My advice is pick a minimal installation with your desktop of choice and install your preferred packages after the main OS is installed and running. One thing that’s really nice about the NetBoot install is that they offer many flavors of Ubuntu to install. Most instructions asked me to install packages that weren’t available to me. So I followed bits of blog post instructions from, maybe, 5 different sources to get this working. The only problem was their Pentium 4 would NOT boot from USB. I discovered this after going on vacation and trying to help out some family by installing Ubuntu on their PC. Once start going through your settings Ubuntu will let you connect to your network via your wireless USB adapter to complete the installation. When the computer boots up the network device will acquire an IP address from the server, then it checks for a network boot and finds the files in the tftp server and starts the Ubuntu installation on the client PC. The client computer should have the Boot From Network option set in the BIOS as the first boot device.

Turn the client computer on while the server PC is running.

(a second ethernet port will work as well if it’s plugged into your home network with internet access). You will need internet access outside of the crossover cable for installation thus the need for the USB wifi adapter. Now hook the crossover cable from the client computer into the server computer. d / isc - dhcp - server startĪt this point I needed to reboot my Netbook (the server) and then everything was working.

Tftp server ubuntu