Introduction
Even though I have already written, UNetbootin – Installing Linux without a CD, I hope that others can benefit from UNetbootin when installing Ubuntu 8.04. I never do upgrades but always fresh installs as I like to do some house-cleaning when upgrading to a new version of a OS. As I have a separate /home partition this doesn’t affect any of my settings and only takes 2 hours which is comparable to the upgrade option from within 7.10. The process is also made easy since I have a TODO list to install all the programs I use all the time: Favorite programs – Linux
What does UNetbootin do?
UNetbootin creates a boot option in GRUB or the Windows bootloader that will download the installation files directly from the internet and start the installation. I find the very attractive since I don’t have to download or burn any CD’s. It works from within both Windows and Linux and there is a lot of distributions which can be installs this way beside Ubuntu 8.04. The process is also ideal with my IBM Thinkpad X30 subnotebook which doesn’t have any optical drives.
Installation
The first thing to install is the dependencies of UNetbootin:
root@dirac:/home/tjansson# aptitude install ms-sys syslinux p7zip-full libqt4-gui
Download the program from:
unetbootin.sourceforge.net
The next step is to make downloaded program executable and afterwards run it with administrative rights:
tjansson@dirac:~$chmod +x unetbootin-linux-191 tjansson@dirac:~$sudo ./unetbootin-linux-191
The next thing to do is to select the distribution to install and where to install it on the hard disk or on a USB-pen.
After selection the program will downloaded the needed boot files from the internet.
Finally you are asked to reboot to start the installation process of the Ubuntu 8.04.
Grub or the Windows bootloader now has a a special boot option called “UNetbootin”.
When “UNetbootin” is selected a text based (ncurses) installer starts.
I guess this would intimidate some newcomers but it is really as easy as everything else.
The standard questions are then answered and the partition setup part is done. One thing I did before I ran the installer was to check the current partition layout by writing:
root@bohr:~# df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sda3 9,7G 6,7G 2,5G 73% / varrun 1014M 112K 1014M 1% /var/run varlock 1014M 12K 1014M 1% /var/lock udev 1014M 96K 1014M 1% /dev devshm 1014M 0 1014M 0% /dev/shm lrm 1014M 33M 981M 4% /lib/modules/2.6.22-14-generic/volatile /dev/sda6 186G 125G 53G 71% /home
Which tells me that /dev/sda6 is the partition the holds my /home folders. With this knowledge I can chose to only install wipe the current / partition and keep all my user files and settings. 🙂
The rest of the install is quite straight forward and there is only one real caveat – remember to chose either Ubuntu, Kubuntu or Xubuntu desktop during the “Software selection”. Otherwise the installer will not install a graphical interface which is easily fixed but somewhat intimidating for new users.
Final words
I think this is a amazing piece of software. I have been wanting software that did just this for many years now and I am really happy to get rid of the floppy disks and CDs. For newcomers the option install UNetbootin from Windows is really something – since it saves the user of the hassle of burning CD.
This is great to know and pretty easy for new users. It’s much better to do a net install if you can because you don’t waste bandwidth downloading a CD (with stuff you don’t need) then immediately downloading updates. I prefer to do mine manually at the GRub command line.. I wrote up a howto here: http://www.ibeentoubuntu.com/2008/04/reinstalling-without-iso-image.html
Kanon artikel Рjeg har smidt et link til den p̴ http://ubuntu-news.net/modules/news/article.php?storyid=4441
Sig til hvis du laver flere Ubuntu-artikler, så linker jeg gerne.
/Christian
Excellent guide. I also needed the package libqt4-gui for things to work. Which mirror do you recommend? Are the all equally fast?
Hartvig60: Yes I guess you need that library when not running KDE as I. I will update the article. Thanks for the help. 🙂
The german (de) and danish (dk) mirrors are overloaded today at least – so I went for the swedish (se) which was really fast – I got 8.0Mb/s this morning when installing on friends computer.
Hmm РJeg har et problem, kan ikke f̴ sudo ./unetbootin-linux-191
til at virke ? Den siger Command not found ?
Nikolaj: Har du hentet unetbooting-191 fra hjemmesiden og er du i samme folder som filen du hentede fra nettet? Hvis man prøver at kører et program som ikke eksistere, så vil Linux svare på den måde som du så:
tjansson@dirac:~$sudo ./fil-der-ikke-eksisterere.shsudo: ./fil-der-ikke-eksisterere.sh: command not found
Så check endnu en gang at filen unetbooting-191 er i den folder du står.
Hi. I had a really hard time making this work on Ubuntu 6.06 so I just wanted to post the solution. When I tried to run unetbootin I got: “symbol lookup error: ./unetbootin-linux-191: undefined symbol: _ZN12QApplicationC1ERiPPcbi”
This means that unetbootin have some symbolic links which taget can’t be found. For some reason my Qt4 libraries were bad and could not be updated further. Could not compile unetbootin source code either. Solution was to download and compile Qt4 manually (~3h) and make links to the needed libaries (as root):
ln -s /usr/local/Trolltech/Qt-4.4.0/lib/libQtGui.so.4.4.0 /usr/lib/libQtGui.so.4
ln -s /usr/local/Trolltech/Qt-4.4.0/lib/libQtNetwork.so.4.4.0 /usr/lib/libQtNetwork.so.4
ln -s /usr/local/Trolltech/Qt-4.4.0/lib/libQtCore.so.4.4.0 /usr/lib/libQtCore.so.4
So now I’m 2 versions happier 🙂
Hep, jeg skal til at installere Ubuntu på min maskine. Men vil have at det skal ligge på sit helt eget drev (som lige pt. er helt nyformateret og uden andre filer på).
Kan dét også lade sig gøre at vælge den metode under installationen?
Alle guides på nettet snakker om at man skal partitionere etc etc, men kan jeg ikke bare have det på hver sin hdd ?
AoOs: Du kan sagens lægge Linux på en harddisk og Windows på en anden. Ubuntu installeren vil dog skrive en boot-loader i starten af din primære hardisk, som giver dig muligheden for at vælge mellem Linux og Windows under opstart.
Jeg ville dog anbefale dig at se lidt på partionering. Det kan virkeligt godt betale sig at lægge /home partion på sin egen partion, da man på den måde kan bevare alle sine brugerelaterede filer under geninstalleringener uden nogen for besvær.