I've never been able to test this out, primarily because my laptop, a P3-600, has no working CD drive; the one that came with the machine in 2001 has become rather temperamental and reads something like one CD out of 100! The laptop has been running Debian for quite some time as it was possible to install that over the internet using a couple of floppies to boot.

For some time I could not experiment with the laptop as I needed it for my own use - I was stuck in bed with a broken leg and sitting at my workstation was a painful exercise..

But now the leg is well, I depend only on my workstation, and so I decided to look for a way of installing Ubuntu and seeing how good or bad it was when it comes to laptops.

I couldn't find any method of using floppies to install Ubuntu over the internet.

One of the HOWTOs I found described a method of using PXE (preboot execution environment) to boot a machine over a network and then install the distribution. It involves setting up an FTP server (in this case tftpd-hpa) and a DHCP server and then serving the boot files to the PC/laptop on which one wants to install Ubuntu.

To quote from the guide itself, what one needs are: a bootloader which is mentioned in the dhcpd.conf file (pxelinux.0), a configuration file for the bootloader (default or MAC specific), a kernel with an initrd file (vmlinuz, initrd.gz) and an image of the base system (mini.iso).

After setting up the DHCP server and the FTP server, I realised that the laptop BIOS does not support booting from the network; hence, I looked at using Etherboot. Using this method, one can put a single network card-specific image on a floppy and once one boots from that, the machine in question looks for an IP from any machine on the network offering one.

Here again, I floundered; despite the DHCP server offering an IP, which was specific to the MAC address of the network card on the laptop, all I could see on the laptop was "No IP". I tried with five different images but then had to admit defeat.

What does one do in such a case? There are plenty of guides to boot Linux over a network when one is running Windows; nobody has thought of the possibility that someone who is using one Linux distribution may want to try out a second one and needs to boot over a network.

So I adapted some of the steps in one of the guides and came up with my own solution.

I needed two files to boot the laptop into an Ubuntu installation - linux and initrd.gz. Both were located at this address .

I moved both files into the boot directory on the laptop and added a couple of lines to the existing grub configuration on the laptop (which, remember, was running Debian). Grub, for the uninitiated, is what most modern Linuxes use to boot - it has a rather pompous name: grand unified boot loader.

The grub configuration file in question is called menu.lst. What I added is given below:

title <anything_you_like>
root (hd0,0)
kernel (hd0,0)/boot/linux vga=normal ramdisk_size=14972 root=/dev/rd/0 rw --
initrd (hd0,0)/boot/initrd.gz

---

When I booted the laptop it gave me the added option (along with entries for all the Debian kernels) of using my new grub entry to boot. Once I chose this, the installation got under way.
 
I only panicked once, when the downloading of software seemed to get stuck at 6 per cent for a long time; this proved to be a false alarm and the whole thing went throught to completion. Ubuntu was finally installed on the laptop.

The wireless capabilities of Ubuntu, however, proved disappointing. The wireless card I have is a NetGear WG511v2; there are no Linux drivers so one has to use a wrapper and the Windows drivers to get it to work.

On Debian, I had used a manual procedure which is outlined at this address : it worked without a problem.

On Ubuntu, there are a few, seemingly more polished, ways of doing the same thing but the results weren't as good.

I installed the necessary wrapper and some additional needed software; this resulted in a menu item called "Windows wireless drivers" being created. I used the graphic utility that this called up to install the Netgear driver and was then presented with a puzzle after I quit and restarted the utility - there is an entry where the presence of a wireless card should be indicated but it says: "Hardware present: No."

The funny thing is that when I highlighted this and changed its properties (using an option titled Configure Network) to enter the IP address which I wanted the wireless card to have, it was accepted! But other required details like the encryption key and name of the wireless network, though also entered in the same place, were not accepted.

Initially when I used the laptop, I had to enter the encryption key and network name manually to go out on the net through my wireless access point.

But later I found that when I manually commented out all the settings for the ethernet card on the laptop, the wireless connection worked without any intervention!

Funny and certainly not logical. But I'll probably keep Ubuntu on the laptop until the next release (Grinning Gorilla/Gutsy Gibbon/Generous Giraffe) and see how good Ubuntu is at a seamless upgrade.