installing Ubuntu on my new Asus P5KPL-AM (not yet successful)

[Kragen Javier Sitaker]

I decided I'd better get a new machine; my current laptop ("thrifty") is
10 years old.  So I bought an Asus P5KPL-AM motherboard, an Intel
Celeron E1200 1.6GHz dual-core processor (really a slow Core Duo with
512kB of cache), a 2GB DIMM of Kingston DDR2-800 RAM, a cheap-junk power
supply and USB keyboard, a 500GB SATA disk, and a 1280×1024 LCD monitor.
No case yet.  At this point the total cost is roughly US$400.

So far I haven't been able to get anything installed on it due to lack
of suitable install media.  Here is a list the significant mistakes I
know I have made so far:

- ATX 12V power supplies require that you connect *two* power cables to
  the motherboard, the big wide one and the little 12V square one.  Just
  one won't make it boot or even POST.

- I spent far, far too long actually buying the thing, in parts.
  Assembling the parts was easy and fun (aside from the problem above),
  but comparison-shopping for them really sucked.

- I probably should have just bought a CD-ROM drive instead of trying to
  do the install from a USB key.

- I tried to use various automated programs to make a bootable USB key
  instead of doing it myself.  Given a USB key already partitioned with
  a single FAT16 partition, you just need to `syslinux /dev/sda1` and
  copy an Ubuntu `vmlinuz` and `initrd.gz` onto it and put this in
  `syslinux.cfg`:

        default vmlinuz
        append initrd=initrd.gz

  However, I don't currently have a working flash drive large enough to
  load an Ubuntu install CD image from, and for whatever reason, the
  Ubuntu `initrd.gz` doesn't automatically load the Debian Etch netinst
  ISO I put on the flash drive.

Here are some obstacles I've run into:

- The 2GB Kingston/Trend Micro flash key I bought for this purpose for
  AR$49 (US$14) doesn't actually work.  I'm currently using Beatrice's
  256MB flash key.

- The `liveusb` package doesn't work because of a variety of bugs; as
  mentioned before, I should have just done it myself.

- However, it took me a while to find that out, because there are no
  tarballs of `liveusb`.  You have to check it out from source control
  using `bzr`.

- The version of `bzr` in Debian Etch is too old to access the `liveusb`
  repository on Launchpad, so I installed `bzr` from backports.

- But my backports GPG ring was out of date, so I had to update it.

- Thrifty (a Thinkpad T20) won't get past POST with either of my CD-ROM
  drives plugged in.  This is a new feature in the last few months.

- But you can't plug a CD-ROM drive into it once it's already booted;
  Linux won't notice it.

- You can plug a CD-ROM drive into it after it's out of the BIOS but
  before Linux has scanned for IDE devices, and that mostly works.

- Except that both of the CD-ROM drives I have for it can't reliably
  read the Ubuntu 8.10 CD that Beatrice burned on her Mac, probably
  because they're 10 years old this year.  So there was really no point
  in getting one of them to work.

- The AMI BIOS on the "mother" (as they call it here) doesn't really
  have a "boot from USB" option in the setup.  You have to press F8 at
  boot time to get a list of possible boot devices including the USB
  stick.

- But first you have to configure the BIOS to boot from it as if it were
  a floppy drive: press DEL to get into setup, and in the Advanced tab,
  under "‣ USB Configuration", under "‣ USB Mass Storage Device
  Configuration", set the "Emulation Type" to "Forced FDD".  Neither
  "Floppy" nor "Hard Disk" nor "Auto" works; all result in the error
  message "Missing operating system".  "CDROM", the other option, just
  results in hard system hangs during boot.

- The Ubuntu `initrd.gz` doesn't automatically load the Debian Etch
  netinst ISO I put on the flash drive.  I was able to mount it myself
  with commands like the following:

        modprobe vfat
	mkdir /mnt
	mount -t vfat /dev/sdb1 /mnt
	modprobe loop
	losetup -f /mnt/debian-40r6-amd64-netinst.iso
	mkdir /cdrom
	modprobe iso9660
	mount -t iso9660 /dev/loop0 /cdrom
	cp /cdrom/install.amd/initrd.gz /tmp
	cd /tmp
	gzip -d initrd.gz
	cpio -i < initrd
	chroot . bin/ash

  I'm not sure if all of that ceremony was needed, but it did work.
  Unfortunately I don't know enough about how the Debian netinst disk
  works to figure out how to run it from here.