

On a reboot, however, the system booted fine.ĥ. I tried to shutdown the virtual machine cleanly after the setup, but it hung. I had dpkg exiting with error code 1 without being able to review the error - no packages were broken as a result, however. Things are a little wonky - it is alpha quality software, after all. Personally, I'd rather manage the upgrades manually with a tool such as aptitude (which does no longer ship with Ubuntu by default).Īlpha-quality software. It is not guaranteed that the repositories will be in a consistent state by the time you run the installer. Skip the option to automatically download and install updates. If you're using the alternate installer, make sure you set the noatime flag to further reduce the amount of writes to the disk.

Simply allocate a single partition for /. That's no good, as swapping becomes super slow (seconds-long system freezes slow) and quickly kills your drive's life. Avoid using the automatic partitioning system, as it will create a swap partition on your USB key. From inside the "QEMU" window, install as you would normally do. Install normally.Īt this point you are working on a virtual machine that sees your USB key as the only connected hard drive. to install the i386 ISO of the Natty Narwhal desktop - the file name will vary if you download a different ISO image.ĭetails for your virtualization solution of choice will vary, but you want to use the device file of your USB key as the VM's hard drive.Īppend -boot order=d to the kvm command to make it boot from the image in case it tries to boot from the 'hard disk' and fails because it cannot find an operating system there. I made sure (with file) that my USB key was in /dev/sdb, then ran: sudo qemu-system-x86_64 /dev/sdb -cdrom ~/.cache/testdrive/iso/ubuntu_natty-desktop-i386.iso You need to make sure you select "Don't Partition" before it lets you format the disk.ģ. Choose the destination USB key, unmount all partitions, and select Format Drive. You can do so from System → Administration → Disk Utility. I failed earlier because I didn't perform this step, so skip at your own risk! You need a key that is at least 3 GB in size. This is important if you already have anything looking like a Linux install on your disk, or the installer will not want to touch that disk, for some reason.

The Desktop installer refuses to continue if there is less than 4.4 GB of free disk space. If your key is smaller than 4.4 GB (for Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal)), you must get the alternate installer.
