Gyaan Sutra On entrepreneurship and technology

Like people, machines too need love.

When you get a new machine, you think to yourself that this time you will not dump that old machine. It had served you well for so long and it doesn’t deserve to get old and die in the store room.

But invariably, it always happens. The machine just lies there stinking till somebody decides to get rid of the junk.

Most of the people don’t care. But when you’re in a startup, every little piece of hardware is important. You never know when you might need an old friend when the new shiny laptop get sick.

So, this weekend, I decided to get that old piece of junk started again. Luckily for me, there was still some life left in it and now I’m writing this article via firefox running on Ubuntu on that old machine.

All you need to do this is a little love, some quality time and this tutorial. So let’s get started.

1. Get the junk out and open it up. Clean up the RAM and the board, make sure all connections are tight and set up on the table.

2. Now we need to check what all is working. So start up the machine, and check if it boots.

3. If it doesn’t boot, well all I can say is that don’t wait for so long the next time. But if it does, then you can continue.

4. Get a live Ubuntu CD (8.04 is quite a pain in the a** 7.10 works best yet) and put in the CD Rom.

5. If this works, well you don’t need me anymore. In case it doesn’t, read on.

6. Go to BIOS, by pressing Del, F8 and F10, hoping one of those works. Once inside the bios, check if you have an option about enabling the system to boot via USB. Enable the option and the machine is ready.

7. Now go back to your new machine and put in a USB key. The only condition is that it should be more than the size of the live CD, which is about 700MB. So even if it’s 1GB, it will do just fine.

8. Now it’s time to make the USB bootable. One of the easiest ways of doing it is to get syslinux and
mtools. Run the following command on your new Ubuntu machine:
sudo aptitude install syslinux mtools

9. Once the two are installed, you can plug in your USB device.

10. Now you need to find out which device is the USB. Run fdisk -l. Usually, the USB should be the with /dev/sdb1 or something like that. Let’s assume that you got /dev/sdb1.

11. Now it’s time to use syslinux and mtools. Run the following command:
syslinux -s /dev/sda1

12. Your USB is now bootable. To check if everything went right, go to the folder where the USB is mounted and check the contents. There should be a ‘ldlinux.sys’ file there.

13. It’s time to get the LiveCD contents on to the USB. Don’t copy the ISO to the USB. You need the contents of the LiveCD there. And the simplest way to do this is the following:

14. Download the iso of your favorite version. (Skip this if you have one)

15. Create a new directory, say /media/livecd, and mount the iso to that folder using the following command:
sudo mount -o loop /path/to/ubuntu.iso /media/livecd

16. The contents of the LiveCD are in /media/livecd now. You can now copy them to your USB device like this:
sudo cp -rf /media/livecd/* /media/USB (where /media/USB is where your USB is mounted)

17. We’re all set. Get ready for the last few phases.

18. Plug in the USB into a slot and reboot the old machine.

19. Once you see messages like ‘Loading the hardware’ etc on your screen, you can start your victory dance, you have successfully completed the process.

20. Finally, follow the on screen instructions and get Ubuntu running on that old machine.

Once the new machine is up, I would suggest you install firefox, log into your blog admin and write a post linking to this article and thanking me for sharing this knowledge with the ‘internets’.

Thanks for dropping by.