On a normal PC, the latest Ubuntu isn't that much of a big improvement, however if you're an eee-pc owner it is a great upgrade, more on that possibly in a later post.

I did a clean install, wiped my previous xubuntu installation and started from scratch. The problem ofcourse was that my previous install was already a while ago and i didn't quite remember exactly what i did to get it booting from an USB disk. The new USB install creator doesn't work for USB disks, i guess it only works for USB sticks, which is silly. Luckily my bash history is long enough and i got it right after a few tries.

The procedure is as followed (i used xubuntu, but this method works for all ubuntu versions);

• First create a FAT16 partition on your USB disk, important to remember is the filesystem size limit is 2GB, so do not create anything bigger then this, i simply took 900MB (using gparted).
• Run syslinux on the newly created partition. 'syslinux -s /dev/sd'
• Run fdisk on the drive and set the FAT16 partition to bootable. 'fdisk /dec/sd'
• Mount the ubuntu iso image. 'mount -o loop xubuntu-8.10-desktop-i386.iso /mnt'
• Copy the isolinux content to your USB disk. 'cp -a /mnt/isolinux /media/disk'
• Rename the isolinux config file to syslinux. 'cd /media/disk/isolinux && mv isolinux.cfg syslinux.cfg'
• Get the HD disk install kernel from Ubuntu at - http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/intrepid/main/installer-i386/current/images/hd-media/ - change the 'intrepid' depending on what Ubuntu version you want to install. You need to download both vmlinuz and initrd.gz files.
• Create an install directory on your USB disk and copy the downloaded files into it. 'mkdir /media/disk/install && cp ~/downloads/vmlinuz ~/downloads/initrd.gz /media/disk/install'
• Now, just copy the iso file onto your USB disk and you're ready! 'cp -a /home/dirk/Temp/xubuntu-8.10-desktop-i386.iso /media/disk'