So its been a night of learning!! you dont have to get the full iso there are MinimalCDs https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/MinimalCD once you have the initial install underway you can drop to a shell (Ctrl+Alt+F#) and use a CD (the tray will open) or a USB flash drive to frantically copy all debs you have previously downloaded from another machine via USB or writeable CD to /target/var/cache/apt/archives (drastically reducing the amount of downloading the MinimalCD installer will have to do).
Then you can try mounting the squashfs image in the LiveCD to extract the debs on there, only there arent any wthin the compressed filesystem (all availiable debs are on the CD outside the squashfis image)! The way the LiveCD installer works is it copies the contents of casper/filesystem.squashfs over the drives mounted on /target and then attempts to update the nevessary packages, so the LiveCD hasnt got many debs on it. The only gotcha with the live CD is the MinimalCD doesnt haev squashfs support (/poc/filesystems does not list squashfs) so by the time I had worked out which package I needed to get linux-image-2.6.20-14-generic which contains squashfs.ko to enable me to mount filesystem.squashfs image myself the MinimalCD installer had started downlading linux- image-2.6.20-14-generic. No point in downloading it twice and slowing down the transfer rate - off to be. 2 reccommendations; 1. It might be a good idea for the MinimalCD to come with squashfs support for crazies like me in the future :) 2. It might be good to able to download off the web individual precompiled kernel modules of the correct version, i.e squashfs.ko from `lib/modules/2.6.20-14-generic/kernel/ubuntu/fs/squashfs/squashfs.ko` rather than having to download all 28.4 MB of linux- image-2.6.20-14-generic_2.6.20-14.22_i386.deb which would have allowed me to mimic the LiveCD installer and speed up the install process. Oh yeah by the way the current MinimalCD boots just fine on a GA-965P- DS3P! -- boot - /bin/sh: can't access tty; job control turned off https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/96084 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is the bug contact for Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
