Although in some cases the firmware can also be loaded from a partition on a hard disk, the most common method to load firmware will be from some removable medium such as a floppy disk or a USB stick. The firmware files or packages must be placed in either the root directory or a directory named /firmware of the file system on the medium. The recommended file system to use is FAT as that is most certain to be supported during the early stages of the installation.

Tarballs containing current packages for the most common firmware are available from:

Just download the tarball for the correct release and unpack it to the file system on the medium.

If the firmware you need is not included in the tarball, you can also download specific firmware packages from the (non-free section of the) archive. The following overview should list most available firmware packages but is not guaranteed to be complete and may also contain non-firmware packages:

It is also possible to copy individual firmware files to the medium. Loose firmware could be obtained for example from an already installed system or from a hardware vendor. ... Read more »

Sometimes, especially with older CD-ROM drives, the installer may fail to boot from a CD-ROM. The installer may also — even after booting successfully from CD-ROM — fail to recognize the CD-ROM or return errors while reading from it during the installation.

There are many different possible causes for these problems. We can only list some common issues and provide general suggestions on how to deal with them. The rest is up to you.

There are two very simple things that you should try first.

If this does not work, then try the suggestions in the subsections below. Most, but not all, suggestions discussed there are valid for both CD-ROM and DVD, but we'll use the term CD-ROM for simplicity.

If you cannot get the installation working from CD-ROM, try one of the other installation methods that are available.

The installation system recognizes a few additional boot parameters which may be useful.

A number of parameters have a "short form” that helps avoid the limitations of the kernel command line options and makes entering the parameters easier. If a parameter has a short form, it will be listed in brackets behind the (normal) long form. Examples in this manual will normally use the short form too.

USB braille displays should be automatically detected. A textual version of the installer will then be automatically selected, and support for the braille display will be automatically installed on the target system. You can thus just press Enter at the boot menu. Once brltty is started, you can choose a braille table by entering the preference menu. Documentation on key bindings for braille devices is available on the brltty website.

Serial braille displays cannot safely be automatically detected (since that may damage some of them). You thus need to append the brltty=driver,port,table boot parameter to tell brltty which driver it should use. driver should be replaced by the two-letter driver code for your terminal (see the driver code list). port should be replaced by the name of the serial port the display is connected to, ttyS0 is the default. table is the name of the braille table to be used (see the table code list); the English table is the default. Note that the table can be changed later by entering the preference menu. Documentation on key bindings for braille devices is available on the brltty website.

Support for hardware speech synthesis devices is available only alongside support for graphical installer. You thus need to select the "Graphical install” entry in the boot menu.

Hardware speech synthesis devices cannot be automatically detected. You thus need to append the speakup.synth=driver boot parameter to tell speakup which driver it should use. driver should be replaced by the driver code for your device (see driver code list). The textual version of the installer will then be automatically selected, and support for the speech synthesis device will be automatically installed on the target system.

Some accessibility devices are actual boards that are plugged inside the machine and that read text directly from the video memory. To get them to work framebuffer support must be disabled by using the vga=normal fb=false boot parameter. This will however reduce the number of available languages.

If desired a textual version of the bootloader can be activated before adding the boot parameter by typing h Enter.

... Read more »

The easiest route for most people will be to use an Ubuntu CD. If you have a CD, and if your machine supports booting directly off the CD, great! Simply configure your system for booting off a CD as described in the section called "Boot Device Selection”, insert your CD, reboot, and proceed to the next chapter.

Note that certain CD drives may require special drivers, and thus be inaccessible in the early installation stages. If it turns out the standard way of booting off a CD doesn't work for your hardware, revisit this chapter and read about alternate kernels and installation methods which may work for you.

If you have problems booting, see the section called "Troubleshooting the Installation Process”.

To boot the installer from hard disk, you must first download and place the needed files as described in the section called "Preparing Files for Hard Disk Booting”.

If you intend to use the hard drive only for booting and then download everything over the network, you should download the netboot/ubuntu-installer/i386/initrd.gz file and its corresponding kernel netboot/ubuntu-installer/i386/linux. This will allow you to repartition the hard disk from which you boot the installer, although you should do so with care.

For LILO, you will need to configure two essential things in /etc/lilo.conf:

Here is a /etc/lilo.conf example:

image=/boot/newinstall/vmlinuz
 label=newinstall
 initrd=/boot/newinstall/initrd.gz

For more details, refer to the initrd(4) and lilo.conf(5) man pages. Now run lilo and reboot.

The procedure for GRUB is quite similar. Locate your menu.lst in the /boot/grub/ directory (or sometimes /boot/boot/grub/) and add an entry for the installer, for example (assuming /boot is on the first partition of the first disk in the system):

title New Install
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/newinstall/vmlinuz
initrd /boot/newinstall/initrd.gz

From here on, there should be no difference between GRUB or LILO.

... Read more »

The Ubuntu Installer supports automating installs via preconfiguration files. A preconfiguration file can be loaded from the network or from removable media, and used to fill in answers to questions asked during the installation process.

Full documentation on preseeding including a working example that you can edit is in Appendix B, Automating the installation using preseeding.

The Ubuntu installer has preliminary support for automating installs using Kickstart files, as designed by Red Hat for use in their Anaconda installer. This method is not as flexible as the preconfiguration file method above, but it requires less knowledge of how the installer works.

This section documents only the basics, and differences between Anaconda and the Ubuntu installer. Refer to the Red Hat documentation for detailed instructions.

To generate a Kickstart file, install the system-config-kickstart package and run system-config-kickstart. This offers you a graphical user interface to the various options available.

Once you have a Kickstart file, you can edit it if necessary, and place it on a web, FTP, or NFS server, or copy it onto the installer's boot media. Wherever you place the file, you need to pass a parameter to the installer at boot time to tell it to use the file.

To make the installer use a Kickstart file downloaded from a web or FTP server, add ks=http://url/to/ks.cfg or ks=ftp://url/to/ks.cfg respectively to the kernel boot parameters. This requires the installer to be able to set up the network via DHCP on the first connected interface without asking any questions; you may also need to add ksdevice=eth1 or similar if the installer fails to determine the correct interface automatically.

Similarly, to make the installer use a Kickstart file on an NFS server, add ks=nfs:server:/path/to/ks.cfg to the kernel boot parameters. The method supported by Anaconda of adding a plain "ks" boot parameter to work out the location of the Kickstart file from a DHCP response is not yet supported by the Ubuntu installer.

To place a Kickstart file on a CD, you would need to remaster the ISO image to include your Kickstart file, and add ks=cdrom:/path/to/ks.cfg to the kernel boot parameters. See the manual page for mkisofs for details. Alternatively, put the Kickstart file on a floppy, and add ks=floppy:/path/to/ks.cfg to the kernel boot parameters. ... Read more »

One free software DHCP server is ISC dhcpd. For Ubuntu, the dhcp3-server package is recommended. Here is a sample configuration file for it (see /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf):

option domain-name "example.com";
option domain-name-servers ns1.example.com;
option subnet-mask 255.255.255.0;
default-lease-time 600;
max-lease-time 7200;
server-name "servername";

subnet 192.168.1.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
 range 192.168.1.200 192.168.1.253;
 option routers 192.168.1.1;
}

host clientname {
 filename "/tftpboot.img";
 server-name "servername";
 next-server servername;
 hardware ethernet 01:23:45:67:89:AB;
 fixed-address 192.168.1.90;
} 
		
		... 
		
			Read more »
		

This section explains how to add to or even replace an existing linux installation using either LILO or GRUB.

At boot time, both bootloaders support loading in memory not only the kernel, but also a disk image. This RAM disk can be used as the root file-system by the kernel.

Copy the following files from the Ubuntu archives to a convenient location on your hard drive, for instance to /boot/newinstall/.

Finally, to configure the bootloader proceed to the section called "Booting from Linux Using LILO or GRUB”.