Besides installing from a bootable CD, Ubuntu can be installed using other methods as well, which might prove handy in some circumstances. For instance, you might find yourself in the situation when you need to install Ubuntu on one or more machines with no CD-ROM drives, but with an active network connection. For that, you will need another machine on the network that will provide the installation files to other computers on the LAN, through the network. However, in order to perform a successful network install, your computers must support booting from the network.
You should follow this guide if: - you have to install Ubuntu on a machine with no CD-ROM drive but with an active network connection - this machine provides the 'boot from network' option in its BIOS - you have access to another network machine that's already running Ubuntu
INSTALL FROM NETWORK SERVER
First of all, you'll need to set-up the server, which is the machine already running Ubuntu. On this machine, you'll install the FTP, HTTP and DHCP servers, which will allow the client machine to connect to the server and fetch the installation files and package repositories. To install these services, open a terminal and type:
$ sudo mkdir /var/lib/tftpboot/ubuntu
$ sudo mount -o loop ubuntu-7.04-alternate-i386.iso /var/lib/tftpboot/ubuntu
$ sudo ln -s /var/lib/tftpboot/ubuntu/
$ sudo ln -s /media/cdrom /var/www/ubuntu
$ sudo mv dhcpd.conf dhcpd.conf.old
$ sudo wget http://download2.softpedia.com:8081/linux/dhcpd.conf
subnet and netmask - your network subnet and netmask range - an IP from this range will be randomly assigned to the client machine domain-name-server - enter here your DNS servers
Reload the dhcpd config file:
INSTALL FROM HARD DISK
For this method, you'll need to already have a working Linux system on the machine on which you want to install the new Feisty system. This method provides a faster and more usable system because the installer is running from a hard drive rather than from a CD.
First of all, you need to use Gparted to create a new primary partition and format it to ext3. For example, let's say that the partition is /dev/hda3. You will need to copy the ISO's contents over to the new partition:
$ sudo mount -o loop /path/to/ubuntu-7.04-desktop-i386.iso /tmp/installcd
$ sudo mkdir /mnt/installer
$ sudo mount /dev/hda3 /mnt/installer
$ sudo cp -r /tmp/installcd/* /mnt/installer
$ sudo umount /tmp/installcd
root (hd0,2)
kernel /casper/vmlinuz boot=casper root=/dev/ram ramdisk_size=1048576 rw
initrd /casper/initrd.gz
Next, reboot and choose 'disk-instaler' from the grub boot menu.