Thinkpads Forum

Hey Ubuntu gurus, I'm trying to install Ubuntu on a 750P: 33MHz 486 CPU, 36MB RAM, no CD, no USB. (I managed to install Debian Woody with floppies and a network connection!)

I can get DOS loaded and the contents of the Mini ISO on a RAM disk. Loadlin doesn't work with image and is known to have problems with large images. Linld097 seems to start just fine, but there's a kernel crash nearly immediately.

How can I debug this process? It should work on this machine, right?

If you can install a tftp server on another box, you could netboot/install the Ubuntu image. You could use your 600X if you wanted to.

I've never seen a netboot floppy that works with PCMCIA network cards, but I sure would be up for it. Any URLs?

gpxe (newer incarnation of etherboot) planned to support cardbus & pcmcia but I've no idea what they've released lately.

simplest way to me seems:

hook the drive to another machine (e.g. ide 44 pin / usb cable) and install ubuntu there -- the only thing it really customizes for a given hardware is:
(1) the video card, and you can always fix xorg.conf later fairly painlessly (e.g. $ Xorg -configure)
(2) grub entries. they switched to UUID for the kernel directive a while ago, so no need to change that but the root directive may need fixed. e.g. root (hd0,0) is the only one you might need to change based on how you partitioned and what the installer thought your usb-connected drive was called (e.g. it could have it down as hd1,1 etc.)

sound card and network card driver, pcmcia handler etc. all work pretty automagically these days.

also you might consider something like the xubuntu variant which is much more lightweight and meant for older systems with low ram. but I believe even it requires a minimum of 64MB. in which case try something like puppy or dsl or slax I guess? check out distrowatch, there are more than a few distros meant for older systems and you may also do better with one that sticks with the older 2.4 kernel.

hm or fluxbuntu, it's unofficial but even lighter weight than xubuntu I think.

anyway, if you do go about hooking the 750P drive to another machine and installing, the ubuntu installer will be fooled that there's enough ram as long as the surrogate machine has enough.

if you're dead set on trying the main gnome ubuntu, I'd recommend using the "alternate install cd" when trying the process I described above. and then see what happens when you put the drive back into the 750P. it's certainly worth a try but I can tell you it'll be dog slow even if it works (but sometimes that is part of the fun!) -- I had xubuntu on a dell pII laptop w/ something like 256mb and even that was fairly pokey.

crap I did think of one other thing that the installer may do specific to the hardware where you're installing -- if it detects a 686 class processor, it may install 686 optimized packages instead of more generic 386 packages. but still xubuntu or fluxbuntu are more likely to succeed in this regard. don't s'pose you have a 486 desktop all pimped out with 128MB?

this could also be related to the crash you are seeing -- I'm not sure the main ubuntu variant supports 486/586?

Thank you for the thoughtful posts.

Ubuntu claims to support 486. It also claims that the text-mode installer will work in 32MB RAM. The command line install should work well in that footprint.

I would like to get X working some day, but the WD90C24 chip in the 750P has not (yet) been ported to X.org. I don't have time for that project at the moment.

Is there a way to capture the output from the kernel as it crashes, say via serial port?

capturing kernel dumps has always been something I'm never good at, sorry o_O

you know, another thing you could try with your working debian install, is simply switch to ubuntu repositories and let apt do its thing. that stands a fairly good chance of success.
(apt will most likely upgrade every existing package to the ubuntu equivalent, and then something like sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop should take care of any small bits left over)

thinking of more wacky ideas... I don't believe smartboot manager supports usb devices (neither flash nor cd) so a pcmcia usb card is right out; but it *does* support some pcmcia cd drives... you could put sbm on a floppy and then use it to boot a pcmcia cdrom. er, if you had one?

I think grub4dos *will* let you boot random usb devices tho, hmm....

I don't have USB, and I don't think there ever were 16-bit PCCard USB devices anyway. Parallel port CD-ROM would be about as advanced as this could go, but I don't have that either.

I do have a PCCard flash card reader (SD card and memory stick), and a network card (that I used to install Debian).

I looked at "installing from Linux" but that requires Grub, which Woody doesn't have. I tried other methods that do a chroot, but that fails because my kernel is too old and I haven't learned how to upgrade Woody to something newer, or upgrade kernels in Woody since it doesn't use packages for that.

Any other ideas? Anyone?

I installed via unetbootin over broadband. You just click below link in Windows and then everything else is done automatically, no CD required. Takes an hour and you have a dual boot machine with Ubuntu Gutsy (you can choose Kde or Xfce instead of Gnome Desktop as well during the installation process).
Click this link:
http://sourceforge.net/project/download ... e&74875817
Make sure that you are connected over Ethernet as WLAN is autorecognized later during installation.

I was sure I posted a reply...

I don't have Windows on this machine. I do have Linux, but unetbootin requires Grub, which I don't have.

I seem to have found a way to capture the output of the crash. At least the console is quiet. Now to see if it really goes to the serial port!

I've never seen a netboot floppy that works with PCMCIA network cards, but I sure would be up for it. Any URLs?

Correct me, but since you'll use option 66 with dhcpd to serve the kickstart/image over the net, and Debian net-installed with the card, you should be okay. Here's a couple links:
http://halisway.blogspot.com/2006/06/ub ... stall.html
http://myy.helia.fi/~karte/ubuntu_pxe.html

Gutsy hasn't work no matter which way I try. On a lark I decided to try Dapper Drake, and that is installing as I write this. It's not fast, but it didn't immediately crash. Woo!

You can get the installer kernel and initrd from here

http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/ ... /hd-media/

Just add that kernel and initrd to your lilo.conf, run lilo and boot that kernel and it should start the installer.

The newer versions of ubuntu should have those images also, you just need to get them from the correct repo.

I got the linux and initrd.gz files for Dapper, Edgy, Feisty and Gutsy. The first two worked, the latter two crash immediately upon startup (someone in #ubuntu-installer suggested that it happened during CPU initialization).

In any case, Dapper Drake (6.10 LTS) installed just fine, as a command-line installation, with nothing really loaded past that. None of the function keys work, and I don't think APM is working either... and I don't have much time to give it. At least it's a start.