Network booting with GRUB

[voinivich]

Hi, I am having some problems booting with GRUB.
I am trying to boot the latest version of ubuntu onto an old laptop that doesn't have a CD drive, so i am resorting to network booting. I am using the linux kernel found in the install/netboot/ubuntu-installer/i386 directory with the corresponding initrd.gz. I went into GRUB's menu.lst and added an install with the basic mod found in the install manual for ubuntu and edited it for the kernel and initrd.gz. I can get GRUB to boot and to bring me to the menu, but when i try to boot up the kernel it gets up to a point where it tells me it's loading the Filesystem and then it tells me:

Out of Memory: Killed process 782 (cp).
Terminated
Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!

Thanks for any help that anyone can offer!

[RustamB]

Your amount of system memory is low to load installation modules. Create and mount swap partition in order to use it during the installation phase.

[voinivich]

Thanks for the reply RustamB.

Unfortunatly the computer is only running DOS right now so im trying to install ubuntu through that. Can i make the partitions through DOS?

[TerminaMorte]

If your computer is using DOS, I'll have to assume it's very old. Same thing with the memory error you got there.

Ubuntu will not work for you (and I'm not sure why you would want Ubuntu in this case)

I assume you have a floppy + CD-Rom drive (but probably can't boot from CD-Rom).

http://damnsmalllinux.org/

DSL is debian, just like Ubuntu

Grab the bootfloppy.img (and write it to a floppy with rawrite), and the ISO.

It's nice and small (50mb ISO), and should run on very old hardware (got it working on a 486 /w 16mb ram

If, for some reason, you are unwilling to install a CD-Rom drive, you could extract the 'KNOPPIX' folder from the ISO onto your hard drive, and boot/install with the floppy drive using the cheatcode 'dsl fromhd=/dev/hda1' where hda1 is the DOS partition as linux detects it.

[voinivich]

Thanks for the help, TerminaMorte.

The computer i am running did at one point have windows 95 on it.
Unfortunatly, there was some disc compression problems that forced me to format the c: drive. Now i can only run a very bare bones version of DOS running off of a floppy. I have only an external floppy, no CD drive.

The computer has 32mgs of ram, will that be enough for ubuntu or will i have to run DSL?

Thanks again.

[drakebasher]

With your specs and hardware, if you have another box running Linux, I gotta suggest you look at Slackware. You can still get version 8.1 with the 2.4 kernel from LinuxCD.org for about $3 + shipping. You can put the CD into the other machine, boot your laptop with the 5 boot floppies and then do a network install from one machine to the other. Or, with IP forwarding on the other machine, you could do a net install straight from the web. I did the former before I knew anything about networking. Maybe you could do all this with the current version of Slackware as well.

[voinivich]

Thanks for the help drakebasher, i'll have to look into that!!!