Installing Ubuntu on a ThinkPad 750P

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Introduction

This is an experiment to get my 750P running a modern Linux distribution. It may fail. Read on.

Preparation

Start by installing Debian Woody. Instructions are on this site. I did this because I fond other instructions not to work on the 750P for a variety of reasons.

You'll have to be careful about partitioning because you'll be required to perform a chroot during the migration. This means you need a partition that will host your new OS. Here's my partition table for my 5.1GB disk: 

hda1    ext2    227MB
hda2    swap    200MB
hda3    ext2   4600MB

I used hda1 as the only partition for Debian, leaving hda3 unmounted. Hda3 will be the home for (X)ubuntu and then hda1 will become /boot.

Keep in mind that the 750P does have an 8GB BIOS disk limit. That means any partition you boot from should reside entirely below that 8GB boundary. Once Linux boots, however, you should be able to use larger drives. I have used drives up to 20GB in my 750P.

Steps

Start

Start the machine and log in as the root user.

Prepare the Target

If needed, format the target partition. Mount that partition somewhere handy. Here's what I did: 

mkfs -t ext2 /dev/hda3
mkdir /mnt/target
mount /dev/hda3 /mnt/target

debootstrap

Ubuntu is based on Debian. They also make a very nice Debian package that will migrate your Debian system to Ubuntu. Go get the latest package ending with all.deb from this site: 

http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/d/debootstrap/

As of this writing, that file is debootstrap_1.0.7~gutsy1_all.deb. Wget is handy for this. Run apt-get install wget if you don't have it. Install that package: 

dpkg -i debootstrap_1.0.7~gutsy1_all.deb

Wget may rename the file to change the tilde character to %7E. You can leave it that way. If you get dependency problems, install those dependencies using apt-get install x where x is the missing dependency. Apt-get will automatically try again to install debootstrap. Only binutils was missing on my system. Next run your new package. Please look for a mirror that's close by. Note the directory in the command must contain a dists subdirectory. 

debootstrap gutsy /target http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu
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