Installing Xubuntu Lucid on a Viglen MPC-L
Installing Xubuntu on a Viglen MPC-L isn't easy, and what we had to do didn't follow exactly the guide we used, so here's the differences.
We used Tony Whitmore's blog post as a guide for installing Xubuntu on Miia's new Viglen MPC-L machine, and although it was a useful start, I think some of the changes between Ubuntu and Xubuntu, or some of the installation disc updates to Ubuntu Lucid (10.04) mean a slightly different process needed to be followed.
- Downloaded the Xubuntu i386 desktop ISO.
- Turned it into a bootable USB stick using the "Startup Disk Creator" program in System Tools.
- Booted the MPC-L off the USB stick. (N.B. It will only boot from USB sticks inserted into the rear USB sockets.)
- At the splash screen, selected the advanced boot options (F6), and selected expert mode and when prompted for the boot string, type in "pnpbios=no noapic acpi=off" to the end.
- Install as normal.
- At the end of the installation procedure, at the "reboot" prompt, reboot (it's the only option), but keep the USB stick in - The system won't boot on it's own right now, since it's got the wrong kernel.
- Go into the LiveCD mode (the top boot option), remembering to give the same boot options as before.
- When you get to the desktop, open a terminal.
- Since you've rebooted, you now need to remount all of the partitions the installer configured into their place within /target. We managed this by:
sudo fdisk -l - Find the relevant partitions (probably sda...)
sudo mount /dev/sda1 /target - Do the same for any other partitions you created (eg. /target/home) - In the terminal session I set up a chroot to install a suitable kernel:
sudo mount -o bind /proc /target/proc
sudo mount -o bind /dev /target/dev
sudo mount -o bind /dev/pts /target/dev/pts
sudo mount -o bind /sys /target/sys
sudo chroot /target - You are now inside your newly installed version of Xubuntu, almost like a virtual machine. It only exists within that terminal window.
- Make sure your DNS settings are correct, otherwise you'll have to edit your package sources to use IP addresses.
- Installed a kernel: sudo apt-get install linux-386
- Once the kernel has installed, edit /etc/default/grub and add the same boot options as before to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT line after "quiet splash ..."
- sudo update-grub2 to commit your changes to the grub config.
- Exit the chroot and terminal (type exit twice). Then reboot, taking out the USB stick.
Hopefully this helps with a 'smooth' install. Once it's booted into the working system you can uninstall the linux-generic package, since you're using the linux-386 kernel.
