Ubuntu installation on Magnia SG20

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Connect hard drive to desktop system

In my case, the system is 8track. I use a ribbon cable and a 44pin laptop to 40 pin desktop IDE adapter. The drive is one of the 30 GB Toshiba 2.5" 4200rpm drives that came in the system when I got it.

Set up virtual machine

I create a VMware workstation virtual machine using the hard drive on /dev/hda and the cdrom connected to an ISO rescue image called "System Rescue CD".

Boot from the System Rescue CD

Use evmns to partition the hard drive and create filesystems. Create two volumes, the first is swap (500MB) the second is /root (3GB).

Putting swap first means that the second partition can easily be expanded to fill all available space. Make a reiser filesystem on /dev/evms/root and a swap filesystem on /dev/evms/swap.

The first two partitions are set up with RAID 1 in 'degraded mode' . This allows easily converting to a RAID mirror system at a future time.

Install Ubuntu

Boot from the Ubuntu Server install cd, use the "manual" option for partitioning, tell it to install Ubuntu into the third partition. Tell it to install LAMP (Apache + MySQL + PHP)

Remove CDROM and reboot.

Add extra repository

Add the repository for webmin, see http://www.webmin.com/

Install updates

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get dist-upgrade

Install extra packages

  • evms evmsn evmsgui evms-bootdebug support for RAID
  • emacs-nox
  • webmin web-based system management utility
  • oclock to test X11 connections, and for fun, run with "oclock -transparent &"
  • synaptic X11 GUI package manager
  • xauth to allow connecting to X11 applications such as synaptic
  • mgetty mgetty-fax added to support incoming calls on modem line and faxing
  • shorewall to manage the firewall; shorewall is supported in webmin
  • nfs-kernel-server so I can share files with other Linux boxes
  • cupsys-client added to allow webmin to do printer management
  • privoxy web advertising blocker
  • postfix mail handler; added but you will need to reconfigure

Removed

Removed the extra kernel

Copy everything to the EVMS volume

I've done this while the system is running but it's better to do it with a rescue cd so that files are not changing while copying takes place. Also you don't have to figure out how to exclude the in-memory filesystems and the device files that are created at boot time.

  1. Boot from System Rescue CDROM
  2. Mount partitions
  3. Perform copy; tar cf - /mnt/old | (cd /mnt/new; tar xpf -)

Make the new partition bootable

Still in the rescue disk... 

mkdir /mnt/new
mount /dev/evms/root /mnt/new
cd /mnt/new
mount -o bind /sys /mnt/new/sys
mount -o bind /dev /mnt/new/dev
chroot /mnt/new su -l

You are now running in an environment that looks just like it will when you are done, so you can perform the installation commands now.

  1. Edit grub configuration to point at /dev/evms/root
  2. Run grub to install it in /dev/hda2
  3. Edit /etc/fstab to point at /dev/evms/root and /dev/evms/swap
  4. Make a new initrd --
VERSION="2.6.20-16-server"
cd /boot
mv initrd.img-$VERSION initrd.img-$VERSION.old
update-initramfs -k $VERSION -c
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