instLux, installing linux on a machine with no cd or floppy drive

I was very bored of my toshiba libretto L5 as WinXP was getting crazy slow on it so I never bothered to use it. I wanted to put Ubuntu on it but the live cd or the install would not recognise the PCMCIA cd rom I have.

Then I found instLux which installs a mini Grub onto your windows partition which you boot into. There are 4 versions of instLux, two for Ubuntu and two for OpenSuse. Each distro has a Net install and a CD ROM install version. I tried the CD ROM version first but it couldn’t find the CD rom either.

I booted back into windows and installed the Ubuntu Net install version of instLux. At first attempt, it fried my hard disk after stalling at 6% of install. A quick Win XP reinstall, reboot and retry was successful. I now have Ubuntu 6.06 installed with a very quick gnome theme with all icons turned off. Epiphany is super quick and will be my browser of choice on this machine (I haven’t installed Galeon yet though and Dillo is just minging). I did try to upgrade to Edgy Eft but it failed and after the hassles with the upgrade on my iBook (X wouldn’t start untill I managed to install the ATI drivers again), I’m not going to try again.  It’s a joy to use the machine again.

I’ve had a few freezes and hard reboots but it’s a hell of a lot faster than clunky win XP.