Most readers of my blog (and associated LJ) won’t care about this, but maybe someday someone doing a Google search will need to know the answer to this issue, which took me a day to figure out.

The problem: attempting to install Xubuntu 6.10 on an old IBM thinkpad keeps failing.  The install process gets midway through the filesystem discovery process and then hangs, seemingly forever.  This happens no matter how many times I tried it.

The solution: realized that this laptop only has 64MB of RAM, and the standard Xubuntu 6.10 install CD requires 128MB of RAM.  D’oh!

There are two ways to fix this that I found, one much more efficient than the other:

1.    Download the Xubuntu 6.10 alt install iso which is suitable for machines with less than 128MB of memory (available on the standard Xubuntu download site); or,

2.    Track down an old Kubuntu 5.10 (Breezy) install disc.  Do a straight server install.  Then open up /etc/apt/sources.list and replace every instance of “breezy” with “dapper” to upgrade to 6.06.  Do apt-get update and apt-get dist-upgrade as normal.  Then open up /etc/apt/sources.list again and replace every instance of “dapper” with “edgy” to upgrade to 6.10. Update and dist-upgrade once more.  Then execute “sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop”.  And you should be good to go.

Naturally, #1 is the preferred method. And #2 is certainly NOT recommended when you (a) have big software bugs at work to fix, and (b) are participating in National Novel Writing Month.  Installing Linux over and over can be big fun but it is a time sink.