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 Section 3.6.2, “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 Section 5.3, “Troubleshooting the Install Process”.

To boot the installer from hard disk, you must first download and place the needed files as described in Section 4.3, “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/initrd.gz file and its corresponding kernel. 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
       root=/dev/ram
       append="devfs=mount,dall ramdisk_size=17000

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 (sometimes in the /boot/boot/grub/), add the following lines:

title  New Install
kernel (hd0,0)/boot/newinstall/vmlinuz root=/dev/ram devfs=mount,dall ramdisk_size=17000
initrd (hd0,0)/boot/newinstall/initrd.gz

and reboot. Note that the value of the ramdisksize may need to be adjusted for the size of the initrd image. From now on, there should be no difference between GRUB or LILO.

Booting from the network requires that you have a network connection and a TFTP network boot server (DHCP, RARP, or BOOTP).

The installation method to support network booting is described in Section 4.4, “Preparing Files for TFTP Net Booting”.

There are various ways to do a TFTP boot on i386.

When the installer boots, you will be presented with the boot prompt, boot:. You can do two things at the boot: prompt. You can press the function keys F1 through F10 to view a few pages of helpful information, or you can press Enter to boot the system.

Information on boot parameters which might be useful can be found by pressing F3 through F7. If you add any parameters to the boot command line, be sure to type the boot method (the default is linux) and a space before the first parameter (e.g., linux floppy=thinkpad). If you simply press Enter, that's the same as typing linux without any special parameters.

Some systems have floppies with ``inverted DCLs''. If you receive errors reading from the floppy, even when you know the floppy is good, try the parameter floppy=thinkpad.

On some systems, such as the IBM PS/1 or ValuePoint (which have ST-506 disk drivers), the IDE drive may not be properly recognized. Again, try it first without the parameters and see if the IDE drive is recognized properly. If not, determine your drive geometry (cylinders, heads, and sectors), and use the parameter hd=cylinders,heads,sectors.

If you have a very old machine, and the kernel hangs after saying Checking 'hlt' instruction..., then you should try the no-hlt boot argument, which disables this test.

If your screen begins to show a weird picture while the kernel boots, eg. pure white, pure black or colored pixel garbage, your system may contain a problematic video card which does not switch to the framebuffer mode properly. Then you can use the boot parameter debian-installer/framebuffer=false or video=vga16:off to disable the framebuffer console. Only the english language will be available during the installation due to limited console features. See Section 5.2, “Boot Parameters” for details.

Some laptop models produced by Dell are known to crash when PCMCIA device detection tries to access some hardware addresses. Other laptops may display similar problems. If you experience such a problem and you don't need PCMCIA support during the installation, you can disable PCMCIA using the hw-detect/start_pcmcia=false boot parameter. You can then configure PCMCIA after the installation is completed and exclude the resource range causing the problems.

Alternatively, you can boot the installer in expert mode. You will then be asked to enter the resource range options your hardware needs. For example, if you have one of the Dell laptops mentioned above, you should enter exclude port 0x800-0x8ff here. There is also a list of some common resource range options in the System resource settings section of the PCMCIA HOWTO. Note that you have to omit the commas, if any, when you enter this value in the installer.

The kernel normally tries to install USB modules and the USB keyboard driver in order to support some non-standard USB keyboards. However, there are some broken USB systems where the driver hangs on loading. A possible workaround may be disabling the USB controller in your mainboard BIOS setup. Another option is passing the debian-installer/probe/usb=false parameter at the boot prompt, which will prevent the modules from being loaded.