[xubuntu-users] Installation problem with xubuntu

[David J. Ellis]

I have downloaded xubuntu-8.04.1-alternate-i386.iso and am attempting to
install it on a rather aged laptop. It seems to get as far as the
partitioner and then hangs. I am wondering if I am simply pushing my luck
trying to get this to work on such an old machine and should give up now or
whether I have merely done something stupid along the way. Details below:

1. The laptop is old!!! 1999 BIOS, only 128 Mbyte RAM, 3 Gbyte HD, 233 MHz
Intel. There is nothing on this system that needs to be preserved. Candidly,
I'm only trying to set it up as a test bed to decide whether I can convert
some other more modern systems over to Linux now that the application set is
broader.

2. I have written the iso file to CD and it boots fine. I have run the CD
check in the initial menu and that is also fine. The installation proceeds
normally as far as the partitioner. "Guided partitioning" appears to prepare
to set up partition #1 as Ext2 (about 3Gbyte) and partition #5 as swap
(about 197Mbyte). Continuing from this point it just hangs and leaves a
badly corrupt partition and MBR.

3. The only way to remove the corrupt partition seems to be an old copy of
DOS FDISK that manages to delete it. (Even Partition Magic blows up on the
corruption.) From this point I have used Partition Magic to manually create
and format an Ext2 and swap partitions of equivalent sizes to above,
formatted both and made Ext2 bootable. I then repeated the xubuntu install
except this time I tried a manual partitioning. I manually mounted Ext2 as
root. The partitioner seems happy with the manually prepared Ext2. It does
still ask to format swap even though I did that with Partition Magic. If I
let it do that format again it hangs up as before. (I get a small yellow
rectangle that says "wait bay", the CD-ROM indicator goes busy for a short
while, then it stops and the HDD indicator goes busy and stays that way.)

Any suggestions???

Please try to explain carefully - I am not a UNIX expert. I dabbled with Red
Hat a little over ten years ago but have since then been tied into MS as
much of what I needed was only available on MS. Before that I was in the VMS
world so my UNIX terminology is very weak.

David E.