Old/new I8000 #1

I have 2 old Dell Inspiron 8000 laptops which even if they are around 6 years old still have some nice features:

1600×1200 screen resolution
very good quality sound card compared to the one of my new D820 (maestro3 versus intel_hda)

Both of them are running linux since a very long time but I wanted to install a fresh/clean new version on one of them in order to be used as a music, internet station at home since I am afraid that backpack carrying the D820 each day on a bicycle will finally prove fatal to it. This describes some of the steps I took.

Network install

First thing to note is that the laptop CD drive is no longer working but fortunately there is a diskette drive which still works. It was never really used. It was a tricky thing to find an available diskette but the romanian fiscal system still relies on them so I found one in the fiscal declarations :)

Install tftp – server

You require a tftp server. In this case it runs via xinet.d

apt-get install tftpd-hpa tftp-hpa xinetd

create /etc/xinetd.d/tftp

service tft{        
disable     = no        
socket_type = dgram        
wait        = yes        
user        = root        
server      = /usr/sbin/in.tftpd        
server_args = -v -s /var/lib/tftpboot       
only_from   = 192.168.0.0/24 #change here to your network        
interface   = 192.168.0.5    #change here to the interface you wish to bind  
}

Start the xinet service.

Download Ubuntu netboot image – server

wget -c http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/gutsy/main/installer-i386/current/images/netboot/netboot.tar.gztar xvfz netboot.tar.gz -C /var/lib/tftpboot/chown -R nobody:nogroup /var/lib/tftpboot

You can test the tftp server from a remote client in order to make sure
the files are accessible because the network boot will not give you
much information if the image is not available. In this configuration the /pxelinux.0 file should be available.

Configure DHCP – server

You will need to configure your DNS server for the network boot. I am using ISC dhcpd 3 and since my DHCP server is configured to allocate IP-addresses based on the MAC address of each computer my entry looked as following

host gu { 
next-server 192.168.0.5;  #the tftp server 
filename "/pxelinux.0"; 
hardware ethernet 00:30:50:88:A6:03; 
fixed-address 192.168.0.108;
}

Create netboot disk – client

I remember that creating the netboot disk required to download and compile etherboot for your network card. You still need to find your network card but now you can download a ready to use floppy image from http://www.rom-o-matic.net/ just select the last version of etherboot and the exact network card you have and you will just need to do a

cat image.zdsk > /dev/fd0

to create your floppy disk.

Install Ubuntu

Now just boot the floppy and if everything went ok your installation will begin. There is not much to say about this step as the install is standard. I’ve installed just some basic packages and XFCE4 for a lighter desktop.

Network install#

Install tftp – server#

Download Ubuntu netboot image – server#

Configure DHCP – server#

Create netboot disk – client#

Install Ubuntu#