[conspire] ubuntu from Ross's 5.04 DVD edition

[Peter Knaggs]

Hi Installers,

On the topic (perhaps old-hat to most folks at this stage): 
installing ubuntu "hoary hedgehog" 5.04 from Ross's DVD image
(thanks Ross!).

First puzzle I ran into was how to boot from the DVD (the CD was the 
default boot drive). 
Well, ubuntu has an "install" directory on the DVD (I guess it's on
the CD's too),
and in there is an image for a useful floppy called "sbm.bin". 
Essentially, it lets you boot from floppy and choose which CD or DVD
to boot from.
Very neat, and saves having to puzzle with the BIOS settings or swap IDE cables.

So the install goes smoothly but not quite in typical debian style: 
it doesn't ask as many questions. It only asks about partitioning
and selecting a username. It doesn't even ask for a root password,
instead it configures "sudo" for the user. Saves a lot of questions.

It installs the base system, which is quick, and then it proceeds to 
read a huge amount of packages from the DVD. This was a bit of
a surprise to me, as it takes quite a long time.
I'd never seen a debian installer doing that sort of thing before. 
It didn't install all of the packages it read in, though: it just stashed them
in /var/cache/apt/archives -- I guess so that they can be installed
quickly from local disk later. 

Strangely, the "kubuntu-desktop" package wasn't among the packages on
the DVD, even though the DVD was only 2GB in size, so for KDE you'll need 
to uncomment some lines in /etc/apt/sources.list and do an "apt-get
update" then
"apt-get install kubuntu-desktop" which takes a wee while.

The ubuntu installer uses "grub", and if you choose not to install grub
to the MBR it asks you where you want to install it, and offers the choice
of installing it to "(fd0)" (the floppy -- my personal favorite
location for it,
as Bruce can testify :))

So after installing "grub", it prepares to reboot.
The boot screen is quite nice and relaxing: just a simple black and white
screen with the name of the kernel at the top. There are no messages 
whizzing by too fast to read from the kernel boot process, but rather 
it seems that only the relevant messages from init as it starts up the 
system. Very human-friendly :)

Once it boots up, it continues with the install, and asks about getting
packages from the internet. If you're doing a CD-only install, if you
accidentally
say "yes" you can still interrupt the stuck process using ^C and it doesn't
hurt anything. Then it unpacks and installs  the remainder of the 
default set of packages. The total disk space used in the end is some 3.3 GB.

Cheers,
Peter.