Hello Ken, Thank you very much for sharing your valuable experiences by writing this up and emailing the sf-lug.org mail list. I am forwarding this to our state wide Ubuntu team as well.
Cheers, Grant Bowman https://wiki.ubuntu.com/CaliforniaTeam ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Ken Shaffer <[email protected]> Date: Sat, Oct 23, 2010 at 9:17 PM Subject: [sf-lug] Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) USB Installation Tips To: [email protected] Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) USB Installation Tips USB setup (no CDROM involved) had some issues, but all were soluable. One approach is to use the previous release's "Startup Disk Creator" to put the new iso onto a (1-2G) live USB, then use this live USB to install to a 4G USB stick. This approach avoids the use of a CDROM, but assumes you have a computer which can boot off a USB device. If you have access to an Ubuntu 10.10 system, its USB startup creator has fewer problems than with earlier releases, but success is possible with a fully patched Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) system. Earlier distributions or non-current Lucid systems will have additional problems like "unknown keyword"s whose solutions are posted (Google them) in great numbers, burying all other problems/solutions. Summary for the impatient: 1)Start with a fully patched Lucid system. 2)From the BIOS setup, disable non-present devices in the boot order (New problem with Maverick). The non-present floppy causes sdb media missing errors. I disabled the CDROM as well, since it had been removed. 3)Use system/administrator/ Startup Disk Creator " with the Maverick iso. 4)See what happens when you try to boot. ESC at the logo will give you the log. Device errors like sdb seem to be related to missing floppy fd0, sda errors to windows hibernation nonsense. Errors seem to repeat forever. 5)F6 to interrupt the boot early, to get to the language selection screen, then the usual text menu. 6)Insert the target USB (4G+) (pre partitioned for the 128k erase block size) and choose "Install". I don't bother with swap, making the whole 4G root. 7)Rebooting the 4G stick, grub edit the boot command to reduce the device references by one (hd2 -> hd1, and sdc -> sdb). 8)After successful boot, sudo update-grub to fix the grub configuration. 9)Tailor your new USB system. I typically run Ubuntu off a USB device on a laptop with Windows on the internal hard disk. I prefer to upgrade without burning a startup CD-ROM because of hardware problems, but sometimes that is not possible, because the "old" "Startup Disk Creator" will not accept the "new" iso. Downloaded the i386 desktop iso and ran the md5sum check. On a fully patched Lucid (10.04) system running on a USB hard disk, ran the "system/administrator/Create Startup Disk" to create a live usb startup disk. I wrote the Maverick iso to a 2G SD card in a USB reader with no problem, but the card would not boot. The Maverick live USB would get to the Ubuntu logo, with the changeing color dots, but no further. ESC showed the errors, a get getpwuid error followed by a repeating set of device sdb not found, and Windows hibernated and would not mount, with sda errors. The install media created from a current Lucid system did not have any errors for unknown keywords in syslinux.cfg as reported by others from earlier releases. Fix 1)In the BIOS, disable the floppy (and the removed CDROM). This gets rid of the sdb errors. This was never necessary before, sigh. Fix 2)Hit F6 at initial boot, select language, and from the text menu, select install. This avoids the Windows mount nonsense, and allows the install to run. I installed the system to a 4G USB thumbdrive. See previous posts about the partitioning for the 128k erase block for the flash memory. The 4G thumbdrive would not boot of course, but this is an old problem. Grub cannot find sdc since there is no longer an sdc. The USB install media was sdb, it set up the target as sdc, but without the boot media, the target becomes sdb. Fix 3)Reboot and choose e to edit the boot entry, and fix the wrong devices. I changed hd2 to hd1, and on the boot line, changed sdc1 to sdb1. Control X gave a successful boot. First thing, sudo update-grub to fix the wrong boot devices. A USB startup disk created on my new Maverick system avoided the Windows mount error, and in the target grub configuration, used the UUID instead of the wrong sdc, but it still had a wrong reference to hd2 instead of hd1. Tailoring the new system Since my laptop uses 4311/12 Broadcom chips, I need to supply the firmware missing from the Ubuntu distribution. I have been using the open firmware for awhile with good success, so I just copied the b43-open directory into /lib/firmware and network manager found my access point. Newer Broadcom chips may require the installation of the b43-fwcutter package (while hardwired to a network), and accept the download offer of the firmware. I don't even bother to enable the "system/Hardware Drivers" for any of the Broadcom drivers -- so the default b43 driver works with the open firmware. Since flash memory has a limited number of writes, I use some ramdisk mounts for high write traffic directories. This also speeds things up. To set up ramdisks for /tmp and /var/log, add the following just after /proc in /etc/fstab: # update-manager cannot see any space in /tmp when ramfs is used tmpfs /tmp tmpfs size=256M,mode=1777 0 0 ramfs /var/log ramfs mode=755 0 0 The next thing I do is to add a mkdir of /tmp/debs/partial to my /etc/rc.local and make the deb download directory /var/cache/apt/archives point to this location. The update-manager will now dump the new packages into ram instead of onto the flash memory. Now run update-manager and you should be all set. Maverick will boot off this USB in less than a minute. One difference I have noticed from Lucid is that network-manager seems to take a little longer before it starts to connect. All sorts of other things can still be tweaked. I like to add a user whose home is in /tmp (on ramdisk in my case). Still working on ways to have users run mostly from ram, but to have permanent storage available if needed. I'm back in town, and should be attending some SF user group meetings. Good Luck Ken _______________________________________________ sf-lug mailing list [email protected] http://linuxmafia.com/mailman/listinfo/sf-lug Information about SF-LUG is at http://www.sf-lug.org/ -- Ubuntu-us-ca mailing list [email protected] Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-us-ca
