The easiest route for most people will be to use an Ubuntu CD. If you have a CD, and if your machine supports booting directly off the CD, great! Simply configure your system for booting off a CD as described in the section called “Boot Device Selection”, insert your CD, reboot, and proceed to the next chapter.

Note that certain CD drives may require special drivers, and thus be inaccessible in the early installation stages. If it turns out the standard way of booting off a CD doesn't work for your hardware, revisit this chapter and read about alternate kernels and installation methods which may work for you.

If you have problems booting, see the section called “Troubleshooting the Installation Process”.

To boot the installer from hard disk, you must first download and place the needed files as described in the section called “Preparing Files for Hard Disk Booting”.

If you intend to use the hard drive only for booting and then download everything over the network, you should download the netboot/ubuntu-installer/i386/initrd.gz file and its corresponding kernel netboot/ubuntu-installer/i386/linux. This will allow you to repartition the hard disk from which you boot the installer, although you should do so with care.

For LILO, you will need to configure two essential things in /etc/lilo.conf:

Here is a /etc/lilo.conf example:

image=/boot/newinstall/vmlinuz
       label=newinstall
       initrd=/boot/newinstall/initrd.gz

For more details, refer to the initrd(4) and lilo.conf(5) man pages. Now run lilo and reboot.

The procedure for GRUB is quite similar. Locate your menu.lst in the /boot/grub/ directory (sometimes in the /boot/boot/grub/), add the following lines:

title  New Install
kernel (hd0,0)/boot/newinstall/vmlinuz
initrd (hd0,0)/boot/newinstall/initrd.gz

and reboot.

Note that the value of the ramdisk_size may need to be adjusted for the size of the initrd image. From here on, there should be no difference between GRUB or LILO.

Let's assume you have prepared everything from the section called “Boot Device Selection” and the section called “Preparing Files for USB Memory Stick Booting”. Now just plug your USB stick into some free USB connector and reboot the computer. The system should boot up, and you should be presented with the boot: prompt. Here you can enter optional boot arguments, or just hit Enter.

Booting from the network requires that you have a network connection and a TFTP network boot server (DHCP, RARP, or BOOTP).

The installation method to support network booting is described in the section called “Preparing Files for TFTP Net Booting”.

There are various ways to do a TFTP boot on i386.

When the installer boots, you should be presented with a friendly graphical screen showing the Ubuntu logo and a menu:

Installer boot menu

Install
Graphical install
Advanced options       >
Help

Press ENTER to boot or TAB to edit a menu entry

Depending on the installation method you are using, the “Graphical install” option may not be available.

For a normal installation, select either the “Install” or the “Graphical install” entry — using either the arrow keys on your keyboard or by typing the first (highlighted) letter — and press Enter to boot the installer.

The “Advanced options” entry gives access to a second menu that allows to boot the installer in expert mode, in rescue mode and for automated installs.

If you wish or need to add any boot parameters for either the installer or the kernel, press Tab. This will display the default boot command for the selected menu entry and allow to add additional options. The help screens (see below) list some common possible options. Press Enter to boot the installer with your options; pressing Esc will return you to the boot menu.

Choosing the “Help” entry will result in the first help screen being displayed which gives an overview of all available help screens. Note that it is not possible to return to the boot menu after the help screens have been displayed. However, the F3 and F4 help screens list commands that are equivalent to the boot methods listed in the menu. All help screens have a boot prompt at which the boot command can be typed:

Press F1 for the help index, or ENTER to boot:

At this boot prompt you can either just press Enter to boot the installer with default options or enter a specific boot command and, optionally, boot parameters. A number of boot parameters which might be useful can be found on the various help screens. If you do add any parameters to the boot command line, be sure to first type the boot method (the default is install) and a space before the first parameter (e.g., install fb=false).

	The keyboard is assumed to have a default American English layout at this point. This means that if your keyboard has a different (language-specific) layout, the characters that appear on the screen may be different from what you'd expect when you type parameters. Wikipedia has a schema of the US keyboard layout which can be used as a reference to find the correct keys to use.

If you are using a system that has the BIOS configured to use serial console, you may not be able to see the initial graphical splash screen upon booting the installer; you may even not see the boot menu. The same can happen if you are installing the system via a remote management device that provides a text interface to the VGA console. Examples of these devices include the text console of Compaq's “integrated Lights Out” (iLO) and HP's “Integrated Remote Assistant” (IRA). To bypass the graphical boot screen you can either blindly press Esc to get a text boot prompt, or (equally blindly) press “H” followed by Enter to select the “Help” option described above. After that your keystrokes should be echoed at the prompt. To prevent the installer from using the framebuffer for the rest of the installation, you will also want to add fb=false to the boot prompt, as described in the help text.