Ubuntu, Round 2

The thumb drive image was corrupt.

I don't know why, but after I copy the boot sector image to /def/sdf, it ends up changing the size of the volume to 16 Meg. Weird.

After re-trying that in vain a couple of times, I decided to follow the long way around, which involved installing syslinux, running that (there's a win32/ subdir with an EXE in it, takes a drive letter as an arg), and then copy "files from the Ubuntu archives" to the disk. Archives? WHAT archives?!? No clue.

[dig dig]

Oh, you mean THESE archives. Okay. ...But where the heck ARE They?!? No clue.

[poke poke]

It looks like two of the files are available, but the other one (which I guess is optional, really) isn't there. Hmmn. It occurs to me that the image that I unpacked (and which mucked up the format of my stick) has these files on them. Perhaps I'll grab another (small) stick and unload the image onto it, copy the files to my HD, and yada yada. Sure... let's do that and be safe. -Ish.

The smaller stick came up with a different drive letter (why?), but was still mounted on /dsv/sdf, so I copied the image over to it, ejected it, put it back in, noted that it, too, was reduced to 16 Meg, and copied all the files over to the disk. So far, so good.

Format the small stick (to bring it back to 64 Meg, grr), and eject it. Pop the big 'un back in. Copy all the files over to it. Whee. I peek at the file that was missing from the archives and see that, yeah, I probably wanted that... it seems to have prompts and what-not, probably making the install easier. I hope. There's a note on the Ubuntu site about how this file should contain a line saying "default vmlinuz", but I guess this is bullshit: the default directive (install) seems to point to a viable set of commands. I trust in the file as-is. Last step: copy the ISO image over to the (now big) thumb-drive. This takes 4 minutes: it's a big one.

And now it's time to reboot.

If you don't hear from me in 4 hours, call the President.