[ELECTRON] netboot install of ubuntu 9.10 - help required

[Alice]

Hi.

Right, here's me swallowing my pride and asking for help - therefore probably about 30 seconds after I send this off I'll get it working!

I bought a barebones pc, and just added in a hard drive, but didn't bother with an optical drive.  I have a spare one I could extract from an old computer if it comes to it, but I have no cd writer anyway.

I tried a USB install, both a few weeks ago with 9.04 and with 9.10, but neither worked - the latest one seems to be a corrupt usb stick.

So I decided to go ahead with a network install using dhcp and tftp.  Happily there appeared to be a good set of instructions here :
https://help.ubuntu.com/9.04/installation-guide/amd64/install-tftp.html

I've got a good part of it working, but its still failing in strange ways before it even gets to the install.  So far I've got it booting off the dhcp daemon on my laptop and interacting with the tftp daemon.  Of course by the time you read this I may have got further!  My laptop is running ubuntu 9.04.

What I would like is for somebody to come to my house - I live 5 mins from St George's Cross - and give me a hand.  I do not want someone to do it for me - partly I've persisted with the network install as a learning exercise.

I also have a couple of ubergeeks at the end of a phone line, so I'm not looking for remote support, though they're handy for answering specific questions.

I have pizza and cookies and lots of coffee and some decent beer so we can have a night of it!

My contact details are here :
http://sei531.livejournal.com/tag/contact+details

Cheers,
Alice
-- 
Anarchist Federation - Organising for Resistance
http://www.afed.org.uk/