop > > When I run that I get an error message: > > "Unable to locate package ubuntu-gnome-desktop" > > Then I figured I'd see if the ubuntu-12.04.4-alternate-i386.iso might > just happen to be small enough to fit on a CD. Alas, no. > > So, does anyone have any ideas about how to switch from non-pae xubuntu > 12.04 to ubuntu 12.04? > > Thanks. > > -- > Regards, > > Dick Steffens > > _______________________________________________ > PLUG mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug > _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
