Ubuntu Mate installation on a 10 year old eMachines desktop

 

The next step in our adventure was to install Ubuntu Mate onto the server. In the past, I would have said this would be the easiest part of the process: Simply pop in the burned disk, boot, and we're off to the races. Or just use a USB stick and the LinuxLive USB Creator, as I did recently when fixing my parents laptop. However, for whatever reason, this proved to take many hours over several days just to get to the point where Ubuntu was installed.

The system is a 10 year old eMachines desktop that I purchased just after returning from my LDS mission to Madagascar, model W3410 (it looks basically identical to the W3400 pictured above). eMachines used to be a really terrible computer manufacturer, but by 2005 they had improved the quality of their parts enough that I was willing to try one out. Over the years, the system has functioned well. I had the company replace the DVD drive once or twice while it was under warranty, and after the warranty period I ended up replacing the drive with an LG (which has functioned ever since). I also added a 1 GB stick of RAM to the system soon after I got it, as the 512 MB it came with just wasn't enough. But other than those things, I have had no other issues.

My problems began when I tried to boot using the DVD drive. No matter what I tried, I could not get the system to boot from a disc. I changed the boot order in the BIOS, and also selected the boot device at startup, but in all cases the system just skipped right past to the hard drive or the network boot.

So I decided to just move to booting from a USB stick. Unfortunately, that came with another set of problems. When I tried to boot from a USB flash drive, I found that only when the drive appeared as a Hard Disk in the BIOS and boot menu was I able to boot from it. If it appeared as a Removable drive, it would just skip past it even if I chose the device from the boot menu.

Through some trial and error, I found two things:

• First, if I used a 1 GB drive or smaller, then the USB drive appeared as a hard disk and was bootable. However, my 4 GB drive appeared as a removable device. (I didn't have a 2 GB drive to test, which may have been successful based on some similar situations I read online.) 

• Second, even the 4 GB drive appeared as a hard disk and (I think) was bootable if it was formatted as NTFS. It was only if it was formatted as FAT32 that it was recognized by the BIOS as a removable device. 

Combined, these two facts caused me significant difficulties in getting Ubuntu Mate loaded. The iso for Ubuntu Mate is over 1.1 GB in size, and wouldn't fit on the 1 GB drive. But I couldn't use the 4GB drive because it isn't simple to create an NTFS boot drive for Linux (it may be possible, but it looks to take a lot of work).

I attempted several different things to try to get this to work. Below is a brief list of things I tried that did not work:

• Booting using Plop Linux, with the intent to bootstrap (I think I used that word right??) into the Ubuntu Mate Live USB
• Booting using Super Grub2 Disk
• Shrinking the primary partition of the 4 GB drive to less than 2 GB in an attempt to get it to appear as a hard disk
• Shrinking the standard Ubuntu Mate install by using squashfs tools to open up the filesystem.squashfs file and removing the LibreOffice and Thunderbird programs, as I could just install them later. I thought this might work, but it ended up crapping out during the install due to the modifications (used squashfs tools) 

I'm sure there is some way to load a smaller Linux distro, and then boot from there to the Ubuntu Mate installation, but I didn't know how and couldn't find any step-by-step guides. Plop should have worked, but it seemed really finicky and I couldn't get it to work. Additionally, the text in several of the windows was impossible to read (blurry and small). See http://askubuntu.com/questions/2146/how-can-i-boot-from-a-16-gb-pendrive-with-some-old-bios. Also note http://askubuntu.com/questions/154565/how-to-install-ubuntu-from-within-other-linux-distributions-without-reboot, which has a link to https://help.ubuntu.com/14.04/installation-guide/i386/apds04.html, which shows how to do this, but it's all manual at the terminal.

After spending time over a couple of days, I finally had a huge "duh" moment, and I found the minimal installation for Ubuntu Mate that just downloads everything during the install. This mini.iso is much smaller, and easily fit on the 1 GB drive. Finally, I found the solution I had been seeking. It's not as pretty an install process, and it takes a little more work to get going, but the instructions on the Ubuntu Mate page are excellent, and I now have a working Ubuntu Mate installation!

Next up: Network and system goals and objectives

Note: This post is part of a loose series. Go here for a full list of all posts in the series.