[ubuntu-nz] 8.04 CDs arrive, wahey!

[Bob Harvey]

Hello all,

You see, I have this aged machine with a P2 processor (400MHz or thereabouts), 128MB RAM and a fiddling amount of disk, but what the hey, it's just for screwing about with.  It's happily (albeit slowly) running 6.06 LTS.  Its CD-ROM drive shows up as an NEC 282 ATAPI device, and works fine.

I think, why don't I get a bit of experience with setting up a server, say running Postfix, or doing firewall stuff, or whatever?  So I request both the Desktop and Server 8.04 CDs.

I boot to the 8.04 Server CD, it prompts for language and then shows the menu; I select Install, it prompts for language again, checks my location and keyboard, then goes to 'detecting hardware'.  At this stage it finds that 'no common CD-ROM drive detected' and I get into a loop about loading a driver from floppy or selecting one from /dev/cdrom, with a CLI.  Clearly there's something about the CD-ROM drive that baffles the install.  It can read from it but not mount it.  

So I try booting to the 8.04 desktop CD and re-installing Linux over the top of what's there.  Select language, Install, kernel gets loaded, Ubuntu banner with the oscillating bar graph, then it drops out to the BusyBox shell with the CLI prompt, '(initramfs)'.  No error message, no clue as to what's wrong.

I am aware that 8.04 Desktop requires 256MB RAM (preferably 384), but then 6.06 also says it needs that much...

Anyway, can anyone tell me what I should do next?  It is 8.04 Server that I plan to install, as I said.

Cheers, Bob.