Recently when I tried to upgrade my ASUS Eee PC from Ubuntu 7.10 to 8.04, it made a complete mess — 4GB internal drive is just not enough to hold all the applications, data + new packages for upgrade. So instead of trying to fix a borked Ubuntu installation, I tried to install Hardy Heron from scratch again.
EeeUser Wiki has a complete instruction on how to get Xubuntu 8.04 onto a USB key so Eee PC can bootstrap from it. The only problem is — it is too complicated and it does not work (for me at least). Downloading the Xubuntu ISO is the easy bit, but making a bootable USB key is PITA. I was booting the Xubuntu live CD from VMWare, follow the instruction to dump the content onto a mounted USB key — doesn’t work. Download the utilities from Pendrivelinux.com to prepare the USB key — doesn’t work.
I guess what I should have read is the this document instead, which points me to UNetbootin, the Universal Netboot Installer. Download a 3MB Windows executable. Run it. Point it to the downloaded Xubuntu ISO and the drive letter for the USB. Click Ok — and it’s done! Booted my Eee PC with it and half an hour later it is now running Hardy Heron. Too easy.
You’re the best Scott – you just saved me a buncha time wit this post!
Thanks!
Thank you so much !!
I was wasting so much time with the Pendrivelinux approach!
Hi Scott, I have tried to do the same thing as you but for linux peppermint one, I got my usb drive ready with unetbootin on windows, but for some reason when it does nothing. I can’t figure what is going wrong. Everyone says that if you set the os intalling to start through F2 it should just boot up but nothing is happening. Got any guesses for me?